Further more I agree that the Archaeological evidence is important but can not be understood as providing facts. Dental analysis to approx. the age of osteological evidnce is in fact highly unreliable. Some scholars believe that many prenatal bodies lay in teh Tophet ground but I have seen caluculations of between 4-40 percent. Furthermore many note a lack of children being buried in Carthaginain grave yards and speculate this mass of infant remains as a specific burial ground for the young alone.

Rituals space and funerary rituals solely for children are a highly normal part of society. In Britain till recently sawn off collumbs were used rather than grave stones to mark a child’s grave.

I would agree that an abscene of evidence is not evidence but does breed speculation. In order to further address this question, I think reading on the stele’s excavated from the site snd art theory as well as taking a general look at critical theory in reference to ancient sources.

I thin kyour website is fabulous but I do not believe literature alone can be used to answer the question of teh Tophet’s purpose.

Thank you for your bibliography – much appreciated.

May I draw your attention to a problem with the anti-sacrifice argument, which you summarise above? It consists of two points, both of which are of a *type* which I believe should make us deeply nervous of any argument which deploys them.

1. “The ancient sources state clearly that infant sacrifice happened at Carthage. But they’re all scumbag Christian / pagan / racist / bigoted / biased so we can ignore them.”

My response to any argument of that kind is deep suspicion. This seems very like an ad hominem argument. It’s essentially an excuse to ignore the data. And such arguments, when made in bad faith, in the last 100 years, on any subject on earth, invariably are followed by the next argument:

2. “There are any number of ancient sources that don’t mention the practice. This proves it didn’t happen, because, of course, these sources are not scumbag Christian / pagan / racist / bigoted / biased, so we can rely on the fact that they don’t discuss the subject as evidence of absence.”

This seems very like an argument from silence.

Together, it amounts to this: “So, having created a silence in the sources, we proceed to argue from that silence to non-existence.”

Now let us ignore the subject — whether or not the Carthaginians murdered their children for ritual purposes. Let us simply look at the kind of argument being made here.

Can either of us think of any bad argument that is NOT put forward using both of these? I would treat the argument that there was no infant sacrifice as disproven on the spot, if this is the argument made against it. It’s atrocious stuff. This is the sort of thing that the revisionists come out with.

Much more interesting, I agree, is the archaeology. This should give us some additional hard facts. Of course we must always read the reports, bearing in mind the general archaeological principle that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

In short: I recommend arguing from evidence, not against it. On any subject. To do the latter invariably raises questions as to why so strange an activity might be undertaken.

To sum up breifly: The literature on the topic is written largely by enemies of Carthage following the destruction of the city in the third Punic War.

Moreover, a large number of late Christian source use ideas of Carthage and its barbarity to depict the horrors of paganism rather than with the intention of studying the civilisation. I think it is nessary to be highly critical of this evidence on teh premise that ancient historians lack modern standards of academia and have a tendancy to fabricate information to suit their tale. Read anything by Herodotus and you will get the picture.

It is also important to address those who do not speak of these practises. Great scholars who also love a good scandle such as Livy, Herodotus, Thucydides and polybuis make no mention of this practise. One must ask themselves why this would be the case when many studied the region.

The site’s Archaeological evidence is also highly interesting and the work of stager (1980), lancel (1991), schwartz (2010) are must read articles.

If you would like to know more or a general sweep of academic trends on this topic I would highly reccomend this online PHD article by Garnard http://www.queendido.org/ABC.pdf

I am not sure if it would interest you but there are several biblical references which may also be beneficial to your source collection.

Though some are not directly linked to carthage, but in reference to tanit and ba’al in general, they may be of interst to you.

See Jeremiah (7:31-32) IIKings (17:17) IIKings (23:10)

It’s posts like this that keep me coming back again and again to your site. This is a subject I have been curious about for years, and I know I one day would have spent hours looking into it.

You have saved me hours of life. If more people were as generous, we would all be happier and less frustrated.

Speaking of frustration, this browser extension might help you recover from crashes in future. I believe there is a version for Google Chrome, as well.

Thank you for the link to the article. It’s great that the material appears in an open-access journal.

The argument in the article is interesting, but unsatisfactory in an important respect. The reason why the “tophet” was considered probably the interment of sacrifices was that both animal and young human remains were found there. But the article more or less ignores the animal remains, and accepts that these were sacrifices. I would have to read the article in more detail to determine whether I agreed with the authors that their conclusions were justified from their data, of course.