Originally posted by Redking
So tired of Xen, self-proclaimed problem child.
Time and again you spew off on subjects of which you seem to have only cursory knowledge, trying to come off as some expert. On a board full of know-it-alls (present company included) you are indeed the king of bullpucky and an award winning problem child.
The Carthaginians did not practice child-sacrifice. Limited, biased Greek sources created a myth which is easily popped with just the slightest review of current knowledge. I invite you to delve a bit deeper in this case, and perhaps take that experience with you into the further accumulation of your assumed expertise on all subjects regarding antiquity.
Stop acting like a College Boy, wouldya?
oh they didnt did they? well, far be it from em to stop acting like the smug problem child here on the forums I am, when now, like so often it seems, I;m right, and back my stance up in full with facts, i dont care if you like me, I dont care if you dont, but dont for a second think I stand by and let you insult me.
[Work by Professor Christopher S. Mackay of the University of Alberta[/i]
Child Sacrifice
The Phoenicians brought with them the standard Semitic deities. These gods had the nasty habit of desiring human sacrifice, in particular that of children. Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch (Greek writer of about AD 100) both directly mention this, and the Christian writer Tertullian alludes to the suppression of child sacrifice soon before AD 200. Because there is no mention of this in the ancient historians, it has been argued that this accusation was mere propaganda. But the Old Testament directly mentions prohibitions against child sacrifice (2 Kings 23.10, Jer. 7.31, 19.5-6), which must must indicate that it was practiced among the Canaanite population from which the Phoenicians (and Carthaginians) were descended. Furthermore, Livy could have mentioned the practice in his now lost account of the first Punic War. Hence, his "silence" signifies nothing.
It was, therefore, capricious even in the past to deny the practice, and it was horrifyingly confirmed by archaeology in 1921. In that year a "holy place" was found on the site of ancient Carthage. In it were discovered thousands of jars with the cremated remains of children's bones. Some urns contained animal bones, which perhaps indicates substitution of an animal (cf. Abraham's sacrifice of a ram in place of Isaac). Diodorus also mentions some sort of attempts to get out of sacrificing the newborn. After a serious military defeat in the late fourth century, 500 children from the ruling families who had gotten out of the obligation were sacrificed to appease the gods, who were clearly mad at being defrauded of their due.
The place for depositing the remains is called a "tophet" from a term in the Old Testament, and tophets have been discovered not only at Carthage but at numerous other Phoenician sites in the west. Oddly, none have been found in Phoenicia itself, but the references in the Old Testament leave the practice there beyond question (Jehovah could hardly have forbidden such a thing if it hadn't already been going on). Some scholars continue to refuse to believe in the practice and to dismiss the ancient literary evidence as mere propaganda, but with the discovery of the physical remains there can be no legitimate doubt.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~csmackay/CLASS_365/Carthage.html
[quoote]
Origional work from a magazine (Archeology Odyssey IIRC) I myself read, and is what first convinced me of the child sacraficeing culture of Carthage, I was lucky enough to find the article on one of my preffered websites about carthage for quotation
Did the ancient Phoenicians, in Carthage and elsewhere,* sacrifice living children to their gods? For the past two decades this has been the subject of heated scholarly debates. (See An Odyssey Debate: Were Living Children Sacrificed to the Gods?) Although some French and Tunisian scholars have argued that children were not sacrificed in large numbers at Carthage, the evidence is against them.
Certainly in ancient times the Phoenicians had a reputation for sacrificing children. The third-century B.C. Greek author Kleitarchos was quoted by a later source as writing: Out of reverence for Kronos [the Greek equivalent of Baal Hammon, the chief god of the Punic pantheon], 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.(1)
The Carthage Tophet first came to modern attention in 1921, when a local official caught an antiquities trafficker removing decorated stelae from the site. A few years later the Tophet was bought and excavated by the French explorer/adventurer Count Byron Khun de Prorok, who uncovered numerous burial urns containing charred human remains. This is a dreadful period of human degeneracy, de Prorok wrote, that we are now unearthing in the famous temple of Tanit [the consort of Baal Hammon].(2) De Prorok later recalled that he had found six thousand funerary urns in the sanctuary of Tanit, where the little children of Carthage made their great, but unwilling, gift of life for the sake of the citys security.(3)
**Referring to the Phoeniciansand their languagein the western Mediterranean, the term Punic derives from the Latin adjective punicus, a transliteration of the Greek Phoinikos (Phoenician), which derives from the Greek word for purple (as in purple dye).
