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00:05Archaeologists have made a sinister find. The skeletons of over a hundred newborn babies thrown
00:14into a Roman sewer. Who killed the babies of Ashkelon and why? To solve the mystery,
00:25scientists have used contemporary crime investigation techniques including DNA
00:31testing. The story they investigate is a murder mystery nearly 2,000 years old. A
00:41tale of sex, death and infanticide.
01:06On the shores of Israel's Mediterranean coast lies Ashkelon. A seaport since 3500 B.C. it
01:16became one of the most important cities of the ancient world.
01:23The Romans conquered Ashkelon in 37 B.C. Ashkelon was a vital strategic acquisition. Whoever held it
01:34controlled access to the Middle East. The Romans stayed for four centuries. The city was finally
01:42destroyed during the Crusades.
01:48For the last 15 years, archaeologists from Harvard University have been digging into the secrets
01:55of Ashkelon.
02:00Ross Voss made the most intriguing find yet. The mass burial of babies in the city's sewer.
02:12We started probing down beneath the sewer below the bath which is behind me here. And when we reached the
02:18gutter of the sewer at the base, we started discovering a number of bones and shells and lots of broken
02:24pottery. And one of the volunteers remarked, who was excavating inside, that she started finding all of these chicken bones.
02:31And I came over and I started looking at them and I thought, well, they could be drumsticks, but I
02:36wasn't exactly sure. They looked a little strange.
02:38And then I started seeing some other bones that didn't seem to be parts of chickens. So we had our
02:43funnel analyst, Paula Wapnish, come by and she all of a sudden pulled out one of these little ribs and
02:49was horrified to say, these are not chickens, these are babies.
02:51And we realized right then that we had a number of infants that were thrown into the gutter of the
02:57sewer beneath the bath.
02:59This is a unique find. Baby bones are often mistaken for animal bones and thrown away. But in Ashkelon, excavators
03:07are finding bones that are unmistakably human.
03:10The largest and most common that we seem to have are fibias and tibias of the legs and arms and
03:16part of the radial bones of the limbs.
03:19In addition, we've also discovered these scapula bones from the back and fragments of skulls which are unfused and so
03:27coming in small plates like this.
03:29And finally, besides jaws and pelvises, we have the ribs which are probably the most numerous parts of the baby
03:37that are found inside the deposit of the gutter.
03:41The team uncovered the bones of more than 100 individual babies. It's the biggest single find ever of ancient infant
03:49remains.
03:51They also found coins, jewelry, and pottery which helped date their find, mid-3rd century.
04:00And over 15 years after the dig began, bones are still emerging.
04:07And right now as I remove some of the rubble, I already see a few small bones which are parts
04:14of a rib of one of the infants.
04:17I've got maybe an arm bone here. So it's very rich in remains.
04:27Voss and his team discovered the bones while excavating this sector on the slopes by the sea.
04:33First they uncovered a small bathhouse. It had a hot pool and mosaics like all Roman public bathing places.
04:42Then they dug beneath and discovered the position of a major sewer.
04:49On my left there's a large underground sewer. It continues to the north and makes a very sharp right turn
04:56and goes before me here.
04:57At the base of the sewer we have the gutter which contained the baby bones beneath the bathhouse.
05:10The bathhouse itself was small. There were just a handful of rooms inside.
05:19It probably had two stories and a tiled roof like many buildings in this once grand city.
05:36Today, Ashkelon is a minor seaside resort, enjoyed by local families.
05:43But in the third century AD, when the babies died, it was a powerful seaport, a stronghold for Rome.
05:54Head of the Ashkelon excavations, Professor Larry Stager knows the history of the city better than anyone.
06:02Ashkelon would have been a bustling seaport where you had a whole variety of people gathering together here or living
06:09here as well.
06:10There probably were the people of the Hellenistic Roman era that had their own religion, the so-called pagans.
06:17There had been small communities of Jews, small communities of the early Christians.
06:22But coming and going all the time would have been the sailors, would have been the merchants.
06:27Ashkelon was highly developed at that time because Rome took an interest in it and wanted to see it thrive
06:33as a great seaport.
06:43Ashkelon was the gateway to Jerusalem and the Middle East.
06:54Pilgrims and sailors came ashore here.
