Study Concludes Child Sacrifice Took Place in Carthage

[frigidmagi]

Archaeology

Archaeologists have been debating the truth of the claims made by ancient Greek and Roman propagandists that the Carthaginians offered their children as sacrifices to the gods since the early twentieth century, when cemeteries holding the cremated bones of small children packed into urns were discovered along with the remains of sacrificed animals. Now, an international team of scholars argues that the ancient Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice their infant children. “…When you pull together all the evidence—archaeological, epigraphic and literary—it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favors but fulfilling a promise that had already been made,” said Josephine Quinn of Oxford University. Based upon the number of burials that have been found, she estimates that 25 such sacrifices a year were made for a city of perhaps 500,000 people.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Huh. Well then... at the risk of failing in my academic detachment, I am afraid I have to stand by Cato the Elder.

Carthago delenda est.

[Josh]

I thought that had been established a good few years ago. Or maybe it was for another Canaanite city.

Yeah, Moloch/Baal worshipers had some seriously fucked-up practices going on. Maltheism is a nasty thing to be a part of.

[LadyTevar]

"I'll teach you to spin straw into gold, if you give me your first-born son...."

25 per year is still a small number for a population that large. There were possibly up to 2500 children born a year (based on the births in Kanawha Co WV, also 500k). There may have been more, as modern families have less children over all.

[Josh]

"I'll teach you to spin straw into gold, if you give me your first-born son...."

25 per year is still a small number for a population that large. There were possibly up to 2500 children born a year (based on the births in Kanawha Co WV, also 500k). There may have been more, as modern families have less children over all.

Well if they got seriously industrious with their baby-murdering they never would've gotten so far as building decent cities and managing to piss off their neighbors.

[frigidmagi]

Well from what we can tell... Child sarifice seems to have been mostly the upper class doing it. So the peasants would mostly not take part. This might be because children are necessary labor on a farm I think.

[LadyTevar]

Pity children that age are so hard to sex as bone fragments. It would be interesting to see which were preferred: boys or girls.

[frigidmagi]

If we take the writings of the time, it seems there was no gender preference. At least as far as I know.

[Lys]

What I really want to know is whether the sacrificed babies were healthy or not. Infanticide was commonplace and not really a huge deal in the classical world, it was just another way to perform an abortion. Usually the babies would be left out to die of exposure, but they were often also drowned or thrown off cliffsides and the like. It's largely thanks to Christianity that the practice became uncommon. I'm wondering if what the Carthaginians did was simply a ritualized version of commonplace behaviour, or if they were actually sacrificing healthy babies.

[General Havoc]

The romans practiced infanticide of the exposure variety, but they regarded Carthage's practices as alien and barbaric, which would indicate that something was going on beyond the normal ancient world practice. I read somewhere that they may have sacrificed 6-8 year olds en-masse when they felt it necessary.