Various
Greek and
Roman sources describe the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning as part of
their religion. These descriptions were compared to those found in the
Hebrew Bible. The ancient descriptions were seemingly confirmed by the discovering of the so-called "Tophet of Salambô" in Carthage in 1921, which contained the urns of cremated children. However, modern historians and archaeologists debate the reality and extent of this practice. Some scholars propose that all remains at the Tophet were sacrificed, whereas others propose that only some were. Whilst scholars generally see the Carthaginians as faithful adherents to the mainland Phoenician religion, others believe that they were dissidents and that their sacrificial customs were unique innovations.
Archaeological evidence covered by a vault built in the Roman period said the infant sacrifice remains found here, all less than a week old, were sometimes in jars and with smaller jars, perhaps food for what they thought was still to come. In Phoenician sites throughout the Western Mediterranean except in the
Iberian Peninsula and
Ibiza, archaeology has revealed fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments. These fields are conventionally referred to as "tophets" by archaeologists, after the location in the Bible. When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms
bt (house, temple or sanctuary) or
qdš (shrine), not "tophet". Archaeology reveals two "generations" of Punic tophets: those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE; and those established under Carthaginian influence (direct or indirect) in North Africa from the 4th century BCE onward. No Carthaginian literary texts survive that would explain or describe what rituals were performed at the tophet. Archaeological evidence shows that the remains could consist of human infants or lambs, often mixed with small portions of other animals, including cows, pigs, fish, birds, and deer. The proportion of lamb to human remains differs by site. At Carthage, 31% of the urns contained lambs; at
Tharros it was 47%.
Analysis of the bone fragments provides some information about the remains. In a sample of seventy infants from the tophet at Carthage, 37% were identified as male and 54% as female. The age of the children and whether they had died before they were interred is controversial (see below). The lambs are usually between one and three months old; this might indicate that offerings were made at a specific time following the
lambing (February/March and October/November). The bone fragments were subjected to uneven temperatures, indicating they were burnt on an open-air pyre over several hours. The remains were then collected and placed in an urn, sometimes mixing in bones from other infants or lambs - suggesting that multiple infants/lambs were burnt on the same pyre. Sometimes jewellery or amulets were added to the urn. The urn was placed in the ground, in holes cut into the bedrock or within boxes made from stone slabs. In some cases a stone monument was set up above the urn. This could take the form of a
stele,
cippus, or throne, often with figural decoration and an inscription. In a few occasions, a chapel was built as well. Steles are oriented toward the east. , Sardinia, with figural decoration The figural decoration on the stone monuments takes different forms in different regions. In Carthage, geometric patterns were preferred. In Sardinia, human figures are more common. Inscriptions are most common in the
Carthage tophet, where there are thousands of examples. There are some from other tophets as well. Matthew McCarty cites
CIS I.2.511 as a typical inscription: To Lady
Tanit, face of Baal, and to Lord
Baal Hammon: [that] which Arisham son of Bodashtart, son of Bodeshmun vowed (
ndr); because he (the god) heard his (Arisham's) voice, he blessed him. Thus, these texts present the monument as a
votive offering to the gods in thanks for a favour received from them. Sometimes the final clause instead reads "may he (the god) hear his voice" (i.e. in expectation of a future favour). The individual making the offering is almost always a single individual, nearly always male. The dead child is never mentioned. Tanit appears only in examples from Carthage. Other inscriptions refer to the ritual as
mlk or
molk. The meaning of this term is uncertain, but it appears to be the same word as the Biblical term "Molech" discussed above. The inscriptions distinguish between ''mlk b'l
/ mlk ʿdm
(molk
of a citizen/person) and mlk ʿmr
(molk'' of a lamb). Over a hundred tophets have been identified. The earliest examples were established at Carthage,
Malta,
Motya in western Sicily, and
Tharros in southern Sardinia, when the Phoenicians first settled in these areas in the ninth century BCE. The largest known tophet, the Carthage tophet, seems to have been established at this time and continued in use for at least a few decades after the city's destruction in 146 BCE. The stone markers first appeared at Salammbô, Carthage around 650 BCE and spread to Motya and Tharros around 600 BCE. Between the fifth and third centuries BCE, tophets became more common in southern Sardinia and the Carthaginian hinterland as Phoenician settlement expanded. In Sicily and Sardinia, tophets slowly went out of use in the third and second centuries BCE, following the establishment of Roman control in the
First Punic War. In the same period in North Africa, many new tophets were established, mainly inland in
Tunisia. Many of these tophets remained in use after the fall of Carthage in 146 BCE. In the late first and second centuries CE, migration resulting from military deployment patterns led to establishing new tophets in Tunisia and eastern
Algeria. In the Roman period, inscriptions named the god to which the monuments were dedicated as
Saturn. In addition to infants, some of these tophets contain offerings only of goats, sheep, birds, or plants; many of the worshipers have Libyan rather than Punic names. Their use appears to have declined in the second and third centuries CE.
