In the middle of a residential area of modern Tunis is an unusual relic from the ancient past. The Tophet of Carthage covers a hectare of land on what was the outskirt of the city. It is a small fenced area of palms and grave stelae, carved with the emblems of Baal and Tanit, the gods of the Carthaginians. Excavations between the 1920s to the 1970s uncovered the cremated remains of infants interred within the graves, often accompanied by precious grave goods.

The area was initially dubbed The Sanctuary of Tanit. However, it was later renamed the Tophet, a biblical area of human sacrifice, because of ancient sources that associated the Carthaginians with child sacrifice. Some scholars, however, believe these sources offer distorted, biased views, or are simple misunderstandings of Carthaginian practices.

A recent reanalysis of dental evidence and bone fragments by physical anthropologist Professor Jeffrey Schwartz, of Pittsburgh University, backs the alternative view that the Tophet was nothing more sinister than a children’s graveyard. So has this new archaeological evidence really solve the mystery of the Tophet of Carthage?

Tophet Burial Phases

 Carthaginians used the hectare of land known as the Tophet for 600 years. Later burials were laid over those of their predecessors due to diminishing space. Excavations have established three burial phases, all named after the Goddess Tanit:

Tanit I: 730-600 BC. The graves from this first phase are relatively few and lie scattered over a wide area. The early bone analysis suggests these remains are those of very young children – babies a few days to a few months old. The burials were in small vaults and contain Egyptian style beads and amulets, such as the eye of Horus. The cremated bones of kids or lambs are included in the urns as well. A throne-like cippus marks the grave.

Tanit IIa: 600-400 BC. These burials lie above a thin layer of debris that was laid over the Tanit I graves. Amulets are less frequent, and the cippus thrones are of sandstone.

Tanit IIb: 399BC-299 BC. In this phase, the burials have grave markers of sandstone covered with white stucco, painted yellow, red or blue. Later burials have narrow grave stelae with a triangular pediment. Inscriptions and pictorial representations of Baal and Tanit appear in this era for the first time.

Tanit III: This period covers the last 150 years up until the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. The grave markers are now fine, slender limestone needles or stelae, with a triangular pediment, and still featuring the sign of Tanit. This phase has the lowest occurrences of animal remains in the urns.

The Evidence for Sacrifice.

Historians have used two main sets of ancient texts as evidence for Carthaginian child sacrifice: the Old Testament of the Bible and the reports from classical authors.

Many Old Testament books refer to child sacrifices to Baal, the companion god to Tanit in Carthage. Jeremiah 7.31 and 19.5, in particular, refer to places of high sacrifice were children were offered to the god. Chronicles 27 refers to a King Ahaz, who made molten images for Baal and burned his sons as offerings.

In the fourth century AD, Plato referred to the Carthaginian’s penchant for sacrificing their sons. Later, Kleitarchos, a third-century Greek writer gave a graphic description of the practice:

‘Out of reverence for Kronos (the Greek equivalent of Ba’al Hammon), the Phoenicians, and especially the Carthaginians, whenever they seek to obtain some great favor, vow one of their children, burning it as a sacrifice to the deity if they are especially eager to gain success.…There stands in their midst a bronze statue of Kronos, its hands extended over a bronze brazier, the flames of which engulf the child. When the flame falls upon the body, the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing until the body slips quietly into the brazier.’

 In the first century BC, Diodorus Siculus elaborated on this theme. He describes how the ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their children in times of crisis. He explicitly describes one such event in 310 BC when 300 upper-class children were killed to gain the favor of Baal. The parents were reputed to have placed the infants in the outstretched arms of the statue after a priest had killed the child. It was then allowed to fall into a pit of fire.

Many of the inscriptions found on the grave stelae have been taken to support this idea of sacrifice. Many include dedications to Baal containing the phrase ‘for having granted his prayer,.’ They also include the word ‘mlk’ which has been taken to mean ‘gift’ or ‘offering.’ All of this has been interpreted as proof that the children were offerings for the achievement of specific aims.

 

 

 

Ancient Biases and Alternative Views

 However, the literary evidence for sacrifice is ambiguous and inconclusive. Diodorus was writing to justify Roman aggression against Carthage, making his testimony questionable.

Physical anthropologist Professor Jeffery Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh has been involved in the study of the Tophet since the 1970s. He suggests that rather than describing sacrifice, many of the biblical sources are garbled accounts of a ‘kiss with smoke and flames’ where an infant was passed over a fire for ritual purposes but not actually harmed.

He also believes, along with other scholars that the term ‘mlk’ has been misused. According to Professor Schwartz’s paper ‘The mythology of Carthaginian child Sacrifice: A physical Anthropological Perspective,’ the interpretation of mlk as a sacrifice is based on the evidence of a single Roman stele referring to a kid or a lamb-not a human sacrifice.

Curiously, the cremated remains of lambs and kids were found amongst the children’s remains. Could it be that they are the offerings, not the children?

The answer to this may lie in another ancient source describing the sacrifices at the Tophet. Plutarch, writing after the fall of Carthage in the late first, early second century AD described how flutes and drums were played at sacrifices made by wealthy Carthaginians to mask the sound of wailing. This suggests mourning-strangely out of place at a sacrifice.

The image of the priest holding a child above in the picture is taken from another grave marker. It has been interpreted as a priest taking a child to sacrifice. But the clearly animated adult is holding a distinctly inanimate child, suggesting the child is already dead.

So could Plutarch, in fact, be describing a funeral?

