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It's likely the oldest example of a battered child ever found, Liston says. One 18-month-old infant shows signs of frequent abuse-multiple fractures throughout the body, including in the skull, at different degrees of healing. Liston muses that being dropped in a disused well may also have been considered more respectful than being thrown into the city dump. At the time of this burial, the well would've been located down a blind alley near the agora, easily accessible but out of sight. It would have been an ideal location for such a deed. The team thinks that Athenian midwives took the infants to the well shortly after they had passed. It wasn't unusual for such children to be raised as slaves.īut if these noncitizen babies died before that ceremony, they'd perhaps end up at the bottom of a well. Sometimes, an unwanted baby would be left out in a public place in the hopes that it would be adopted. He could determine to not raise the baby for several reasons-for example, in the case of some type of deformity, or if the family was too big, or if the mother was unmarried. During this event, at which time the child was given his or her name, the head of the household (almost always the father) decided whether or not to rear the child.
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This is because Greek babies, like those in Rome, weren't considered full individuals until a special ceremony about a week to 10 days after birth, Rotroff explains. This latest work adds to those disturbing discoveries, building a case that, at the time, if a baby died, its body was discarded, not properly interred. Here, the Interior view of skull is shown with a close-up of a healing fracture. Over the last two decades, a team of researchers have wielded the latest technologies available to analyze the remains. The other Greek babies, she adds, likely died from one of the many other diseases and health conditions common at the time, such as dehydration from diarrhea, that don't leave any stamp on the skeleton. Meningitis leaves recognizable marks in the skull bones, Liston says. Her study of the skulls suggests that as many as one-third died of bacterial meningitis, an infection of the brain and surrounding tissues often caused by cutting the umbilical cord with an unsterile object-still a common cause of death in some parts of the developing world. All of the infants, save three, were less than a week old at the time of death, Liston says. The well babies appear to have died naturally, and not as part of some pandemic. Louis archaeologist Susan Rotroff calculated that the bodies ended up there sometime between 165 and 150 B.C., at the end of the Hellenistic period following the conquests of Alexander the Great and shortly before the Romans invaded Greece. By dating this material, Washington University in St. Mixed in with the bones, they found tons of pottery shards. Maria Liston, a biological anthropologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and her team determined that there were 450 dead infants in the well, along with 150 dogs and puppies, and the skeleton of one adult with some serious physical deformity. A research team has determined that there were 450 dead infants in the well, along with 150 dogs and puppies, and the skeleton of one adult with some serious physical deformity. The reconstructed skull of an infant discovered in the ancient well shows a y-shaped fracture to the right of the midline at the back of the skull. Their analysis, soon be submitted to Hesperia, an academic journal published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, casts a new and macabre light on ancient Athenian society. They have concluded that neither of these hypotheses are likely correct. Some ventured that the trove could be the mortifying result of a mass infanticide others guessed a plague was to blame. Over the years, scholars put forward two main hypotheses to explain the bizarre find, which is unlike anything uncovered in the ancient world, unique in terms of both the number of dead babies and the inclusion of canine carcasses. The disturbing assemblage of ancient dead mystified the archaeologists. There, they found the skeletons of hundreds of dogs and human infants. They got a shock when they looked inside. Besides coming across the grand temples and statues for which the city is now known, they found something they originally thought mundane: a well, hewn into the bedrock. In the 1930s, archaeologists started excavating the Athenian agora, the marketplace in the center of the ancient Greek city.