Major excavations of the Tophet were conducted in the mid- to late 1970s by Lawrence Stager (then with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and now at Harvard) and a team that included the author. Stager concluded that child sacrifice took place on the site almost continuously for a period of nearly 600 years, from the mid-eighth to mid-second centuries B.C.(4) The Carthage Tophet is a huge precinct of at least 54,000 square feet. Between 400 and 200 B.C. alone, as many as 20,000 urns containing the remains of children offered to the gods may have been deposited in this sanctuary.
From the archaeological evidence and numerous literary references, it seems that infant children were sacrificed regularly in small numbers. They were sacrificed in larger numbers, perhaps up to 500 at a time, in times of dire emergency that required appeasing the godsthough this was rare. (One such emergency came in the fourth century B.C., when Carthage was invaded by Agathocles [361-289 B.C.], the tyrant of Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily.) The bloodthirsty Carthaginian god who required slaughtered infants may have been Baal Hammon, lord of the great mountain, whose consort, Tanit, was identified with the Canaanite/Phoenician Astarte, goddess of love and war.** The Carthaginians made divine offerings of incinerated children right up to the end of Punic civilization and into the Neo-Punic period (designating the survival of Punic culture after 146 B.C.). According to the Church father and Carthaginian Tertullian (c. 160-225 A.D.), for example, In Africa infants used to be sacrificed to Saturn, and quite openly ... Yes, and to this day that holy crime persists in secret.(5)
**Many of the stones marking the burial niches where the urns were laid are inscribed with the triangular symbol of Tanit. The disk (or double disk) with extended lines on top of the symbol of Tanit may be the symbol of Baal Hammon.
That holy crime, for us moderns, was murder. But we should not be surprised to learn of human sacrifice. It wasnt the idea of human sacrifice that shocked the ancients. It was the sheer quantity of Punic sacrifices. The Romans themselves did not always save sickly newborns; sometimes they drowned or strangled them, exposed them to the elements or deposited them at a crossroads. The sacrifice of infants or even adults (such as vestal virgins or Gauls) was occasionally mandated for religious and political purposes by the Greeks as well as the Romans. What is so shocking about the Tophet is its direct, visible evidence that tens of thousands of children, over hundreds of years, were sacrificed by burning.
At first, the Carthaginians seem to have considered the sacrifice of a child as sealing a special covenant between the ruler and the god, a covenant sealed with the execution of the rulers childperhaps, but not necessarily, the first born. There is also evidence that surrogate mothers were used to bear children that would be adopted as replacements by the parents of sacrificed children. As Carthage aged and grew, the practice of offering children to Baal Hammon and Tanit ceased being a privilege merely of royalty. By the fourth century B.C., Carthage was a democracy praised by Aristotle (Politics 2.2). This meant that almost anyonecarpenters, schoolteachers, average citizenscould now sacrifice their children and receive the blessings of the gods. Carthage is a rare, perhaps unique, example of a society that became a democracy while the practice of human sacrifice was becoming ever more prevalent.
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http://www.barca.fsnet.co.uk/carthage-forgotton.htm
I think these two resources are more then enough to PROOVE in full that Carthage did indeed sacrifice children, how you got the idea they didnt is beyond, and quite simply, I think its just a disagreement based on personal biased against me- perhaps I am a smug know it all somtimes, but then unfortunately for you, there is a good deal fo basis for it, as I do indeed know what I'm talking about- because if I couldnt back up my words, I wouldnt be talking in the first place
