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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.
''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.
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 ...
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 ]
Although a minority of scholars has argued that the tophet ritual described in the Bible was a harmless activity that did not involve sacrificing any children, the majority of scholars agree that the Bible depicts human sacrifice as occurring at the tophet. [4] Modern scholarship has described sacrifice at the Tophet as a mulk or mlk sacrifice.
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 ...
Tophet excavations in 1921. In 1921, the so-called "priest stele" was unearthed as part of the clandestine archaeological digs that were very common at the time. [10]A limestone stele, over a metre high, [11] depicting an adult wearing a typical kohanim (Punic priest) hat, a Punic tunic and holding a young child in his arms, was offered by an outfitter to enlightened antiquities enthusiasts ...
In Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô, a historical novel about Carthage published in 1862, Moloch is a Carthaginian god who embodies the male principle and the destructive power of the sun. [64] Additionally, Moloch is portrayed as the husband of the Carthaginian goddess Tanit. [65] Sacrifices to Moloch are described at length in chapter 13. [62]