The Child in Human Progress

“They sacrifice each month their own children, and with their blood smear the faces of the idols and the doors of the temples, and sprinkle the blood over the graves of their dead.”204

It is certain, according to the story of Sieur le Moyne de Mourgues, that “in that part of Florida which is near Virginia,—and where the French are under the leadership of Sieur le Laudonnière—the people of this country regard their chiefs as sons of the Sun and, for this reason, they pay them divine honours, sacrificing to them their first-born.”205

“Their custom is,” according to Le Moyne, “to offer up the first-born son to the chief. When the day for the sacrifice is notified to the chief, he proceeds to a place set apart for the purpose, where there is a bench for him on which he takes his seat. In the middle of the area before him is a wooden stump two feet high and as many thick, before which a mother sits on her heels, her face covered in her hands, lamenting the loss of her child. The principal one of her female relatives or friends now offers the child to the chief in worship, after which the women who have accompanied the mother form a circle and dance around with demonstrations of joy, but without joining hands. She who holds the child goes and dances in the middle, singing some praises to the chief. Meanwhile, six Indians, chosen for the purpose, take their stand in a certain place in the open area; and midway among them the sacrificing officer, who is decorated with a sort of magnificence, and holds a club. The ceremony being through, the sacrificer takes the child and slays it in honour of the chief, before them all, upon the wooden stump. This offering was, on one occasion, performed in our presence.”206

“It was the Custom in Peru, to sacrifice Children from four to ten Years of Age, which was chiefly done when the Inga was sick, or going to War, to pray for Victory, and at the Coronation of those Princes they sacrific’d two hundred Children. Sometimes they strangl’d, and bury’d them, and other times they cut their Throats, and the Priests besmear’d themselves with the Blood from Ear to Ear, which was the Formality of the Sacrifice. Nor were the Virgins (Mamaconas) of the Temple exempt from being sacrific’d and, when any Person of Note was sick, and the Priest said he must die, they sacrific’d his son, desiring the Idol to be satisfied with him, and not take away his Father’s life. The Ceremonies us’d at this Sacrifice were strange, for they behav’d themselves like mad Men. They believ’d that all Calamities were occasion’d by Sin, and that Sacrifices were the Remedy.”207

Further evidence of the attitude of the Indians is given by the first secretary of the Colony of Virginia Brittania, who asserted that the Indians in Florida sacrificed the first-born male child. According to this writer, their Quiyoughquisocks, or prophets to the Indians, persuaded the warriors to resist the settlements of the white people because their Okeus, who was god of the tribe, would not be appeased by the sacrifice of a thousand children if they permitted the white people, who despised their religion, to dwell among them.208

In parts of New South Wales209 such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan, or MacQuarie, the first-born of every lubra was eaten by the tribe as a part of the religious ceremony. Here, too, it was the male infant that was more desirable as a sacrifice, the female infants being sometimes allowed to live. In this connection, it is interesting to note that where children are killed without any other excuse than that they are a drain on the resources of their parents, it is the female children who are slaughtered. When, however, there is a so-called religious reason for the infanticide, it is the male child that suffers.

In India, as we shall see, children were frankly killed for economic reasons; but here too there are evidences of the sacrifice theory. Up to the beginning of the present century, the custom of offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common. A custom akin to this was that of the Ganga Jatra, the murder of sick relatives on the banks of the sacred river. As late as 1812, a mother and sister burned a leper at Katwa near Calcutta, their excuse being that by so doing he would be given a pure body in the next world.

Women, too, who had been long barren dedicated their first child, if one were given them, to Omkar Mandharta.210

Bathing in blood, especially the blood of children, in Northern India was regarded as a powerful remedy for disease. In 1870, a Mussulman butcher, losing his child, was told by a Hindu conjurer that in order to make the next child healthy, he should wash his wife in the blood of a boy, with the result that a child was murdered. At Muzaffar Nagar a child was killed and the blood drunk by a barren woman.211

