Greek mythology is dotted with a few rare, dark stories of human sacrifice—and now, one of them might just be true.
Atop Mount Lykaion—the earliest known site where Zeus was worshipped and his mythological birthplace—archaeologists have uncovered evidence of what appears to be a 3,000-year-old human sacrifice.
As reported by ekathimerini.com, an excavation by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens has discovered the skeleton of a teenaged boy amid the ashes of a thousand years of sacrificed animals. He was found in the heart of a 100-foot-broad (30-meter-broad) altar next to a manmade stone platform.
It is unclear how the boy died, but the location of his body is extraordinarily unusual.
“Whether it’s a sacrifice or not, this is a sacrificial altar … so it’s not a place where you would bury an individual. It’s not a cemetery,” excavator David Gilman Romano, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Further, Mount Lykaion is closely tied to human sacrifice, both in mythology and in literary sources. In some tales, a Greek named Lykaion instituted the worship of Zeus there, only to later be transformed into a wolf after trying to trick Zeus into eating human flesh. And Plato, for example, tied it to a Greek cult that practiced human sacrifice to Zeus. Some sources claimed that those who were apportioned the meat of the sacrificed human would become a wolf for nine years.
First Evidence of Human Sacrifice in Greece
However, despite these numerous ties to human sacrifice, the archaeological evidence across Greece has been almost entirely absent. In fact, human remains were conspicuously missing from the Mount Lykaion site until now.
“Several ancient literary sources mention rumours that human sacrifice took place at the altar, but up until a few weeks ago there has been no trace whatsoever of human bones discovered at the site,” said Romano.
And besides being found on an ash altar, the boy’s remains were further unusual in that part of the upper skull was entirely missing, the body was aligned between two stones on an east-west axis, and stone slabs covered the pelvis.
Should the bones prove to be a human sacrifice—which they truly appear to be, given their unusual placement and treatment—it would be the first time one has been discovered on the Greek mainland in known history.
Mount Lykaion itself was the home of tens of thousands of animal sacrifices, starting in the 16th century BCE and ending around the death of Alexander the Great, and humans occupied the area for another 1,500 or so years before that. The body found has been dated to around 1,000 BCE, as pottery from the 11th century was found with it—which ties the body with the end of the Mycenaean civilization, the people written about by Homer.
As to why such a barren, exposed site was occupied 5,000 years ago, no one is certain, but we may yet find out in the years to come—since only seven percent of the altar area has been excavated so far.
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Image credit: ekathimerini
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