This is good stuff!
> I am not familiar with the myth, though the names Acteon and Aqhat
> appear similar. Anat was known elsewhere in the Near East as
> Ashtarte, Ishtar, and so on. She must have been the same as Tanit
> in Carthage. Some say she is found in Zoroastrian religion as
> Anahita, who is also known as Tanais. Anyway, she is about the same
> as the Anatolian 'Great Mother' goddesses like Ma, Cybele, Kubebe,
> and so on. The Greeks compared them to Artemis, Athena, and
> Aphrodite in their myths. Aphrodite lost her lover Adonis to Ares'
> jealousy. In one myth Athena lost her childhood sweetheart Palas
> and so took his name as Palas Athena (contrived reason, IMO), and
> of course Artemis lost Orion because Apollo was afraid he was going
> to doink his chaste sister.
>
> Acteon was turned into a stag and set upon by his hunting hounds
> after he found Artemis in the buff. This part seems more in the IE
> tradition. However, being torn to pieces and scattered to the
> fields seems to have been more of a Near Eastern fertility rite. I
> haven't seen too much on it, but it may have been based on actual
> ritual human sacrifice going way back into the Neolithic.
Regarding the Anath, Anahita, Tanit connection. It seems to be
related to the Hurrian "Hannah" meaning Mother. The Anatolian
(Hattic-Hurrian) Goddess Hannahannah (Mothers mother = Grandmother)
seems to have been the archetypal name from which these others were
derived. Once again it confirms that a proto-Hurro-Urartuan language
was the one which began the development of agriculture, spreading its
seeds widely into Syria, Anatolia, and the Zagros as far south as
Sumer and Elam (from which the Iranians picked up Anahita i.e.
Akkadian Anahitu = "Lady Anah").
Regarding neolithic human sacrifice, when population exceeds the
natural carrying capacity of an area, there are various techniques of
overcoming the problem. One is increased warfare with your
neighbours to confiscate their resources. A second is emigration. A
third is agricultural intensification. A fourth is to try to trade
with your neighbours for what you lack. A fifth is volunatry suicide
amongst the elderly (Eskimo or Innuit as well as Australian
Aboriginal people practiced such a custom), and a sixth is to
institutionalise infanticide or human sacrifice. All six strategies
seem to have been practiced in the Middle East from about 4,000 BCE
if not earlier.
Human sacrifice in the Middle East has now been confirmed in Egypt
(Dynasty 1), Sumeria (Puabi's death pits at Ur), Assyria (human
sacrifice is found in Ashurbanipals inscriptions), Canaan (the
Tophets of Carthage are infamous, Abraham's original sacrifice of
Isaac (the "happy ending" shows clear evidence of being inserted
later when sacrifice of children to the gods had become
unacceptable), in Crete (the finds at Mount Youktas) and in the Vinca
culture (oops.... there goes Eisler and Gambutas's pacifist matri-
focal cultures out the window!). We know how widely practiced it was
amongst our earlier IE forebears too.
There is interesting coincidence with the finds of declining health
and nutrition status in graves and the simultaneous rise in human
sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica and in Peru also. It would seem to
be one response to the imbalance between human numbers and resources,
adopted in difficult periods. And as for cannibalism.....
Regards
John