The truth about child sacrifice in ancient Carthage

Ancient accounts that described Carthaginian child sacrifice began with Greek writers and were later repeated by Roman historians.

Diodorus Siculus quoted earlier sources such as Cleitarchus and alleged that Carthaginian priests sacrificed the children of nobles to the gods and that the priests placed them into the heated arms of a bronze statue while a fire blazed underneath.

Plutarch wrote that parents showed no emotion during the process, and musicians drowned out the cries of the victims to silence the pain.

Authors such as Livy, Tertullian, and other Roman writers included similar accusations, and they included them as part of a larger effort to cast Carthage as cruel culture.

According to their descriptions, the Carthaginians believed that Baal Hammon demanded such offerings during times of hardship.

Greek writers identified this god with Cronus, and Roman authors equated him with Saturn.

It appears that the repeated portrayal of these rites as widespread and official probably supported Roman attempts to justify conquest.

Roman historians presented their opponents as morally depraved, which bolstered their claim that they had the right to destroy Carthage in 146 BCE and reinforced a narrative in which civilised Rome triumphed over savagery.

However, none of the writers had witnessed these rituals firsthand, and their claims rested on second-hand accounts or political assumptions.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French archaeologists led by Père Alfred Louis Delattre excavated a very large open-air burial site in Carthage that was known as the tophet.

It contained more than 20,000 urns that held cremated human bones. In those urns, researchers found the bones of very young humans and, in some cases, animal bones.

Many of the urns had inscriptions that dedicated the contents to Baal Hammon and Tanit, two of the most important deities in the Punic pantheon.

Notably, the inscriptions often included a vow fulfilled or a favour granted, which suggested that the burials were linked to ritual obligations rather than ordinary funerary practice.

Although a few infant burials have been found at other locations in Carthage, the tophet is still the main site, and the relative absence of other cemeteries for infants supports the argument that this space had a specific ritual purpose.

Moreover, the distribution of the burials showed a large number of very young children, especially those under two years of age.

Cremation conditions across multiple layers appeared to point to temperatures consistent with sacrificial fires, rather than lower-temperature cremations for natural deaths.

Radiocarbon dating has placed the use of the site between the late 9th and mid-2nd centuries BCE.

A such, the evidence suggested that the site generally operated under consistent ritual activity over many centuries.

Additionally, many urns contained both animal and child remains, often mixed, and this pattern implied that the Carthaginians treated these offerings as part of a single religious system.

The repeated use of the term mlk on the artefacts, a word with a disputed meaning but Biblical associations to child sacrifice, further seems to link the rituals at the tophet to the descriptions in Greek and Roman texts.

Although scholars debate the exact significance of the term, the archaeological context makes the sacrificial interpretation more likely than the alternative explanation of ordinary child burial.

Similar cemeteries have been found at other Punic sites, such as Motya in Sicily and Tharros in Sardinia, which tends to strengthen the argument for a shared religious custom across the Punic world.

Since the late twentieth century, debates over the meaning of the tophet have divided scholars.

Some, such as Sabatino Moscati, supported the traditional interpretation and argued that child sacrifice did take place in Carthaginian society.

In the 1990s, Lawrence Stager and Joseph Greene conducted detailed studies of the burial grounds and concluded that the evidence supported deliberate ritual killings.

They pointed to the age range of the victims and to the careful arrangement of the urns, and they highlighted the standardised language on the stelae as strong evidence of repeated formal sacrifice.

Stager also argued that the proportion of infant burials found at the tophet had far exceeded what he had calculated as expected natural mortality rates for ancient populations.

However, this point has been challenged by scholars who argue those rates may have been higher.

By contrast, other historians, including Shelby Brown and P. G. Mosca, argued that the tophet was used as a sacred burial site for children who had died naturally.

According to this interpretation, Carthaginian families cremated their dead infants and offered their ashes to the gods as part of a religious mourning practice.

They argued that the inscriptions reflected personal grief expressed in votive language, rather than a record of violent ritual.

However, later bioarchaeological research has revealed that many of the skeletons lacked signs of disease or developmental problems.

Importantly, the absence of pathology in many of the skeletons, combined with the repeated association of sacrifice terminology and specific deities, lends significant support to the argument that these deaths most likely resulted from ritual practice rather than illness.

Although some scholars have maintained alternative explanations, the combined weight of physical and textual evidence increasingly points toward the presence of child sacrifice in Carthaginian religious life.

Carthaginian religion developed out of older Phoenician religious traditions and placed great emphasis on sacrificial offerings so that the gods stayed on their side.

Baal Hammon and Tanit appear to have received regular dedications across the Punic world.

As mentioned above, at sites from Carthage to Motya and Sulcis, archaeologists have discovered inscriptions alongside complexes of altars and associated burial spaces that show similar ways in which people made offerings.

They include references to fulfilled vows and requests for divine assistance.

In moments of disaster or military defeat, ancient societies often turned to extreme forms of worship.

According to Diodorus, following a naval defeat in the fourth century BCE, Carthaginian officials offered 200 children from elite families to the gods in an effort to restore favour.

While the accuracy of that number is still unconfirmed, similar examples appear elsewhere in the ancient world.

According to the Mesha Stele and 2 Kings 3:27, the Moabite king Mesha sacrificed his son on the city wall during a siege so that he might gain victory by divine intervention.

Biblical texts such as Leviticus 18:21 and Jeremiah 7:31 condemned similar offerings “to Molech,” which suggests that such rituals were atleast somewhat common.

Also, Agamemnon, in Greek myth, offered his daughter Iphigenia to the gods to ensure a successful voyage to Troy.

Such stories show that the idea of human sacrifice appeared in many societies across the ancient world, and Carthage formed one example within that wider worldview.

In that system, divine favour could be purchased with extreme offerings, and children, as the most valuable and purest possessions, became the ultimate gifts.

Within Carthage, this belief may have translated into organised ritual offerings at the tophet, where fire transformed the sacrifice into something sacred and acceptable to the gods.