06:56Merchants traded goods from all around the empire and the city grew rich.
07:03In the third century AD, it was at its peak, with 15,000 inhabitants and grand buildings throughout the city.
07:16A great forum ran across the center, leading towards the theater.
07:20A massive basilica ran east-west towards the sea.
07:24And overlooking it on the hillside were villas for Ashkelon's rich.
07:32Beyond the villas were poorer districts.
07:35And it is here that the archaeologist's bathhouse stood.
07:40Like all bathhouses, it was a popular place for socializing.
07:50Well, of course, a port like this would have been quite an attraction to sailors,
07:55who would come in and they could have had all kinds of different foods and drink, of course.
08:01They might have involved themselves in gambling.
08:04We find dice, you know, in different places at the site.
08:09The archaeologists believed that theirs was a small, private bathhouse, one of many in Ashkelon.
08:18The social center of the complex was the changing room, where bathers could eat and drink, play games and exercise.
08:27Everyone went to the baths, men and women, free men and slaves.
08:36Throughout the empire, the authorities encouraged bathing as a civilizing influence that helped enforce Roman values.
08:51But some bathhouses had a rather dubious reputation.
08:55Men might meet their mistresses there, or find prostitutes.
09:03So why were there baby bones in the sewer beneath this building?
09:07What was the link between the bathhouse and the dead infants?
09:12The mystery now had the archaeologists in its grip.
09:17This is a unique discovery.
09:19Archaeologists always want to have something new that has never been seen before,
09:24try to understand some kind of mystery, because this then becomes a mystery.
09:27What are all the babies doing in the gutter and just thrown in like trash,
09:32instead of, you know, having a nice burial?
09:35And we didn't know exactly what was the cause of all this.
09:38Could it be an epidemic that raged through the city,
09:41and everyone was forced, like in the plague, to just dispose of bodies as quickly as possible?
09:49Voss took the bones to Jerusalem for forensic analysis,
09:53to find out how the hundred babies died,
09:55whether it was plague, or massacre, or murder.
10:12At the Hebrew University, two forensic scientists would attempt to get to the bottom of the Ashkelon baby mystery.
10:19It was a juvenile, about 12, got hit on the head three times.
10:24Pat Smith is a forensic anthropologist.
10:27By looking at bones even those thousands of years old, she can work out the cause of death.
10:34She does the same work as a pathologist, but with skeletons, not corpses.
10:39Her first observation about the Ashkelon case was vital.
10:44The interesting thing is that these infants seem to have been buried shortly after the time of death.
10:53If we look here, you can see that quite unusually for infant remains recovered after nearly 2,000 years,
11:04that we have indeed all parts of the skeleton, including very, very small bones.
11:10This suggests that they were buried shortly after death, when the soft tissues were still present,
11:15and that this was their first and final resting place.
11:21Smith's next piece of detective work was to find out if the babies died of disease.
11:27One of the things that we look at is the surface of the bone.
11:30If there's been any disease or infection, then the body responds by the formation of a regular new bone.
11:42This bone, which is an upper arm bone, a humerus from Ashkelon,
11:46you can see that the surface of the bone is relatively smooth.
11:49If I look at the same bone of an infant, but from another side,
11:57you can see here that there's a lot of very irregular, almost stripy bone on the surface,
12:07suggesting that this infant was ill at least in the two weeks or so before he died.
12:14So the Ashkelon babies were healthy.
12:18Professor Smith now had a hunch about the cause of death,
12:21but she was lacking a crucial piece of information, the baby's age.
12:25For this, she had to examine their teeth.
12:29What clinched it for me was based on the development of the tooth germs.
12:34This is the tooth germ of an infant from Ashkelon.
12:39Less than half of the crown is present.
12:42If we can compare it with that of an individual from another archaeological site
12:48that was aged at around nine months at the time of death, there's quite a big difference.
12:55Judging the precise age of an infant is extremely difficult.
12:59The latest forensic method is to look at a cross-section of a tooth bud, highly magnified.
13:05Like the rings in a tree trunk, layers of enamel are laid down on teeth at regular intervals.
13:10Enamel stops forming for 24 hours or so after birth and then carries on again at more or less the
13:18same rate.