In the city of Saugor in India, human sacrifices were offered up in the year 1800, when they were stopped by the local governor, Assa Sahib, although the Brahmin priests objected strenuously to the innovation. Outside the city, there was a spot where the young men sacrificed themselves in order to fulfil the vows of their mothers. The belief was that when a woman was without a child, she could overcome barrenness by promising her first-born, if a male, to the god of destruction, Mahadea. If a boy was born after this vow, she concealed from him the vow until he attained the age of puberty, when it was his duty to obey his mother’s call and throw himself, at the annual fair on the sandstone hills, from a perpendicular height of four or five hundred feet and be dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.212

Among the Banjarilu, a caste of travelling traders noted in “Bhadrachellam and Rekapalli Taluquas,”213 the custom in former years was, before starting off on a business journey, to procure a little child and bury it in the ground up to its shoulders. Then the traders would drive their loaded bullocks over the victim and in proportion as the bullocks “thoroughly trampled the child to death” was their belief in a successful journey increased. Probably very little credence can be given to their assertions that they have completely left off such cruelties.

The Chinese philosopher, Mih Tsze, who lived about the fourth century before Christ, wrote that there existed at one time in China a state called Kai-muh, where it was the custom to kill and devour the eldest brother as an offering to the gods.214

We come now to the results of recent excavations in Palestine.

There were discovered at Gezer, the bodies of adults that had been sacrificed at foundation rites and deposited with the corner-stones much as moderns deposit mementoes and newspapers. Mr. MacAlister, who had charge of the excavations at Gezer, says, however, that adult or adolescent victims were rare in comparison with the number of infants or very young children whose remains were found under the corners of houses. Such deposits were found in all the Semitic strata but were very rare in the Hellenistic stratum, showing that the practice died down when the Greeks came into control of the land. The children sacrificed at these foundation rites were deposited in the same manner as those found at the messobath or high place, where there was discovered a cemetery of jar-buried infants that went to show how general was the practice of sacrificing their new-born infants among the Canaanites.

“That these sacrificed infants were the first-born, devoted in the Temple, is indicated by the fact that none were over a week old. This seems to show that the sacrifices were not offered under stress or any special calamity, or at the rites attaching to any special season of the year. The special circumstance which led to the selection of these infants must have been something inherent in the victims themselves, which devoted them to sacrifice from the moment of their birth. Among various races, various circumstances are regarded as sufficient reason for infanticide—deformity, the birth of twins, etc.; but among the Semites the one cause most likely to have been effective was primogeniture.”215

In the vessels in which the infants were placed, were found by the excavators smaller vessels which were probably food vessels with a viaticum for the victim.

At Ta’Annek216 after the discoveries at Gezer, a cemetery containing some twenty infants, also buried in jars, was discovered about a rock altar, the age of the infants that had been sacrificed having been as much as five years. At Megiddo217 underneath a corner of a temple, there were found four jars with the bones of children and near them smaller jars and a bowl, which undoubtedly contained the food that children were supposed to need in the other world. Professor Sellin suggests that the bones found at Tell Ta’Annek may have been the bones of children that had died too young to be buried in the family sepulchres, but the burden of evidence suggests a different explanation. Here, then, we have a double reason for the sacrifice of the children, for the foundation sacrifices were—one might almost say are, so recently have there been instances of the practice—of a different order from the sacrifice of the first-born.

On these foundation sacrifices, Dr. Driver has made some interesting notes. We are all familiar with our own foundation ceremonies, which are really nothing more or less than a modification of these primitive ceremonies that consisted almost entirely of the sacrifice of a human being and in many instances of an infant, inasmuch as the infant, having just come into the world, was purer and nearer to god and therefore more acceptable. Traces of the custom of sacrificing a human life in order that some destructive god or demon might be propitiated and the lives of those about to occupy the building thereby made safer are found in India, New Zealand, China, Japan, Mexico, Germany, and Denmark.

The extent of these foundation sacrifices had been revealed by Dr. Trumbull in his Threshold Covenant, all going to show that different branches of the human family, though far removed, mounted much the same steps in their endeavour to achieve the truth about the world in which they lived.

Among the Danes, when the fortifications were first being built around Copenhagen many years ago, the walls, as they were built, kept sinking in, and it did not seem possible that they would ever stand firmly.

“The workmen finally took a little girl, placed her at a table, and gave her play toys and sweetmeats. Then, as she sat there enjoying herself, the masons built an arch over her and in this way the walls were made solid.”218

A similar story is told219 of a castle of Liebenstein. It was made fast and impregnable by buying a child from its mother and walling it in.

