``The Greeks and Romans practiced infanticide. The Egyptians did not. So, when Egypt was under Macedonian and then Roman control, Egyptians would go through the trash heaps and other such places where babies would be abandoned and take them home. As a result you see people's names on records of the period that translate as "Found on the Trash Heap" and whatnot...'' Chris Doss
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That is interesting and curious. But in my mind completely understandable through Egyptian mythology. I am thinking of the Osiris cycle of resurection. One version was, that Osiris was murdered by Sheth and cut up in pieces then tossed into the Nile. His body parts were retrieved from the river marshes and river scaveners like the crocodiles by Isis with help from her sister Nephthys, Seth's wife. Together they brought the dismembered body to Anubus, the jackal who knew the mysteries of reconstruction and resurrection--the proper rites to restore Osiris to life. But once restored Osiris could never leave the underworld where Anubus dwelled. The only part missing was of course the penis that Isis had to fashion for herself. And so with custom made phallis in hand she visited her husband in the underworld and they conceived their son, Horus...
I would say the Egyptians had no problem at all with retrieving babies from the marshes and waste dumps along the river. I would even say it could be conceived as a sacred act (not the same as moral). And let's not forget Moses. What a convienent coincidence.
The flow of the river, seeds of life, maggots in dung, sprouts in black mud, pyramids with bodies in waiting.... babies in marshes. You have to get into the deep mytho-poetics of a mythology in order understand it on some level.
We would say, life itself issues from these kinds of waters, the warm slews and tidepools, the shallow primodial seas were organic molecules brewed under a burning sun... And we believe this process to be a universal.
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>From Dennis Claxton:
``Boswell, John The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance...
... Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. The Kindness of Strangers presents a startling history of the abandoned child that helps to illustrate the changing meaning of family.''
Here in the SF/Oak/Berkeley area there were so many newborns found in dumpsters, or wrapped and left on the street, or died from abandonment that local hospitals instituted a `no questions asked'' policy so women could simply take their newborn baby to a hospital and leave them.
CG
PS. It's interesting to think about all these cultures and their ways of dealing with unwanted children. The ancient Egyptians had an extensive medical system/tradition with all kinds of surgery tools, drugs/herbal curatives, and other paraphernalia. I pretty sure they had some abortion methods.