13:19But for the Ashkelon babies, the picture was very different.
13:23On the Ashkelon infant teeth, what we saw was only this amount of enamel formed, that is down to here,
13:32and none of these lines at all appear.
13:36There's no evidence of survival beyond a few days.
13:41The Ashkelon babies were newborns, leading Professor Smith to one conclusion.
13:47None of these infants, by any stretch of imagination, could be as much as a week old.
13:55That really is the strongest evidence to suggest that these were intentionally killed and placed there.
14:10The fact that all the infants were so young is crucial.
14:15According to anthropologists, when mothers kill their infants, it is almost always within the first few days of life, before
14:23the maternal bond becomes too strong.
14:38So the Ashkelon babies, all 100 of them, were either killed and put in the sewer, or taken down alive
14:46and left to die.
15:04It is the best forensic evidence ever found for the ancient practice of infanticide, a form of population control.
15:21In the Roman world, infanticide, the killing of an unwanted child, was not a crime.
15:28It was a form of birth control.
15:32Newborn babies who were sickly, or simply unwanted, were abandoned.
15:38The Romans, cultured in so many ways, could be brutal when necessary.
15:52Eleanor Scott is an expert on Roman attitudes to babies.
15:56These were very different to our own, which are cushioned by the advances of medical science.
16:03We start to view a baby as having an identity whilst it's still in the womb.
16:08From the fact that a woman can tell if she's pregnant from the first day after a missed period, to
16:13photographs we take of babies in the womb.
16:16And a woman can invest an immense amount of almost romantic love in that baby, because she expects it to
16:23survive.
16:24For a Roman woman, the situation was incredibly different.
16:28She couldn't afford to invest any powerful feelings in that baby, especially in the newborn stage, because she might likely
16:36lose it.
16:40The Romans had a strange idea about babies.
16:43They believed that newborns were not yet fully human.
16:47This protected them from grief when infants died.
16:50It also made it possible for them to abandon those babies they did not want.
16:56The practice was known as exposure.
16:59Rather than killing a baby directly, a mother would leave it somewhere where it might or might not be picked
17:08up and cared for by someone else.
17:13It was up to the gods to decide the child's fate.
17:24But in the Ashkelon case, it was very different.
17:27It was not in the lap of the gods to decide whether or not these babies were rescued.
17:34When we look at the Ashkelon evidence, it really is quite stark.
17:38It was a direct murder of the newborn by discarding them in the sewers.
17:45So there was no possibility that these were going to be rescued by anyone.
17:53But is it possible the babies were killed before being placed here?
17:58We don't know if they actually were dead before they were placed in the sewer.
18:03One would always like to think that the material that one is dealing with suffered an easy death.
18:11These are people. These were people.
18:15But for the Romans, newborn babies did not yet count as people.
18:20And one sex in particular, archaeologists believe, was marked out for death.
18:27The usual victim in infanticide are the girls.
18:30This we know from both ancient evidence and modern ethno-histories.
18:38It's generally the female that is the victim of infanticide.
18:44Archaeologists have long assumed that the Romans preferred to keep boys and discard girls.
18:52But it is a belief based on very little evidence.
18:56Chiefly, one letter, written in 1 B.C. from a man called Hilarion to his pregnant wife, Elise.
19:05There are a few references to killing baby girls in classical literature, but there is no real forensic evidence.
19:16Hilarion is away from home on business and writes to Elise.
19:22Wormest greetings.
19:24Know that we are still in Alexandria, and do not worry if the others return without me.
19:31I beg and beseech you to take care of the little child, and as soon as we receive our wages,
19:38I'll send him to you.
19:40If, and good luck to you, you give birth before I return, if it's a boy, let it live.
19:48If it's a girl, expose it.
19:56But to assume, on the basis of a single letter, that all Roman families preferred to get rid of girls,
20:02is controversial to some experts.
20:06It's just one letter. They are just one family.
20:09They might have had very special circumstances.
20:12Maybe they're completely broke, and they can't afford to have any more daughters, because perhaps they've got daughters already.
20:18And to take that one letter, and use it to build this big theory, this big picture of mass culling
20:26of unwanted baby girls,
20:28strikes me as being very dangerous, because we just don't have the broad archaeological and historical evidence
20:34to support the idea that infanticide was the killing of girls, and only girls.
