Ancient civilizations killed people as a form of religious worship -- the human sacrifice.

Pictured here are two of the 200 victims sacrificed at the dedication of the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, Mexico.

Some, like the Greeks and Romans performed human sacrifice relatively infrequently. In other civilizations, human sacrifice was the focal point. Sometimes people sacrificed their own children; sometimes the victims would be prisoners or slaves.

The funeral rites of nobility and kings, whether in Ancient Egypt, China or among the Vikings, often included sacrificing servants, young girls and prisoners.

The Incas who lived in the Andes worshipped mountain gods. They sacrificed their own children on the peaks of the highest mountains.

In many civilizations, instead of dedicating a new building with a cornerstone-laying ceremony, people would be sacrificed and buried in its foundations.

EUROPEAN VICTIMS

Shown here are some preserved remains of human sacrifices that were found in many sites in Northern Europe.
They are believed to have been sacrificed around 2,000 years ago.  Their bodies were staked out in bogs and typically found in association with pagan cult objects.

AZTEC HUMAN SACRIFICE

Human sacrifice was an essential feature of Central and South American Indian culture. The best example comes from the Aztecs, whose vast civilization centered in the area around modern Mexico City. Five hundred years ago when the Spanish came to the New World, they discovered this very advanced civilization which ruled over six million people. The Aztecs went to war with non-lethal weapons in order to take large numbers of captives. These prisoners were brought back to Aztec holy cities, dragged up pyramids, and then their hearts were ripped from their chests while they were still alive, person after person. The Aztecs believed that if the blood stopped flowing, the world would cease to exist. They practiced perpetual human sacrifice on a scale that is hard to imagine.

Clearly the ancients had a very different attitude about the sanctity of human life than we have today.

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