Slavensk, a Slavonic town on the Danube, had been devastated by the plague and when it was built anew the wise men of the town agreed that there must be a human victim. Messengers were sent out before sunrise to seize the first living creature they met. The victim was a child and it was buried alive under the foundation stone of the citadel, and from that time on, a citadel was called a Dyetinet, from Dyetina220, a child.

In Africa in Galam, Tylor says221 that a boy and a girl were buried alive before the gate of the city in order to make it impregnable. In other places, such as Great Bassam and Yarriba, such sacrifices were usual even when the foundation was only that of a house.

In some places, such as among the Tantis of Africa, the sacrifice was made at every new moon. In Sargos, a girl was offered up that there might be good crops. In Bonny, they sacrificed every year a beautiful virgin to Juju that the evil spirits might be kept away.

“The connection between cannibalism and human sacrifice,” says Dr. Waitz, “is manifest enough in the festivals of Dahomey.”222

There were two principal and solemn sacrifices among the Pipiles, a Maya people in Central America—one at the commencement of summer and one at the beginning of winter. Little boys of ten and twelve years of age were the victims, and their blood was sprinkled in the direction of the four cardinal points.223

Among the Milanau Dyaks when the largest house was being erected, a deep hole was dug and a slave girl was placed in it. An enormous timber was then allowed to descend on her and crush her to death.224

As late as 1843 in Germany, when a new bridge was being built at Halle, the common people fancied that a child was wanted to be walled into the foundations. According to Grimm, the tower called the Reichenfels Castle was built on a live child and a projecting stone marks the place. If that were pulled out, the wall, it is said, would tumble down.225

According to a Servian legend, three hundred masons laboured for three years at the foundation stones of Scutari, but what they built by day, the Vila tore down at night. At last she made known to the kings that the place would never be finished until two brothers or sisters “of like name” were built into the foundations. Nowhere could such be found. Then the Vila required that one of the wives of the kings should be walled up in the ground. The next day the consort of the youngest king, never dreaming of such a decree, brought out some dinner to the workmen; thereupon the three hundred masons dropped their stones around her and began to wall her in. At her entreaty, they left a small opening and there she continued to suckle her babe who was held up to her once a day.226

The foundation sacrifice is well known in India. At Madras, it has long been a tradition that when the fort was first built a girl was built into it to render it impregnable.227 A Raja was once building a bridge over the river Jargo at Chunar and when it fell down several times, he was advised to sacrifice a Brahman girl to the local deity. She has now become the Mari or ghost of the place and is regularly worshipped in time of trouble. In Kumaun, there are professional kidnappers known as Doqhutiya, or two-legged beasts of prey, who go about capturing boys that they may be used in foundation sacrifices.

Up to 1867, when a house was built among the Tlinkits tribe in Alaska, the relatives and friends of the chief or wealthy man were invited to appear on the spot that he had chosen for the site. Addressing them at great length, he referred with pride to the various deeds of his ancestors and promised to so conduct himself as to shed more lustre on the family name. The space for the house was then cleared, a spot for the fireplace designated, and four holes dug wherein the corner posts were to be set. A slave, or the descendant of a slave who had been captured in war, was then blind-folded and compelled to lie down face uppermost on the spot selected for the fireplace. A sapling was then cut, laid across the throat of the slave, and, at a given signal, the two nearest relatives of the house sat upon the respective ends of the sapling, thereby choking the wretch to death.228

CHAPTER X

HEBREW WRITERS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY—CHILD SACRIFICE CONDEMNED IN THE STORY OF ISAAC—CIRCUMCISION SUBSTITUTED—REVERSION TO BARBARIC HABITS IN CANAAN—TRIUMPH OF THE PROPHETS.

