Child sacrifices in Carthage
A Punic cultural expression, or political propaganda of the time?
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C., maintained that the Carthaginian aristocracy had the custom of sacrificing their children in honor of Baal Hamon, whom the Greeks identified as Chronos, when the city entered times of crisis (20. 14. 4). This idea, constantly reflected in Greco-Roman literature, would endure until modern times. More than a few contemporary scholars have affirmed this idea as true, but since the 1990s this notion has begun to be refuted. Today, the debate is still open, but the weight of archaeological and literary evidence finally seems to yield conclusions that make it important to revisit this issue. So, did the Carthaginians sacrify children?
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The image with which I decided to start this article is useful for several reasons. First of all, the representation of child sacrifices in front of the imposing statue sets us in a powerful and shocking theme. Secondly, there are so many things wrong with this representation of Carthage, starting with the fact that this statue represents the god Moloch, confused for decades by western literature as a Punic god, when he never had any relation with the city of Carthage. Thirdly, the fact that this image, from its origin in the design, is so poorly executed, by focusing on a character alien to the culture they seek to portray, represents very well all the ignorance that exists about the Carthaginian culture and in particular with regard to certain myths and legends that adorn its history. The Moloch we see here has been designed based on the statue of Moloch by Flaubert, who immortalized it in a famous work Salamboó of 1862, where he recreated for the first time this fantastic scene where a supposed god Moloch received the sacrifices of the children of the wealthiest families of Carthage.
Let us start by making something clear. No Moloch was ever worshipped in Carthage. Flaubert undoubtedly read the sources, and the passage of Diodorus where he points out the Carthaginian custom of sacrificing children to the god Baal Hamon. Perhaps because of a translation issue or more probably because of ignorance, the French writer ended up associating Baal Hamon with the god Moloch, a god that does not exist but that acquired a strong hold in the popular culture of the time. The truth is that the fragment of Diodorus, the main evidence from which this true rumor about the child sacrifices carried out by the Carthaginians was born, refers to Baal Hamon, the main Carthaginian god next to Tanit.
In his epic Punica, the Roman poet Silius Italicus creates a fictitious episode in which the Carthaginian senators order Hannibal, while in Italy, to sacrifice his son according to Punic customs to ensure victory over the Roman legions, something the general would flatly refuse (4. 770-773). The episode is fictitious starting from the fact that Hannibal had no children, and then proposes this Carthaginian custom, ratified by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus.
Now, what does the archaeological evidence say? The city of Carthage had a sacred area called Tophet, which survives in fairly good condition to this day, in which the remains of infant bones from the Phoenician/Punic era of the city (812-146 BC) have been found. The first findings of these bones seemed to close a centuries-long discussion among scholars, many aware that the Carthaginians, who had fought fiercely on several occasions against Greeks and Romans, might be the victims of propaganda aimed at portraying them as particularly cruel. But others have not taken this very much into account. Even the great Sabatino Moscati went so far as to point out with certainty in 1973 that the Carthaginians sacrificed children (The World of the Phoenicians).
Today, the issue has been reopened to debate, with new evidence that challenges the hypothesis that children were sacrificed in the Tophet of Carthage. As Professor MacDonald (Hannibal. A Hellenistic Life, 2015) argues, it has not been possible to prove whether these children were sacrificed at the site, allowing speculation that they died of natural causes or accidents, and then their bodies offered to Baal Hamon at the Tophet. This is an opinion with which Serge Lancel, one of the most important archaeologists in the field of study of Punic Carthage, agrees (Carthage, 1994).
In addition, there is another argument that allows us to rule out child sacrifice as a Carthaginian custom. When Diodorus reports that the Carthaginians sacrificed children to Baal Hamon, he refers to an episode that would have taken place in the decade of 310 B.C., when the Carthaginians were invaded by the army of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, which besieged Carthage. Even if this report of Diodorus were to be taken as true, these sacrifices would have taken place on one particular occasion or period, for no new sacrifices are reported in the Roman invasions of the Punic Wars. The Third Punic War in particular, where the Romans besieged the city for three years before taking it and sacking it, would have provided a logical scenario, from the Greco-Roman perspective, for sacrificing children in honor of Baal Hamon to gain his support in the face of the disaster the siege entailed. But the Carthaginians did not sacrifice children on any of those occasions, which should at least make us doubt what their Greek and Roman counterparts, who had every reason to discredit them, were saying.
From my point of view, it is most likely that the Carthaginians never sacrificed children in honor of Baal Hamon, and this is an issue that should be closed in the academic community for years to come. There is no point in continuing to search for evidence to support the Greco-Roman propaganda about the Carthaginians. Thousands of years have passed and still nothing new has been found. But that is history, or at least part of it. The first verses are told by the victors, the losers disappear, and then it is up to the historians to rescue their verses and present their truths. After all, the Carthaginians may not have been as cruel as their enemies claimed.
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The evidence that the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice is in fact quite strong, and has only been made stronger by recent archaeological discoveries. See Amadassi, M. G. and J. A. Zamora, “The Epigraphy of the Tophet,” Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 20-30 (2012-13): 159-92. Xella et al. “Phoenician Bones of Contention,” Antiquity 87 (2013): 1-9. Brien Garnand. 2022. “Phoenician synthesis: patterns of human sacrifice and problems with ritual killing.” In The Value of a Human Life: Ritual Killing and Human Sacrifice in Antiquity, ed. Karel C. Innemée. Leiden, pp. 69-93.
In particular, the inscriptions on the tophet urns are dedicatory and not funerary, the tophets contatin a mix of child and animal remains, and the age of the children is across the board older than we would expect from the average for natural infant mortality at the time. Besides, the Bible also clearly remarks on Canaanite practices of child sacrifice. This doesn't means the Carthaginians were particularly evil: infanticide, for ritual purposes or otherwise, was a common practice in the ancient world, and the Greeks and Romans engaged it in mass scale.
I think there's been a relatively recent tendency to be skeptical of ancient texts that portray the "enemy" as particularly inhuman, immoral, or otherwise unacceptable by modern standards. While it’s fair to question the credibility of ancient sources, I think there’s also a deeper motivation behind this skepticism—one that’s more tied to modern concerns than to a sober evaluation of ancient history itself.
The demonization of foreign peoples is an eternally relevant issue, but it’s especially important to modern liberals who seek to dismantle unfair biases of this kind. I think that desire—to correct for unfair demonization in the modern day—has influenced how we approach ancient cases that resemble these patterns.
In the case of Carthage, there’s actually a lot of circumstantial evidence that would be difficult to explain if child sacrifice wasn’t practiced. This includes the bones of infants and children found at sites in numbers and conditions that don’t match what we’d expect from typical child mortality rates in pre-industrial societies. While this evidence isn’t conclusive by itself, when combined with multiple independent sources mentioning this practice among both Canaanites and Canaanite-descended peoples, I think the overall weight of evidence lands closer to “probably” than “probably not.”