20:41The Ashkelon infanticide case was a unique opportunity to find out if the Romans really did expose more girls than
20:49boys.
20:50For the first time, there was real forensic evidence to investigate.
20:55But there was only one way to discover the sex of the infant bones, by testing their DNA.
21:09Ancient DNA research has revolutionized archaeology.
21:13The secrets of the long dead can now be investigated scientifically.
21:20But it is difficult and sometimes controversial work.
21:26Dr. Andrew Merriweather is one of the world's leading ancient DNA experts.
21:33There's no way of knowing, really, when you get a bone, whether it's going to have DNA in it or
21:37not.
21:38And even if it's recovered, very often it may be fragmentary.
21:41It may only give you a small part of an answer that you're looking for.
21:46The DNA of every individual, alive or dead, is unique.
21:50It is the blueprint for our sex, appearance, our susceptibility to disease, perhaps even our personality.
21:57And it is present in our every cell.
22:01Within each cell's nucleus are chromosomes.
22:04Within these is our DNA.
22:07A chemical consisting of two interlocking strands of molecules.
22:12The molecules are organized into sequences called genes.
22:17And each gene determines who we are and what we look like.
22:23When we die, much of our DNA gets destroyed.
22:27But in bones and teeth, it may remain, although fragmented, for thousands of years.
22:38In Jerusalem, the forensic team jumped at the opportunity of using DNA to find out the sex of the Ashkelon
22:46infants.
22:49It would be the first real evidence about the sex of Roman infanticide victims.
23:04In Jerusalem, Dr. Marina Fairman began DNA testing the Ashkelon bones to discover their sex.
23:11She was under no illusions about the difficulties of her task.
23:16It is much more difficult to work with ancient DNA than with modern DNA,
23:22because modern DNA will always give you results.
23:25You know, maybe sometimes the results that you don't want to get, but they will get the results definitely.
23:30With the ancient DNA, you can't predict that you will get anything.
23:38The first problem was that there might be no DNA left in the bones at all.
23:43The damp sewer in the heat of Israel might have destroyed it.
23:46But there was only one way to find out.
23:53First, Fairman extracted bone powder from the center of the bones,
23:56where it was less likely to be contaminated with modern DNA.
24:01Contamination is really the bane of ancient DNA research.
24:05It's a problem because the contamination from modern sources,
24:08from me or from whoever's handling the samples,
24:11that DNA is in so much better shape than the ancient DNA that's actually inside the bone or inside the
24:16tooth,
24:16that even the teeniest little bit will contaminate a sample, and that's your result.
24:25Researchers must always be gloved and masked.
24:28The air in the laboratory is filtered.
24:31Ancient bones can be contaminated by one touch, or one cell of dried skin, from the researcher.
24:40The Ashkelon bone powder was washed, spun, heated, and put on ice,
24:45in order to strip away impurities and to reduce it down to pure DNA.
24:51The critical process was amplification.
24:54This machine works like a photocopier, duplicating the fragmented ancient DNA until there is enough to actually test.
25:07The final stage was electrophoresis, which translates DNA into a readable result.
25:14Samples of DNA, colored blue, are put on a gel.
25:18An electric current drives it through the gel, and then the results are viewed under ultraviolet light.
25:26Fairman could now tell whether the DNA was male or female, according to the number of bands each sample made
25:33on the gel.
25:36The longer set of bands was a control of modern DNA.
25:40The two short bands were the ancient DNA, and both were male.
25:46Other gels, recorded as photographs, showed similar results.
25:50Lanes 10 to 14 are Ashkelon DNA.
25:54In each case, there are two telltale bands, corresponding to the X and Y chromosome.
26:01So each of these five individuals is also a boy.
26:09Dr. Fairman tested the bones of 43 babies.
26:13Only 19 of them yielded DNA, and of the 19, 14 turned out to be boys, and just five were
26:21girls.
26:24One possibility had to be investigated.
26:28Contamination.
26:29If I got those results, I would first be very excited that I got all this difficult nuclear DNA to
26:35amplify from very old samples.
26:36So it would be a very exciting result, and I would be excited that my negative controls were negative,
26:41and I would then immediately want to find some way to confirm that it's not contamination.