HAVING reviewed the ethnological and archæological aspect of the attitude of the Semitic people toward the sacrifice of the first-born, we turn to the written record of the small bands of Semites who gave to the world the humane ideas that dominate it today. From that written record we will learn that nowhere among the civilization of the world was there the same spirit that there was in that outlandish corner of Syria. Israel was never content with the abuses of the world and in this her philosophy differed from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Indian philosophies as we have been able to judge of them in the writing of the civilizations they produced. If, to make one more comparison, the Greeks were wanting in humanity the Israelites were passionately human. “The Israelitish prophets were impetuous writers such as we of the present day should denounce as socialists and anarchists. They were fanatics in the cause of social justice.”229

Modern Bible criticism has made the period of the writing of the Elohistic part of the Hexateuch about 770 B. C.230 Whatever the sources that were drawn on and whatever actual historical value they have, we know that the ideas contained therein represent the ideas of the eighth century B. C.231

According to these writings, Abraham, the eponymic father of the Israelites, was tested in his loyalty to Yahweh by being told to take his son Isaac into the land of Moriah, a district in Palestine, and there sacrifice him as a burnt offering. In the land of Canaan at the time the Jahvist and the Elohist wrote of this temptation, the ceremony of sacrificing the first-born of a living thing was still practised; among the neighbouring peoples—the Phœnicians on one side and the Sabeans on the south-east—children were still sacrificed. The Elohist therefore was anxious to show that a thousand or more years back, in the time of the founder of their race, it was not the custom of the tribe to sacrifice children and that it was only done when the Lord gave the especial command.

With Abraham the command, while painful, was apparently not surprising. He went about the execution in a businesslike way, only to find when he was about to sacrifice the boy, that the Lord was satisfied with his display of zeal and did not intend the command to be carried out. Then “Abraham lifted up his eyes, and behold, behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.”232

Here was the first case of substitution, in which the early writer testifies that not only was the substitution satisfactory to the deity, but the human sacrifice was forbidden and an animal providentially provided that the ceremony of sacrifice might be gone through without loss of human blood. However strong the popular inclination to accept the bloody rites of the religion of the surrounding tribes, from that time there was a fixed standard to which the prophets and true believers of Israel held—human sacrifice had been stopped by the Lord himself.

Among the Assyrians also, father Orhan was represented as having substituted an animal for human beings, the Assyrian patriarch being represented as a man of benevolent aspect, seated in an armchair without any sort of military pomp or circumstance.233

To make the substitution of an animal for a human being more effective, and more popular, Abraham entered into a covenant with Yahweh by which the deity was still given the blood of humans without a life being sacrificed. The rite of circumcision is the substitution commanded by Yahweh himself:

“This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and thee, and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.”234

This rite, mixed as it is with phallic worship (see Genesis), had its origin in the castration of prisoners of war,235 and, as far as the Israelites were concerned, probably originated in Egypt,236 although it has been found to be performed among the tribes of Central Australia with a stone knife just as is recorded of the Israelites. With progress and the fact that use was found for prisoners, castration gave way to marking the prisoners, until the original significance passing, as among the Egyptians according to Herodotus, the practice became one of purely hygienic value.

That this covenant with Yahweh was kept when all about them the first-born children of the Egyptians were sacrificed, the feast of the Passover (from חטם, pesach, meaning “to pass by, to spare”) attests. Yahweh told Moses that he was to claim the lives of not only the first-born of the Egyptians “from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon,” but also the first-born of all the animals in the land. That the chosen people might not suffer in this contemplated destruction they were instructed, through Moses, to take the blood of a lamb, “a male of the first year,” and “strike it on the two side-posts and on the upper door-post of the houses,” that it might be known wherein the faithful dwelt.

Here we see the beginning of the threshold sacrifice or covenant, which became, in time, the foundation sacrifice.

So complete was this claiming of the first-born that “there was not a house where there was not one dead.”237

From their deliverance from this visitation, Yahweh instructed Moses to “sanctify unto me all the first-born, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel; both of man and beast, it is mine.” Already there was the example of the patriarch Abraham that an animal might be substituted; now there was the statement from the One on high that the first-born of the chosen people might be redeemed. Of the temper of the people at this time and their proneness to fall into the vices of their neighbours, and of idolatry, we need only the statement of Joshua238 that while in Egypt—Renan says that they were not there more than three hundred years—they acquired the habit of worshipping false gods.

The speedy fall from grace, as shown by the worship of the golden calf while Moses was away from them for a short time, is another evidence of their excitability, although modern scientists have declared that under adverse circumstances the entire civilized peoples would revert to barbarity in three generations.