 

Careful Burials at the Tophet

 The excavation of the Tophet has revealed no material evidence to substantiate the descriptions of sacrifice in the ancient sources, such as the bronze statue of Baal used to hold the sacrificial victims.

This does not rule out sacrifice, but the graves appear too careful, individual and meticulously tended to belong to sacrificial victims. A stela from Tanit III, relating to the last era of the site, shows a woman kneeling on the ground next to a grave mound with a libation vessel in her right hand. In the same layer, there were holes next to the grave markers leading into the graves. This indicates relatives might have made offerings to the dead children.

Punic graveyards, in general, lacked child burials, suggesting that children of a certain age were buried separately to the rest of the community. This was a custom common in the ancient world where children below a certain age were not viewed as full individuals. Based on the evidence of graves, the idea of a children’s graveyard is compelling.

The Gods of the Tophet.

 The gods of the Tophet, whose symbols are inscribed on every grave stelae, are also not what they first seem. Baal is the deity most frequently mentioned in the biblical texts as a semi-demonic ‘idol.’ He is also referred to as Kronos by the ancient authors after the Greek god Cronos, whose cult was associated with human sacrifice.

In fact, the Phoenician Baal was a sky god and god of fertility and regeneration. And the ancient sources are strangely silent on the subject of Tanit, a mother goddess figure associated with the goddesses Isis and Astarte.

Joanna Stuckley suggests that the children in the Tophet are dedicated to Tanit in particular in her capacity as a mother goddess, not as sacrifices but by parents who were commending their dead offspring to her care, in the hope of their regeneration.

 

Grave Goods and Offerings

 Professor Schwartz has been involved in both the recent analysis of the cremated remains and in excavations and analysis of the Tophet since the 1970s. In an interview with him, I suggested that the beads, amulets, and lamb and kid bones found amongst the cremated remains could be grave goods. “Exactly,” was his reply.

Professor Schwarz also believes that the presence of these grave goods proves that children from every level of society were buried at the Tophet, a fact that contradicts the ancient sources, which stipulate that only the upper classes were involved in sacrifice.

“My general impression is that one thing that’s common to everything is there’s an urn,” said Professor Schwartz, “in the first three centuries, the urns were individualistic. In the latter centuries, they were rather uniform. Then some urns would have an amulet in them, most often an eye of Horus. Then there’s a subset with more amulets and beads, then another with gold. Everyone gets an urn but depending on status what you put in. Not every urn had stelae.”

 

Analysis of the Remains

 In 2010, Professor Schwartz and his team analyzed bone fragments and teeth from 540 individuals buried at the Tophet. They concluded that the burials represented burials of the victims of natural infant mortality rather than sacrifice.

Teeth were used for two reasons. Firstly, they contain limited organic material and so are unlikely to shrink in extreme temperatures, making age deductions based on their measurements more accurate. Then there is the neonatal line, which occurs in the teeth of all newly born children who survive birth. This is a dark line on the tooth buds, created by a brief halt in tooth development due to the stress of childbirth. A child without a neonatal line would not have survived to be born.

In the Tophet sample, half the sample lacked a neonatal line, indicating they died before birth. Overall, Professor Schwartz and his team concluded most of the deaths occurred before birth or 2-5 months after it- a pattern consistent with current infant mortality rates.

What was more, in sexing the bones, Schwartz’s team discovered there was no male bias in the bones- ruling out the idea of first-born sons were being sacrificed. Of those remains with a sufficiently intact pelvis, 38% were female and 26 male.

These results were challenged by Patricia Smith, an anthropologist for Hebrew University, Jerusalem but quickly refuted. Smith stated that both bones and teeth would have shrunk significantly in the heat of cremation and the neonatal line would have been erased, making the remains appear to belong to much younger infants. But the Pittsburgh team had already factored in possible shrinkage. Even after increasing measurements by as much as 25%, the bones and teeth of the Tophet site were too small to belong to older children. And if the neonatal line couldn’t survive, neither would the teeth.

 

 

Place of Sacrifice or a Cemetery?

 Professor Schwartz believes that the overwhelming evidence at the Tophet points to a graveyard rather than a place of sacrifice. But even he does not rule out some instances of sacrifice there.

 ‘You can’t be definitive there wasn’t an instance of it,’ he told me,’ there are one or two older children…you just don’t know.’

 It seems that science can only provide so many answers. The rest is very much a matter of interpretation.

Sources

 

Leckie, R (2000) Carthage. Canongate Books

Lancel, S, (1995) Carthage: A History. Wiley Blackwell.

Ancient baby Graveyard not for child sacrifice, Scientists Claim. Live science 2012

Schwartz, J, Houghton, F, Macciarelli, R, Bondioli, L (2010) Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do not support systematic sacrifice of Infants. PL0S ONE 5(2): e9177doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009177

Schwartz, J. The mythology of Carthaginian child sacrifice: a physical anthropological perspective   (professor Schwartz’s own paper)

SMITH, P. 86:  G. AVISHAI, J.A. GREENE & L.E. STAGER, 2011. Aging cremated infants: the problem of

sacrifice at the Tophet of Carthage. Antiquity 85:859–75.

Schwartz, J, Houghton, F, Macciarelli, R, Bondioli, L (2012) Bones, teeth, and estimating age of perinates: Carthaginian infant sacrifice revisited,   ANTIQU86:738–745

Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History (Vol X, Book 20.14)

Stuckley, Joanna, Tanit of Carthage, http://www.matrifocus.com/LAM09/spotlight.htm viewed 6/4/2013

The Bible, Book of Jeremiah.