Category Archives: human sacrifice

Arabians: Pseudo-Nilus on barbarian bandits and Saracens in the Sinai desert (early fifth century CE)

Arkadians: Plato, Varro, and others on supposed Lykaian human sacrifice (fourth century BCE on)

Celts: Diodoros on Galatian origins, “savage” customs and invasions of Italy and Greece (mid-first century BCE)

Eastern and northern peoples: Bardaisan of Edessa’s Book of the Laws of Countries, Pseudo-Clementines, and Origen on astrology and peoples (second-third centuries CE)

Egyptian perspectives: Memphites on the goddess Isis and the origins of civilization among Egyptians (first century BCE on)

Egyptians and Canaanites: Wisdom of Solomon on worship of animals and images (first century BCE)

Egyptians, Thracians, Judeans, and Carthaginians: Theophrastos on piety and human sacrifice (fourth century BCE on)

Egyptians: Achilles Tatius and Dio Cassius on man-eating cowherds / bandits (second-third century CE)

Indians: Herodotos on eastern peoples at the ends of the earth (mid-fifth century BCE)

Israelites, Egyptians, Idumeans, Scythians, and others: Origen on ethnic hierarchies and their spiritual equivalents (mid-third century CE)

Mediterranean peoples: Sextus Empiricus engages with ethnographic discourses for philosophical aims (second-third centuries CE)

Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and others: Minucius Felix’s ethnographic defence of the Christian people (early third century CE)

Romans: Livy, Pliny, Plutarch, and Dio on Roman human sacrifice of Gauls and Greeks (late first century BCE on)

Scythians and other Pontic peoples: Herodotos on the “most ignorant peoples of all” (fifth century BCE)

Taurians and Greeks: Clement of Alexandria [III] on human sacrifice (late second century CE)

Taurians and Kolchians: Diodoros on the origins of human sacrifice in the Black Sea area (mid-first century BCE)

Taurians, Gauls, and Romans: Lactantius on human sacrifice and other criminal rituals to false gods (early fourth century CE)