Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries, Brian Haughton [books you need to read .TXT] 📗

lumps of flesh had been removed, not every piece), excavator of the site Peter Warren, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Bristol, concluded that the children were probably ritually sacrificed and then eaten.

At the four-room sanctuary at Anemospilia, only 4.3 miles south of Knossos (first excavated in 1979 by J. Sakellarikas) another find suggestive of human sacrifice was made. When investigating the temple's western room, archaeologists found three skeletons. The first was an 18-year-old male lying on his right side on an altar in the center of the room, a bronze dagger at his chest, and his feet tied. Near to the altar there had once been a pillar with a channel running around its base, seemingly intended to catch blood dripping from a sacrifice. Examination of the dead youth's bones revealed that he had probably died from loss of blood. In the southwest corner of the room, the remains of a

28-year-old female were found sprawled across the floor, and near the altar the skeleton of a 5-foot 9-inch tall male in his late thirties was discovered. This man's hands were raised, as if trying to protect himself, and his legs had been broken by falling masonry. A further skeleton, too damaged to identify, was also found in the building. The temple was destroyed in a fire around 1600 B.C., which probably resulted from an earthquake. Three of these individuals had been killed by the collapsing roof and masonry of the upper walls, but it seems that the teenager was already dead by this time.

According to the archaeological evidence, human sacrifice does not seem to have been widespread on Minoan Crete. The examples cited may have been exceptions brought on by a desperate attempt to appease the gods in troubled times, probably during violent earthquake activity. A point worthy of note is that at both the North House at Knossos and at at the Anemospilia temple, the sacrifices were of young adults or children, bringing to mind the seven young men and seven young women sent by Athens to satisfy the Minotaur. Perhaps the origins of the Knossos labyrinth legend were partly in these horrific practices of human sacrifice, made in unstable times, when the safety of the entire community was thought to be at risk.

the Slone SenIinels of Easter Island

© Thanassis Vembos.

Agroup of moai on their ceremonial platforms.

The most isolated inhabited island in the world, Easter Island (nowadays called Rapa Nui, which means Great Island) is located in the southeast Pacific Ocean, 2,000 miles from the nearest population center. The island is roughly triangular in shape and composed of volcanic rock. It is most famous for its large number of enigmatic giant stone statues scattered along the coast, and perhaps less so for its undeciphered and mysterious script known as Rongorongo.

The original inhabitants of Easter Island called it Te Pito 0 Te Henua (Navel of the Earth), but who these first settlers were or where they came from are much debated subjects. Probably the

most controversial theory about the peopling of the island was originated by the Norwegian explorer and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl. According to Heyerdahl, Easter Island was partly settled by a pre-Incan society sailing from Peru in substantial ocean-going rafts, with the help of the prevailing westerly trade winds. In 1947, to prove it was theoretically possible to make it across the Pacific in such a vessel, Heyerdahl built a replica of one of these balsa wood crafts and named it the Kon-Tiki, after an Incan Sun God. Once out in the Pacific, Heyerdahl and his team sailed for 101 days across 4,349 miles of open sea before crashing into the reef at Raroia atoll, in the Tuamotu Archipelago, east of Tahiti. In 1951, the documentary Kon-Tiki, relating the expedition, won an Academy Award. The Kon-Tiki expedition proved that it was technically possible for South American peoples to have crossed the Pacific in a raft and settled the Polynesian Islands. But there are one or two problems with Heyerdahl's experiment. The Kon-Tiki was a type of vessel copied from rafts in the 16th century A.D., after the sail had been introduced by the Spanish. So it is not certain how close his raft was in design to those in use 800 years before the appearance of the Spanish, when the supposed colonizing expeditions to the Pacific took place. Furthermore, when Heyerdahl first attempted to set out on his journey, the offshore currents were so strong that the Kon-Tiki needed to be towed out to sea a distance of 50 miles before it could be sailed.

Heyerdahl also included botanical, linguistic, and architectural evidence in his theory of a South American origin for the Easter Islanders, around A.D. 800. However, archaeological evidence gathered in the years since Heyerdahl made his daring voyage has all but disproved his hypothesis, especially as the settlement of the island was already complete by the time of the proposed trans-Pacific journey. So where did the first inhabitants of Easter Island come from? Due to its extremely isolated position, a voyage to Easter Island from anywhere would have taken at least two weeks, over thousands of miles of open sea. Such a journey clearly indicates a maritime people. Polynesian cultures were expert sailors and constructed huge ocean-going canoes and rafts, navigating by using the position of the stars,

wind direction, and the natural movements of birds and fish. Linguistic evidence points to the settlement of Rapa Nui by peoples from East Polynesia between A.D. 300 and A.D. 700, possibly from the Marquesas Islands or Pitcairn Island. The latter is the nearest inhabited land, lying 1,199 miles to the west. This colonization was probably part of a gradual eastward migration, originating in southeast Asia around 2000 B.C. A western origin is also indicated by an Easter Island myth. This myth describes how, around 1,500 years ago, a Polynesian king named Hotu Matua (the Great Parent) came to the island with his wife and family in a double canoe, by sailing in