Carthaginian Baby Sacrifice

The Greeks, Romans and Hebrews all insisted that the Phoenicians sometimes sacrificed their own babies to their gods. Here is an account by Diodorus Siculus of how the people of Carthage -- a Phoenician city in North Africa -- reacted to a military defeat in 300 BC:

The people were filled with superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected 200 of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly.... There was in their city of bronze image of Cronus (as the Greeks called Ba'al Hammon), extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed on the arms rolled down and fell into a gaping pit filled with fire.

Skeptics have always been doubtful about this, and the debate over whether these stories are true, or just the propaganda of Carthage's enemies, has been going on for 300 years. To answer this question archaeologists have for a century been digging in the Tophet or temple precinct of Carthage. Within the Tophet are buried thousands of jars containing the remains of cremated infants. But were these sacrifices, or just children who were buried close to the gods?

Now some forensic anthropologists have released the largest study yet done of human remains from the Tophet, convering the contents of 368 urns. They find that most of the identifiable remains were from babies of 2 to 5 months in age, and that 20 percent of the sample consists of pre- or peri-natal infants who were either stillborn or died at birth, and therefore would not have lived long enough to be sacrificed. They conclude:

A study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed, according to a Feb. 17 report in PLoS ONE.

The findings—based on the first published analysis of the skeletal remains found in Carthaginian burial urns—refute claims from as early as the 3rd century BCE of systematic infant sacrifice at Carthage that remain a subject of debate among biblical scholars and archaeologists, said lead researcher Jeffrey H. Schwartz. Schwartz and his colleagues present the more benign interpretation that very young Punic children were cremated and interred in burial urns regardless of how they died.

"Our study emphasizes that historical scientists must consider all evidence when deciphering ancient societal behavior," Schwartz said. "The idea of regular infant sacrifice in Carthage is not based on a study of the cremated remains, but on instances of human sacrifice reported by a few ancient chroniclers, inferred from ambiguous Carthaginian inscriptions, and referenced in the Old Testament. Our results show that some children were sacrificed, but they contradict the conclusion that Carthaginians were a brutal bunch who regularly sacrificed their own children."

I can't see how these findings prove anything one way or the other about Carthaginian sacrifical practices. The one thing they convince me of is that SOME of the babies whose remains were buried at the Tophet had not been sacrificed. That is interesting, because those "ambiguous inscriptions" describe the buried infants as having been dedicated to the gods. The Greek and Roman writers make it plain that infant sacrifice was not an everyday event in Carthage, but a rare response to extraordinary calamities, or, in some accounts, an annual event in which one child was chosen for sacrifice from the whole population of several hundred thousand. Such practice is perfectly compatible with the finding that only a few of the still-identifiable remains seem to represent sacrificed children.

I wonder about the practice of burying stillborn infants in the same burying ground as the victims of sacrifice. Surely the rite of sacrifice was the most solemn and awesome religious act in Carthage; surely the slaughtered babes were given the most impressive possible funeral rites; surely their parents were assured that the child had gone to be with the gods, and that his or her death was a great service to the community. Could it be that this solemn machinery, or at least some of it, was adapted for the consolation of parents whose children died natural deaths? Did they dedicate those dead infants to the gods with the same language used for the chosen victims of sacrifice, hoping to invoke the same divine favor, and to receive the same consolation?