The struggle upward out of barbarism could have been attended with nothing less than herculean belief on the part of the leaders of Israel, when we see this lapse came after their miraculous escape from Egypt and after the receipt of the ten commandments. Illuminating too is the fact that the making of the golden calf was superintended by no less a person than Aaron, the brother of Moses, his confidant and first lieutenant.

When we come to the period of the Judges, we find the Israelites falling away from their humanitarianism. While Joshua and his contemporaries were alive, they held to their religion, but the gods of Canaan, together with the more easily understood and more deeply ingrained rites of idolatry, reappeared as soon as the patriarchs had passed away.

Nothing indeed is more interesting in this study of the Old Testament than the record of the difficulty that the leaders and prophets had in keeping a semi-barbarous people up to their standard of civilization and humanization. Ethnological and archæological data picture the struggle forward but feebly, when compared to the written records of the Israelites, especially during the period of the Judges.

The period of the Judges was the period of the formation of the nation, and had there not been all around them reminders of their own previous nomadic habits, and had they been a less excitable people, there would not have been the recurrence to barbaric traits that we find. Even then, the progress of the Israelites in humanitarianism is unique in the world. From the settlement in Canaan, which was about 1200 B. C., until the birth of Christ, they suffered conquest, disintegration, and many afflictions, but progressed steadily in humanitarianism. In that time the Greeks rose and fell, achieving great intellectual and æsthetic perfection, but failing to even approach the Israelites in humanity. A few hundred years after the settlement in Canaan, the Romans appear as a civilized people and, aided by a transplanted stoicism, developed a great humanitarianism under the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian; the last named, however, despite his greatness, indissolubly linked with the degeneracy that was the mark of Greek self-centredness, or lack of humanity, as Mahaffy calls it.

The transition from idealism to nationalism is never affected with impunity, says Renan, and so the growing nation suffered in its material growth and through the insistence that Yahweh “loved Israel and hated all the rest of the world.”239 Baal and Yahweh were not far apart and at Sechem there was a Baal-berith, or Baal covenant, which the idolators worshipped as Baal, and the Israelites as Yahweh.240 “If the religion of Israel had not gone beyond this phase, it is certainly the last religion to which the world would have rallied.”241

It is in this period that we have the story of Jephthah, an outcast, the head of banditti and an illegitimate son, who was asked by the Israelites of Gilead to help them against the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed that if he should be successful he would sacrifice to Yahweh the first thing that met him on his return from the campaign, and the first thing to meet him was his daughter. “And he sent her away for two months and she went with her companions and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass that at the end of two months that she returned unto her father who did with her according to the vow which he had vowed.”242

It is suggested by Renan that what probably happened was that Jephthah, before undertaking a difficult war, sacrificed one of his daughters according to the barbarous custom put into practice on solemn occasions when the country was in danger. “Patriarchal deism,” he says, “had condemned these immolations; Yahwehism with its exclusively national principle was rather favourable to them. Not many human sacrifices were offered to God nor to the Elohim. The gods whom they thought to propitiate by means of human sacrifices were the patriot gods, Camos of the Moabites, Moloch of the Canaanites, Melqarth of Carthage.”243

The coming of David was the triumph of Yahweh over the contending religions, though, as modern critics have pointed out, there was little humanitarianism in the semi-barbarous poet. When there was a three years’ famine in the land it was ascribed to the wrong done the Gibeonites by Saul and the Gibeonites were allowed to say what should be the sacrifice to atone for the wrong. The ancient historian records the fact that they asked that they might be allowed to hang the seven sons of Saul, and this was done. The sacrifice was asked for by the Gibeonites and it was for the purpose of ending the famine, but, incidentally, it enabled David to get rid of those who stood in his way.244

A few hundred years later, in the ninth century, we find the effect of the sacrifice of the first-born telling on the Israelites even though at that time it is evident that they themselves have given up human sacrifice. Jehoram, King of Israel, and Jehosophat, King of Judah, united to defeat the remarkable King of Moab, Mesha. The combined forces drove him within his strong fortifications of Kir-Haraseth and when he found that there was no way of escape, as a last resort:

“He took his eldest son, that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And they [the Israelites] departed from him and returned to their own land.”

