Child sacrifice question[
edit]Carthage under the Phoenicians was accused by its adversaries of
child sacrifice.
Plutarch (20:14,4–6) alleges the practice,
[149] as do
Tertullian (Apolog.9:2–3),
[150] Orosius,
Philo and
Diodorus Siculus.
[151] However,
Herodotos and
Polybius do not.
Skeptics contend that if Carthage's critics were aware of such a practice, however limited, they would have been horrified by it and exaggerated its extent due to their polemical treatment of the Carthaginians.
[152] The Hebrew Bible also mentions child sacrifice practiced by the Canaanites, ancestors of the Carthaginians. The Greek and Roman critics, according to Charles Picard, objected not to the killing of children but to the religious nature of it. As in both ancient Greece and Rome, inconvenient children were commonly killed by exposure to the elements
Modern
archaeology in formerly Punic areas has discovered a number of large cemeteries for children and infants, representing a civic and religious institution for worship and sacrifice called the
Tophet by archaeologists. These cemeteries may have been used as graves for
stillborn infants or children who died very early.
[154] Modern archeological excavations have been interpreted by some archeologists
[155] as confirming Plutarch's reports of Carthaginian child sacrifice.
[156] An estimated 20,000 urns were deposited between 400 BC and 200 BC,
[157] in the tophet discovered in the Salammbô neighbourhood of present-day Carthage with the practice continuing until the early years of the Christian period. The urns contained the charred bones of newborns and in some cases the bones of fetuses and two-year-olds. There is a clear correlation between the frequency of cremation and the well-being of the city. In bad times (war, poor harvests) cremations became more frequent, but it is not known why. One explanation for this correlation is the claim that the Carthaginians prayed for divine intervention (via child sacrifice); however, bad times would naturally lead to increased child mortality, and consequently, more child burials (via cremation).
Accounts of child sacrifice in Carthage report that beginning at the founding of Carthage in about 814 BC, mothers and fathers buried their children who had been sacrificed to Ba`al Hammon and Tanit in the tophet.
[158] The practice was apparently distasteful even to Carthaginians, and they began to buy children for the purpose of sacrifice or even to raise servant children instead of offering up their own. However, Carthage's priests demanded the youth in times of crisis or calamity like war, drought or famine. Special ceremonies during extreme crisis saw up to 200 children of the most affluent and powerful families slain and tossed into the burning pyre.
[159]
Skeptics maintain that the bodies of children found in Carthaginian and Phoenician cemeteries were merely the cremated remains of children who died naturally. Sergio Ribichini has argued that the tophet was "a child necropolis designed to receive the remains of infants who had died prematurely of sickness or other natural causes, and who for this reason were "offered" to specific deities and buried in a place different from the one reserved for the ordinary dead".[160] The few Carthaginian texts which have survived make absolutely no mention of child sacrifice, though most of them pertain to matters entirely unrelated to religion, such as the practice of agricultura.