Over the excavation works of a bathhouse ad Ashkelonin Israel, archaeologists were faced with a sad discovery. Just below the bathhouse, built in the sewers in the 4th century AD. C and used until the 6th century AD, they found the bone of about 100 male childrentogether with the animal bones.
Lo studio showed that the bones of about 100 male children they were in good condition and this suggested that the babies were placed there soon after their deaths, probably when soft tissue was still present. There burial inside the sewers it was unusual for both the time and the area, with a careful pot burial of children found in a nearby courtyard some 182 yards away.
In their study, the research team intervened as follows: “The presence of the children in the sewers therefore aroused suspicions that they might have been victims of infanticide or some mass disaster that had caused a disruption in normal burial practices”.
From the studies the team reached a conclusion: if i children they were all newborns they probably were victims of infanticide, as the large volume of body parts suggested they were not stillborn. Upon closer inspection of the remains, they found stains of iron oxide on many of their teeth that weren’t present on the bones and they analyzed it using mass spectrography.
Scholars explained that: “Iron oxide was concentrated in the outer layer of developing immature enamel and may represent breakdown products of hemoglobin released by bleeding into oral tissues at the time of death. Hemoglobin breakdown products have previously been identified in the dentin of adult teeth, especially after asphyxia. It is attributed to blood being forced into the tubules of the dentin.”
They then added that: “Infanticide would appear to be the most likely explanation for disposing of just infants down the gutter. It was widely practiced in Hellenistic and Roman societies. So, the disposal of children in the gutter of Ashkelon is anomalousand presumably reflects indifference or an emergency measure resulting from some catastrophe, such as an epidemic or massacre”.