The entire myth of child sacrifice is based on the writings of two authors: Diodorus of Sicily and Plutarque, who write solely about Carthage and not Phoenicia itself. Today's scholars agree on the fact that Plutarque's text, which dates from his youth, was a school exercise rather than a report based on reality. Diodorus' recounting is equally incoherent: evidently he collected unrelated pieces of information and patchworked them together. The paragraph that specifically accuses the Carthaginians of child sacrifice only seems to make sense when taken out of context -- otherwise it is part of a large knot of contradictions. Another author, Clitarque, described the victims "placed on the hands of the statue of the god, and rolling into a pool of fire", but his text is artificial and must be discarded.

This defamatory (although perhaps involuntary) propaganda was on the minds of the archaeologists that first discovered the tophets, so the finding troubled them. Tophets are enclosures protected by a wall, found near Phoenician cities. They are more respected than necropolis: while a necropolis might be cut in two by a new wall, a tophet remains untouched no matter what. The function of the tophets is to receive the bones of cremated children after they have been deposited into urns. The discovery of these immense heaps of urns containing the remains of children gave the first researchers quite a shock, but subsequent finds have shed light on the exact function of these children cemeteries.

It is an established fact that the Phoenician's preferred way of burying their dead was to cremate them first. This habit was shocking to Greek observers: in Greece, cremation was an honour reserved to the elite, and certainly not wasted on babies that were not full-fledged citizens yet. To their eyes this was an aberration, as bizarre as the freedom and status of Egyptian women. Furthermore, in Greece stillborn children and those who died at a young age were not isolated in burial, but buried with their family, whereas the Phoenicians reserved a separate space for them. The tophet is that very space: the burial ground of individuals who were not yet integrated to society. Most of the remains found in the urns are babies who died before the 9th month, in other words before they were even born. A child can't be sacrificed if it hasn't been born yet! The tophets' being simply cemeteries for young children is confirmed by the fact that no child was ever found buried among adults. Sometimes the bones of small animals are found with the children's, and this combined with the finding of stelae bearing prayers to Baal indicates that the burials were sometimes accompanied in Carthage by the sacrifice of a small animal to ask from the god to grant the couple another birth. All the stelae are dedicated to Baal, and this deity was never associated to sacrifices anywhere, not even in the Bible despite its stand against Baal, Moloch and other pagan deities. The Bible does describe the Phoenicians as "those who have been through the fire", but the wording clearly indicates that they have not died in the process. This expression does not refer then to sacrifice, but probably to a ritual akin to that of the ancient Celts who leaped over a bonfire in the belief that it would cleanse their body and soul. Without going on a tangent, I would mention the Greek legend of Achilles, who was plunged into the fire in order to become invincible, and the Egyptian myth of Isis looking for Osiris: when given hospitality by the king and queen of Byblos, she thanked them by secretly laying their child into a fire every night, for the same purpose. We know that the holocaust of firstborns was occasionally practiced in Palestine, but it was alien to the inhabitants of Phoenician cities. On the contrary, the Bible describes a sacrifice of substitution, where people symbolically gave up their firstborns by actually sacrificing an animal instead (Exodus XXXIV, 19-20).

Have humans ever been sacrificed on exceptional occasions, in times of dire need that required extreme measures? There is no definitive answer, but an affirmative one would no more infirm the above discussion than Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac would mean that the Hebrews practiced infanticide. It is attested that child sacrifice was neither regular nor systematic in Phoenician and Punic cultures, and the only way to rehabilitate the notion of child sacrifice would be to find bodies of children who were in good health at the time of their death. At this time, no such evidence has been found.

Article © Joumana Medlej