Greco-Roman sources Greco-Roman sources frequently criticize the Carthaginians for engaging in child sacrifice. The earliest references to the practice are bare references in
Sophocles and the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue,
Minos, probably of the fourth century BCE. The late fourth century BCE philosopher
Theophrastus claimed that the Syracusan tyrant
Gelon had demanded that the Carthaginians abandon the practice after he defeated them in the
Battle of Himera (480 BC). The first detailed account comes from
Cleitarchus, an early third-century BCE historian of
Alexander the Great, who is quoted by a
scholiast as saying: Phoenicians, and above all Carthaginians, worship Kronos; if they wish to achieve something big, they devote a child of theirs, and in the case of success, sacrifice it to the god. There is a bronze statue of Kronos among them, which stands upright with open arms and palms of its hands facing upwards above a bronze brazier on which the child is burnt. When the flames reach the body, the victim's limbs stiffen and the tense mouth almost seems like it is laughing until, with a final spasm, the child falls in the brazier.Cleitarchus
FGrH no. 137, F 9 The first century BCE Greek historian
Diodorus Siculus writes that, when the Carthaginians were besieged by
Agathocles of
Syracuse in 310 BCE, the Carthaginians responded by sacrificing large numbers of children according to an old custom they had abandoned: They also alleged that Kronos had turned against them inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been substituted by stealth. ... In their zeal to make amends for the omission, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not less than three hundred. There was in the city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire. Elsewhere in the
Bibliotheca Another Christian writer,
Minucius Felix, claims that Punic women aborted their children as a form of sacrifice.
Controversy The degree and existence of Carthaginian child sacrifice is controversial. Some archaeologists and historians argue that the literary and archaeological evidence indicates that all remains in the tophets were sacrificed.
Sabatino Moscati and other scholars have argued that the tophets were cemeteries for premature or short-lived infants who died naturally and then were ritually offered. The account given by the Greco-Roman authors is questionable. They were not eye-witnesses, contradict each other on how the children were killed, and describe children older than infants being killed as opposed to the infants found in the tophets. The archaeological evidence is not consistent with the mechanical statue of Cronus mentioned by Cleitarchus and Diodorus. There are no references to child sacrifice in Greco-Roman accounts of the
Punic Wars, which are better documented than the earlier periods in which mass child sacrifice is claimed. Many, but not all, Greco-Roman authors were hostile to the Carthaginians because they had been enemies in the
Sicilian and Punic Wars and this may have influenced their presentation of the practice. Matthew McCarty argues that, even if the Greco-Roman testimonies are inaccurate "even the most fantastical slanders rely upon a germ of fact". The archaeological evidence is ambiguous. An osteological study of the remains at Carthage by Jeffrey Schwartz et al. suggested 38% of a sample of 540 individuals had died before or during childbirth, based on the size of the bones, the development of teeth, and the absence of
neonatal lines on teeth. Another osteological study of the same material challenged these findings, arguing that it had not taken account of the shrinkage of the bones caused by the burning process. The form of the deposits in tophets is different from Carthaginian graves for non-infants, which usually took the form of burials, not cremations. Phoenician grave goods are also different from the objects found with the human remains in tophets. However, cross-culturally, funerary practices for infants often differ from those for non-infants. Many archaeologists argue that the ancient authors and the evidence of the Tophet indicates that all remains in the Tophet must have been sacrificed. Others argue that only some infants were sacrificed. Paolo Xella argues that "the principle of Occam's Razor" indicates that the weight of classical and biblical sources indicate that the sacrifices occurred. He further argues that the number of children in the tophet is far smaller than the rate of natural infant mortality. In Xella's estimation, prenatal remains at the tophet are probably those of children who were promised to be sacrificed but died before birth, but who were nevertheless offered as a sacrifice in fulfillment of a vow. He concludes that The legendary death of Carthage's first queen
Elissa (Dido) by immolation, as well as the deaths of
Hamilcar and the wife of
Hasdrubal the Boetharch in the same manner, has been connected to the tophet ritual by some scholars. It is possible that the practice was more frequent in the earlier years of the city. ==See also==