The efficacy of the sacrifice is hereby admitted although it was offered to Camos and not to Yahweh. The ancient historian says nothing in extenuation of the effect. Ewald suggests that Yahweh, full of bitterness245 against Israel for having driven the King of Moab to such a deed of fearful bravery, filled the army full of terror. Renan, however, suggests that though they did not then offer human sacrifices themselves, the Israelites still had the fullest faith in their efficacy and retired lest they be defeated.

Coming nearer, to a period that is contemporaneous with that which is revealed in the excavations at Gezer and Tell Ta’Annek, we have the direct statement in Kings and Chronicles246 that Ahaz, the eleventh King of Judah (about 741 to 725 B. C.), “made his son pass through the fire.” To gain the aid of Tiglath-Pileser against the Edomites and the Philistines he became a vassal of the Assyrian monarch and his name appears among the names of those who acknowledged his sovereignty and paid tribute.

Manasseh was another King of Judah (697 to 642 B. C.) who sacrificed his son,247 emulating Ahaz in this as in other heathenish customs, increasing the popularity of the foreign gods and causing the streets of Jerusalem to run with the blood of the prophets whom he put to death. In every way he tried to make the heathen religions more acceptable and accessible to the whole nation by providing them with temples and altars. In addition to sacrificing one of his own sons to Moloch, he revived that religion on a large scale, building for it a magnificent burning place (Tophet) in the valley of Hinnom on the southern wall of Jerusalem. The tortures to which the children were subjected soon associated themselves in the minds of the pious with what punishment beyond the grave must be like, so that the name of hell itself was taken from this valley, Ge-Hinnom.248

With the reforms of Josiah we hear no more of such treatment of children but we must not suppose that while barbarous practices were going on the prophets had remained silent. The latter day writers revolted against the entire idea of sacrifice, Hosea declaring: “I desired mercy and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of Yahweh more than burnt offerings.”249 Jeremiah even declared that the Lord had not commanded the people to sacrifice when they came forth from Egypt:

“For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices.”250

To Micah, however, it was reserved to express in those early days the vigorous protest that was to become the ethical keynote of the future religion:

“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?

“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my first son for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?”251

CHAPTER XI

ANCIENT ARABIANS WERE CANNIBALISTIC—DAUGHTERS TOO EXPENSIVE TO REAR—CONDITIONS BEFORE THE COMING OF THE PROPHET—THE INJUNCTIONS OF MOHAMMED—HIS LAW AS FOUND IN “AL HIDAYA.”

OF the one remaining tribe of the Semites, a name that has meant so much to the civilization of the world, it is hardly necessary to offer a prelude. Coming, however, in the mouth of the defenders of the latest religion and as the youngest of the Semitic languages, it is necessary to say of the Arabic language that it is nearer akin than any of the others to the original archetype, the Ursemitisch, from which they are all derived; “just as the Arabs, by reason of their geographical situation and the monotonous uniformity of the desert life, have, in some respects, preserved the Semitic character more purely and exhibited it more distinctly than any people of the same family.”252

Arabic history divides itself into three periods, first the Sabean and Himyarite period, from 800 B. C., the date of the oldest south Arabic inscription; second, the Pre-Islamic period, 500 to 622 A. D.; and third, the Mohammedan period, beginning with the Flight, or Hijra (or Hegira). Of the first periods the little that we know except the inscriptions coming to us by tradition is preserved in the Pre-Islamic poems and the Koran.253

The second period is known as the Jahiliyya, or Age of Ignorance or Barbarism, and, in the ample remnant of the poetry of that day, we are enabled “to picture the life of those wild days in its larger aspects, accurately enough.”254

The pagan Arabs had long been in the habit of burying their infant daughters alive, the excuse offered being that it cost too much to marry them and that their lives were too closely attended with the possibility of disgrace “if they should happen to be made captives or to become scandalous by their behaviour.”255 For these reasons there was never any disguising the fact that the birth of a daughter was considered a great misfortune and the death of one a great happiness.

