1876.] E. C. Bayley — On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India, 55 



Tlie Hon. E. C. Batlet said that while he agreed with Dr. Banerjea 

 that Babu Rajendralala had gone a good deal beyond what he proposed as 

 the subject matter of his paper, and had travelled on to grouad which was 

 possibly beyond the province of the Society, nevertheless Mr. Bayley thought 

 that some at least of his propositions were not open to dispute. 



It was no dotibt true that human sacrifice was in many cases due to the 

 desire of jDropitiating the Gods by the sacrifice of the sacrificer's dearest pos- 

 sessions, as for example was the case in the well known history, curiously 

 brought into prominence by the recent discovery of the " Moabite Stone," 

 of Mesha, king of Moab, who sacrificed his son on the walls of his belea- 

 guered city to obtain relief from the danger which pressed upon him. 



That this principle was carried also to the extent of inducing the sacri- 

 fice of a man's own life to propitiate the Deity, was a fact of which con- 

 temjDorary evidence might be had. Mr. Bayley had, on one occasion, ofiicial 

 cognizance of a case in which an unfortunate Hindu, suffering terribly from 

 leprosy, had caused himself to be buried alive, in the hope that by this act 

 of self-immolation he might in a futui-e state of existence escape his terrible 

 disease, and in which case two men were punished for assisting him thus to 

 commit suicide. On the other hand some of the instances to which Babu 

 Rajendralala had alluded, could hardly come under the head of sacrifice, such 

 for example as the alleged destruction by the Emj)eror Napoleon the First, of 

 the sick who embarrassed his army — there were many well known similar 

 instances of wholesale and wanton destruction of human life, which certainly 

 partook in no way of the character of sacrifice, as for examjDle, the massacres 

 of his prisoners by Timur, near Dehli and elsewhere ; and, in very recent 

 times, the story of the barbarous Turkoman who erected a pyramid of human 

 skulls, and mui'dered the unfortunate Schlagintweit to obtain his head 

 for the apex of it. It was not, however, Mr. Bayley's purpose to enter 

 into the general questions raised, but rather to call the attention of the 

 meeting to a fact which gave to the theories jDropounded a substantial existence 

 and a local colouring,and which also would give a tolerably accurate and remote 

 date for the practice of human sacrifice amongst a Hindu community. 



Twelve years ago Mr. Bayley had the honor to furnish to the Society 

 a number of drawings of sculptures brought from the rums of Jamalgiri, 

 near Peshawar, and which were of the class now known as Eusofzye sculp- 

 tures. They were published, with a brief account of them, in the 21st Vo- 

 lume of the Society's Journal, and opposite p. 621 of that volume would be 

 found a lithograph* of a sculptm-e which Mr. Bayley believed undoubtedly 

 to represent a human sacrifice. The originalf (which mifortmaately perish- 



* From a di'awing by the late Sir Herbert Edwardes. 



t It was cut in a coarse blue slatey limestone and was in imperfect preservation, four 

 parts of the sui-face were scaled ofif as the drawing shows. 



