We know Neolithic Europeans, as well as Mayan and Pacific Islanders practiced Cannibalism. Were those practices gone by the time writing and "civilization" was developed in Ancient peoples?
Hi,
Greeks and Romans were very against it, in the Iliad there are parts where characters threaten to eat people that they hate and this is painted as being very extreme (and even then noone actually does it). Similarly when Odysseus is in the wilder parts of the world in the Odyssey he meets several beings that eat humans (such as the Cyclops) and they too are portrayed in a bad light.
I don't know though of any real accounts of people doing it though so it must have been very taboo.
Hope this helped!
For Greeks and Romans, cannibalism was probably the ultimate taboo (right beside and occasionally combined with incest). It was believed to get you and everyone in your family and basically everyone who ever spoke to you super cursed and afflicted with "miasma," also sometimes turned into a werewolf.
The (fictional) house of Atreus, for example, gets all kind of cursed for it. Eg Grandpa Tantalus feeds his son to the gods, gets tortured in Hell for eternity (he's the "tantalized" food and water just out of reach guy). His grandkids Atreus and Thyestes carry on the family tradition when Atreus feeds Thyestes his own children, which leads to incest, and inter-familial murder that lasts for generation (check out Seneca's Thyestes, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseum).
Cannibalism was a great way to slur people you didn't like (hence the Athenians continually trotting out the stories of cannibalism in the royal house of Sparta). It also shows up in Roman anti-Carthaginian propaganda, even anti-Christian writings. Kind of understandable in the latter case though if you imagine a Roman who knew only that Christians 1) celebrate the heck out of the birth of their god as a human baby and 2) eat the flesh of said god turned baby human as a sacrament.