According to one authority, the method employed by the Arabs to get rid of the female infant was to have the mother who was about to give birth to a child lie down by a pit when she was about to deliver the child, and if it was a daughter, it was thrown into the pit without any more ado.256

Another version is that when a daughter was born the father, if he intended to keep her, would have her clothed in a garment of wool or hair as an indication that later he intended to have her keep camels or sheep in the desert. If, on the other hand, he intended to do away with her, he would allow her to live until she was six years of age, and then said to her mother:

“Perfume her and adorn her, that I may carry her to her mothers.”

This being done, he led her to a well or pit that had previously been dug for that purpose, pushed her into it, and then, filling the pit, levelled it with the rest of the ground. It does not seem that the latter practice could have been other than rare.

Al Mostatraf is quoted by Sale as saying that these practices were common throughout Arabia, and that the tribes of Koreish and Kendah were particularly notorious in this respect. The members of the former tribe were in the habit of burying their daughters alive in Mount Abu Dalama, near Mecca.

Among the Pre-Islamitic Arabians, the people of Tamim were noted for their addiction to this practice and claimed, in after years, that it was brought about by the action of their chief, Qays, who was a contemporary of the Prophet. According to this story, Moshamraj the Yashkorite descended on the camp of Qays and carried off, among other women, the daughter of the sister of Qays. This captive was assigned to the son of Moshamraj, and when her uncle appeared to ransom her, she declined to leave her new-found husband. Qays was so incensed over this action that, on returning home, he is said to have killed all of his daughters by burying them alive, and never thereafter allowed another daughter to live.

During his absence some time later, his wife gave birth to a daughter, and knowing the feeling of the father she sent the infant to some relatives to have the child raised in secrecy. When Qays returned home she told him that she had given birth to a dead child.

Years after, when the child had grown up, she came to visit her mother and while the two were together they were discovered by Qays.

“I came in,” related Qays himself to Mohammed, “and saw the girl; her mother had plaited her hair, and put rings in the side locks and strung them with sea shells and put on a chain of cowries, and given her a necklace of dried dates. I said:

“‘Who is this pretty girl?’ and her mother wept and said:

“‘She is your daughter’; and told me how she had saved her alive.

“So I waited until the mother ceased to be anxious about her; then I led her out one day, dug a pit and laid her in it, she crying:

“‘Father, what are you doing with me?’

“Then I covered her up with the earth and still she cried:

“‘Father, are you going to bury me? Are you going to leave me alone and go away?’ But I went on filling in the earth till I could hear her cries no longer, and that is the only time that I felt any pity when I buried a daughter.”257

There were others however before Qays who did not take this attitude toward children. Sa’sa’a, the grandfather of the poet Al-Farazdac, frequently redeemed female children that were about to be buried alive. Inasmuch as he too was of the tribe of Tamim his action would indicate that Qays was not an innovator. In order to save them he was obliged to buy them off and the price he paid every time was two she-camels, big with young, and one he-camel.258

Boasting of this humane action on the part of his ancestor (who was the François Villon of his day) Al-Farazdac vauntingly declared one day before the Khalifs of the family of Omayya:

“I am the son of the giver of life to the dead.”

When he was reproved for this boasting he justified it by quoting the Koran:

“He who saveth a soul alive shall be as if he had saved the souls of all mankind.”259

The Aghani explains the practice on the ground of poverty and credits Sa’sa’a with being the first one to attempt to put an end to the practice. Thereafter this humane grandparent of a vagabond poet was known as Muhiyyu’l-Maw’udat, or “He who brings buried girls to life.” According to the Kamil he saved as many as one hundred and eighty daughters.260

That infanticide was rare in the desert is the claim made by defenders of the faith. The following verses are quoted by Lane as going to show that the Arabs really had a tender feeling toward their women and their children; and that infanticide, which is commonly attributed to the whole Arab nation of every age before Islam, was in reality exceedingly rare in the desert, and after almost dying out only revived about the time of Mohammed. It was probably adopted by poor and weak clans, either from inability to support their children, or in order to protect themselves from the stain of having their children dishonoured by stronger tribes, and the occasional practice of this barbarous and suicidal custom affords no ground for assuming an unnatural hatred and contempt for girls among the ancient Arabs. These verses of a father to his daughter tell a different story: