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These stories typify the Roman attitude towards Carthage: a level of grudging respect and acknowledgement of their bravery, prosperity, and even their city's seniority to Rome, along with derision of their cruelty, deviousness, and decadence, as exemplified by their practice of human sacrifice.
The degree and existence of Carthaginian child sacrifice is controversial, and has been ever since the Tophet of Salammbô was discovered in 1920. [95] Some historians have proposed that the Tophet may have been a cemetery for premature or short-lived infants who died naturally and then were ritually offered. [ 83 ]
''Offering to Molech'' in Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us, by Charles Foster, 1897.The drawing is a typical depiction of child sacrifice. Child sacrifice is the ritualistic killing of children in order to please or appease a deity, supernatural beings, or sacred social order, tribal, group or national loyalties in order to achieve a desired result.
At Carthage, the chief gods were Baal Hammon (purportedly "Lord of the Brazier") [16] and his consort Tanit, but other deities are attested, such as Eshmun, Melqart, [17] Ashtart, Reshef, Sakon, and Shamash. [18] The Carthaginians also adopted the Greek goddesses Demeter and Kore in 396 BC, [19] as well as the Egyptian deities Bes, Bastet, Isis ...
Baal Hammon was known as the Chief of the pantheon of Carthage and the deity that made vegetation grow; as with most deities of Carthage, he was seemingly propitiated with child sacrifice, likely in times of strife or crisis, or only by elites, perhaps for the good of the whole community. This practice was recorded by Greeks and Romans, but ...
The name Carthage (/ ˈ k ɑːr θ ɪ dʒ / KAR-thij) is the Early Modern anglicisation of Middle French Carthage /kartaʒə/, [12] from Latin Carthāgō and Karthāgō (cf. Greek Karkhēdōn (Καρχηδών) and Etruscan *Carθaza) from the Punic qrt-ḥdšt (𐤒𐤓𐤕 𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 ) "new city", [b] implying it was a "new Tyre". [14]
Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure, spirits of dead ancestors or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in ...
Officially, human sacrifice was obnoxious "to the laws of gods and men". The practice was a mark of the barbarians, attributed to Rome's traditional enemies such as the Carthaginians and Gauls. Rome banned it on several occasions under extreme penalty. A law passed in 81 BC characterised human sacrifice as murder committed for magical purposes.