The body found has been dated to around 1,000 BCE, as pottery from the 11 century was found with it-which ties the body with the end of the Mycenaean civilization, the people written about by Homer. “I was reluctant to pry into the details of the sacrifice; let them be as they are and were from the beginning”.
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“If there are indeed finds from this period from within the rather careless tomb, then the most convincing interpretation at this stage would be that we are indeed dealing with a human sacrifice and that the deceased was buried within the ash altar as a form of honor”, Mylonopoulos said.
“Lycaon brought a human baby to the altar of (Zeus) and sacrificed it, pouring out its blood upon the altar, and according to the legend, immediately after the sacrifice, he was changed from a man to a wolf”, Pausanias wrote in a book on the geography of Greece (translation from a “Description of Greece with an English Translation” by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, Harvard University Press, 1918). On Wednesday, the Guardian reports, the Greek government announced the discovery of a 3,000-year-old skeleton belonging to a teenage boy. The human remains among animal ashes, suggests that there is truth to the legend.
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. According to the scientists, the skeleton is 3,000 years old.
“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 was resumed again this year with only seven percent of the altar excavated.
However, despite these numerous ties to human sacrifice, the archaeological evidence across Greece has been nearly entirely absent.
The mountaintop in the Peloponnese region is the earliest known site where Zeus was worshipped, and even without the possible human sacrifice element it was a place of massive slaughter. The Roman author Pliny wrote that the athletic competitions at Mount Lykaion-which featured nude athletes squaring off in events including wrestling, boxing, horse racing and running-predated the ancient games held 22 miles away at Olympia. “It’s not a cemetery”, excavator David Gilman Romano, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
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While Romano and his colleagues continue to study the skeleton and its surroundings for clues, they’ll also continue to excavate the rest of the altar.