26:46Fairman is certain that her results are genuine, because she did not manage to get results from all the bones.
26:53The success rate of the sex identification was only 44%.
26:58Less than half of the bones yielded amplifiable DNA, and if all the bones were contaminated from previous handling,
27:09then we should have ended with 100% of sex identification.
27:14And this was not the case.
27:18Fairman also compared the Ashkelon DNA sequences with those of everyone who had handled the bones,
27:24including the male archaeologists.
27:27They did not match, so her results were real.
27:32For Pat Smith, the interpretation was clear.
27:36The samples are small, but they certainly suggest that there was some choice here,
27:44with boys being preferentially killed.
27:50The mystery had taken another twist.
27:54The murder case was taking the archaeologists into uncharted waters.
28:00We were really surprised to find that there were more boys in the sewers than girls,
28:05and by a substantial number, because normally we'd expect many more girls than boys to be the victims of this
28:14horrible practice.
28:18The Ashkelon DNA results proved that the Romans did indeed kill their sons,
28:24sometimes in greater numbers than their daughters.
28:29Perhaps Roman parents did, after all, value girls as much as boys.
28:37But to explain why, in Ashkelon, parents were killing more sons than daughters,
28:43there was still a line of inquiry to follow.
28:46The location of the bones, beneath the bathhouse.
28:52This building was to lead the archaeologists to an entirely new angle on the case.
28:59We were curious as to why this place, this area of the city, had all of these bones.
29:05When we started examining the fact that there was a bathhouse above,
29:09which is not a big public bath, but a private bath, which we thought had been a bordello,
29:13then we started wondering if there was a connection.
29:17When the archaeologists excavated the bathhouse, they found an intriguing inscription.
29:22Enter and enjoy, written in Greek.
29:25They also found pottery with erotic designs.
29:30These finds suggested to them that the bathhouse might also have been a brothel,
29:36an interpretation that might account for the presence of the baby boys in the sewer below.
29:41Maybe the courtesans in the bathhouse, or prostitutes, were getting pregnant regularly,
29:48so they would immediately dispose of those babies that they had brought to term.
29:52Abortion itself would have been too dangerous to practice,
29:55so it would have been safer just to let the baby come to term
29:58and then terminate its life right immediately after its birth.
30:04According to this theory, the prostitutes were not just getting rid of babies, they were selecting.
30:18Boy babies were thrown away because they were not as useful.
30:37Girls were kept and brought up in the bathhouse brothel to provide the next generation of prostitutes.
30:50Pompeii in southern Italy.
30:53Unlike Ashkelon, this Roman city is almost intact.
30:57When Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago,
31:01it covered Pompeii with a blanket of volcanic ash,
31:04which killed thousands but preserved the buildings and the artwork as a record of how the Romans really lived.
31:18Throughout the summer months, thousands of tourists of every nationality flood the city streets.
31:26One aspect of Roman life draws them like no other.
31:31Sex.
31:32The Romans were not embarrassed by sexuality.
31:35It was something to be admired, not covered up.
31:42Right there is the big Salani and the left, money.
31:50That's God Priapus over there.
31:52I remember you that that's God of the fertility, procreation, abundance and fortune.
31:59It's not an erotic sign.
32:01What you're looking at, it's a God.
32:04But there is a darker side to the sex lives of the Romans.
32:08Court records tell a story about a woman called Theodora, who sued the murderer of her prostitute daughter.
32:15Theodora was a woman whose daughter, a prostitute, had been murdered by one of the town councillors of Alexandria.
32:23At his trial, she says to the court that by murdering her daughter, he had robbed her of her livelihood.
32:31This is why I gave my daughter to the pimp, so that I would have a means to living.
32:35It's left to the prefect to express sympathy for the plight of the daughter.
32:40Theodora is more concerned with the impact of the situation on herself.
32:45Clearly, some Roman mothers did prostitute their daughters, as the Ashkelon archaeologists suspected.
32:51But will their theory of a combined bathhouse brothel stand up to the architectural evidence of Pompeii?
33:00The city's star attraction is its uniquely well-preserved brothel.
33:05If the Ashkelon bathhouse was also a bordello, it would have to look something like this.
