Earliest Ordeal: Drowning March 4, 2017
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
What is the earliest ordeal in history? Well, there were probably games involving Paleolithic ne’er-do-wells and mammoths, but the earliest recorded ordeal in history? There are some hypotheses about drinking ancient poisons (drugs?), in the near east: though to Beach this sounds more like an execution and it is, in any case, a hypothesis. However, the first reliable reference to an ordeal in our records relates to Hit (aka Heet) on the Euphrates (pictured), today in Iraq, in the second millennium B.C. We know that in ancient times suspected criminals were sometimes put to the test here. They (or a chosen champion) had to make a ritual announcement of innocence after listening to an accusation. They, then, had to swim across the Euphrates with a weight of some kind tied to them (there may also have been the need to swim underwater). Contemporary accounts suggest that it was all the fun of the fair: people came from miles around to watch the desperate attempt to stay alive: the weight is, in one instance, described as being a millstone. We are uncertain who all these drownable criminals were, but certainly adulterous women were tested in this way: there is some ambiguity about whether lawcodes from the period are condemning women to death by drowning or to ordeal by drowning, but there are also some clear references to women suspected of adultery being forced into the ordeal. Records are VERY patchy and we do not know how many survived, but certainly some did. A nice question is what happened to those who sent out champions when the champions drowned. They were perhaps put to death there and then in front of the picnicking crowds? Can anyone offer any earlier ordeals: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com. Beach is also interested in drowning as capital punishment. ‘Between the two rivers’ death by water must have had extraordinary meaning.
