In the fifth century BC, Herodotus, dubbed by Cicero
"the father of history", wrote his famous work known as
"The histories". In his fourth book he relates some
almost incredible stories of cannibalism practised by some of the
tribes inhabiting the region of the Euxine, which we call the
Black Sea.
The people Herodotus calls the Androphagoi, or
man-eaters, were a branch of the Scythians, dressing like them
but speaking their own language. One of the tribes, the
Issedones, had a curious custom: "When a man's father dies
all his relations bring cattle, and then having sacrificed them
and cut up the flesh, they cut up also the dead parent of their
host, and having mingled all the flesh together, they spread out
a banquet; then having made bare and cleansed his head, they gild
it and afterwards they treat it as a sacred image, performing
grand annual sacrifices to it."
In his first book, Herodotus relates an even more
macabre custom, which he attributes to the Massagetae, near
neighbours of the Issedones. "No particular term of life is
prescribed to them; but when a man has attained a great age, all
his kinsmen meet, and sacrifice him, together with cattle of
several kinds; and when they have boiled the flesh they feast on
it. This death they account the most happy; but they do not eat
the bodies of those who die of disease, but bury them in the
earth, and think it a great misfortune that they did not reach
the age to be sacrificed."
In Antiquity for June, E. M. Murphy and J. P. Mallory
of Queen's University, Belfast, give evidence to show that
Herodotus erred in his interpretation of what he imagined to be
cannibalism. A thorough palaeopathological analysis of human
skeletons from Scythian sites in south Siberia has not been
available until recently. A large cemetery at Aymyrlyg,
containing more than 1,000 burials of Scythian date, however, has
revealed compact accumulations of bones often arranged in
anatomical order, which indicate burials of semi-decomposed
corpses or defleshed bodies sometimes associated with leather
bags or cloth sacks. Marks on some bones show cut-marks of a
nature indicative of defleshing, but most suggest disarticulation
of adult skeletons.
It is suggested that dismembered burial took place in
winter or spring, before the ground was unfrozen sufficiently to
permit immediate burial. Defleshing and disarticulation was
chosen as more hygienic than storage for a period of increasing
warmth. Such a process, replicating the butchering of livestock,
may well have been mistaken for evidence of cannibalism by a
foreign onlooker such as Herodotus, unacquainted with the
traditional methods of disposing of the Scythian dead.
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