33:12On the ground floor are five cubicles, three on that side, two on this side, with a latrine all the
33:21way in the back.
33:21There are five more rooms upstairs.
33:25The evidence which makes this practically certain to be a brothel are, first of all, the stone beds, which you
33:34find in cubicles on the ground floor.
33:36Stone beds with stone pillows in each one of these five cells.
33:43On the walls, there was found over 120 examples of erotic graffiti, including the names of clients, like our friend
33:51Victor here.
33:53And in addition to names of clients and of prostitutes, we have prices for an act of prostitution, various sexual
34:03services are recorded.
34:04We've also got the testimonials by clients as to their satisfaction with the services provided in this place.
34:12Here we can reconstruct every aspect of Pompeii's sex industry, the psychology of its clients, even the detail of price,
34:20thanks to graffiti.
34:22The graffiti show us a number of prices, the most common of which was two asses.
34:28An ass was a small copper coin, and two asses was the price of a flask of cheap wine, suggesting
34:35that this was not an upmarket venue for the sale of sex.
34:39In fact, the prices recorded at Pompeii are among the lowest we have for the entire Roman world.
34:47Prostitutes hustled for trade in every part of the Roman city.
34:51Prostitution was not illegal.
34:53In fact, some town councils levied a tax on it.
34:58Many buildings, bars, hotels, taverns and bathhouses doubled as brothels.
35:05But to do that, they needed a particular architecture.
35:11In Pompeii, there is a building which some experts argue was a combined bathhouse brothel.
35:17So it may be the model for Ashkelons.
35:20It is called the suburban bathhouse.
35:25This is the changing room of the baths, where bathers let their clothes when they went off for their bathing
35:32ritual.
35:37On the walls were once lockers for clothes, and above each locker space is an erotic drawing, very much like
35:44those in the brothel.
35:51Is there a connection here between the bath and the operation of a brothel?
35:55Or were these simply intended to help people remember where they put their clothes?
36:00Or were they simply intended to make people laugh, because the sexual situations depicted are so over the top?
36:10If there was a brothel here, it would be upstairs, above the baths.
36:16This level of the bath complex contains some small rooms, a series of small rooms that could have been used
36:22as cubicles by prostitutes and their clients.
36:24We lack the inset stone beds we saw in the brothel, which adds up to the fact that this could
36:29have been a brothel, but we lack final proof.
36:34In Ashkelon, there is much less evidence to examine.
36:38So will the archaeologists be able to prove that their bathhouse also doubled as a brothel?
36:55Ashkelon. In the third century AD, over a hundred babies, the majority of them male, were dumped in a sewer
37:03here.
37:05Attempting to solve this mystery has forced the archaeologists to confront the dark reality of Roman life,
37:11the routine killing of unwanted children.
37:20Larry Steger and Ross Voss are confident that their prostitution theory best accounts for the find,
37:27because it explains why they found more baby boys than girls.
37:33Well, of course, as an archaeologist, you think about the context in which things are found.
37:37And when we had a bathhouse above the sewers in which all the babies, and especially the boy babies, were
37:44discarded,
37:45it seems sort of logical that if this were also a brothel, the girl babies would have been preferred to
37:53be reared within that establishment,
37:55and maybe more boys discarded.
37:58For the female courtesans, it would have been an insurance measure on their part if they got too old to
38:04carry on their trade,
38:05that their daughters, their children, would be the next to do the work and ensure the welfare of their families.
38:14Voss and Steger have a very neat theory to account for the presence of the baby boys beneath this building.
38:20But how good is their evidence for believing that the bathhouse was a brothel?
38:25They found no traces of graffiti, cubicles, or stone beds.
38:29Nor did they find evidence of a staircase, which would prove the building had a second story.
38:35Can they even be certain that there was a second floor at all to house the prostitutes?
38:40I don't think there's any doubt that they had at least two stories, maybe three in most of these buildings
38:46in the Roman period.
38:48They have quite substantial foundations and would have been easy to build up to that kind of height.
38:56So that's probably where they were living, above and around this particular place.
39:01The problem is that in Ashkelon, the archaeologists are dealing with a totally different state of preservation to Pompeii.
39:11The city was destroyed in the 12th century and its ruins looted, so there is much less evidence for them
39:18to work with.
39:20But Steger and Voss do know that their bathhouse was small, smaller than the suburban bathhouse in Pompeii.
39:27So could such a small building accommodate enough prostitutes to produce over a hundred babies?
39:34Well, it's quite a large number of babies, there's no doubt about that.
39:38But I think that one thing we have to take into consideration is just how long this place was in
39:45operation.
39:45And it could have been well over a century. So if you're talking about over a hundred years, I imagine,
39:51you know, a few dozen prostitutes coming and going could produce quite a number of illegitimate children.
40:02So this bathhouse brothel may have been functioning long enough to account for so many babies, but there is another
40:08problem for the prostitution theory.
40:12Brothel prostitutes were at the very bottom of the sex industry hierarchy.
40:19They were slaves, and as such, did not have the right to dispose of their own children.
40:33Any child born to a slave, whether a prostitute or no, belonged to the slave's owner. That was the law
40:39of Rome.
40:40This meant that any children born to notional prostitutes at Ashkelon or anywhere else would have been the property of
40:49the owner, their pimp, to dispose of as he or she pleased.
40:55The prostitute's pimp might kill their male babies, but he could also sell them, which for a pimp might be
41:02the more attractive option. The women would have no choice.
41:07Boy babies had other uses in the Roman economy as prospective slaves.
41:13And there too, I think the logical thing would have been for the pimp to sell them to somebody who
41:17could put them to some other use.
41:19So that even if he or she wasn't about to employ them or raise them as slaves, others might well
41:26have been ready to do that.
41:28And making money off human misery was the stock and trade of the pimp.
41:45Perhaps prostitution is not the answer to the mystery.
41:49Perhaps it's something simpler.
41:51And the clue is the sewer itself.
41:56The excavators have suggested that these babies were thrown or taken into a sewer, a deep, dark place where there
42:04was no way out.
42:05No one was ever going to come along and find these babies.
42:08And that to me suggests that perhaps they were already dead.
42:11It could be the place where stillborn babies or babies who had died at or around the time of birth
42:18were taken.
42:19We know that babies of that age weren't thought of as fully human.
42:23So they couldn't be taken to a cemetery. They had to be placed somewhere.
42:32So could it be that these infants died a natural death?
42:36And this was, for their mothers, a normal place to put them?
42:46It is a question for forensics to answer. And for Professor Smith, the very young age of the babies is
42:54still the key.
42:57It is, of course, possible that these were stillborn infants and that what we have here is a natural occurrence.
43:05But normally, if newborn infants, because they're stillborn, are disposed of in such a casual fashion,
43:16one finds the same practice extending to slightly older infants, even those dying a couple of months old.
43:24And our main basis for saying that this was a place where only the products of infanticide were disposed of
43:36was the fact that there is absolutely no evidence for any older infants, even those of a week or so
43:44old.
43:44And again, the fact that they were disposed of, thrown, if you like, into a sewer.
43:54Professor Smith is firm in her understanding of the forensic evidence.
43:58All the babies being just a few days old means infanticide.
44:06But whether their mothers were prostitutes, killing boys and keeping girls, has to remain a theory.
44:11It cannot be concretely proved.
44:14But as forensic evidence for the practice of infanticide on a massive scale, the Ashkelon case remains unique.
44:23It really is a grim picture that we have when we look into this sewer with any kind of knowing
44:30eyes.
44:30And it's one that is very discouraging about things that were going on in that culture.
44:38But nevertheless, the evidence is there and it seems to point all in one direction.
44:43So we've got to somehow deal with it and try to explain it.
44:48We will probably never know exactly what happened in Ashkelon.
44:52But the case forces us to recognize just how differently children were valued in a culture in which life was
44:59brutal and short.
45:01We can't judge people by our own modern Western values.
45:07We've got to avoid the value judgments on these societies and try and think more in terms of how different
45:14they were from us.
45:15Not assume that they behaved in a way that we can understand and also that we can denigrate.
45:26A hundred years after Ashkelon, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and the practice of infanticide was banned.
45:36The era of child murder, officially at least, was over.
45:43But for the hundred children left in the sewer, it came too late.
46:18But after the whole Semperon, it had a disaster.
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