An Ancient North African Civilization Sacrificed Their Young Children to Gods as Part of a Religious Practice

In ancient Carthage, (now in Tunisia) the civilization used to follow brutal rituals of sacrificing children. This claim was previously denied in various Greek and Roman accounts but a 2014 study deduced that the previous finds were misguiding, stated University of Oxford. A collaborative paper from the academics of the university and several institutions around the world suggested that the Carthaginian parents sacrificed their young children to gods as part of a religious practice. The study tried to interpret the real story behind the 'tophets'–ancient infant burial grounds–which were simply labeled as child cemeteries in the past.

Experts believe that the child sacrifice ritual might explain why the civilization flourished in the first place. "This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn't want to believe it," Josephine Quinn, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, helming the study with international colleagues, wrote in the paper. "When you pull together all the evidence like archaeological, epigraphic, and literary ones, it is overwhelming. They did kill their children and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favors but fulfilling a promise that had already been made."

Quinn elaborated on how the ritual sacrifices were not common events and were probably practiced amongst the elites of the society. Back then, the process of cremation was expensive and so was the ritualistic burials. "It may even have been seen as a philanthropic act for the good of the whole community," Quinn theorized. Before the study was penned, the 'tophets' were discovered in the outskirts of Carthage, way back in the early 20th century, which is now located in modern-day Tunisia, Sicily, and Sardinia. Those 'tophets' had small urns stuffed with cremated bones and were buried under tombstones, to express gratitude towards the gods. 

Quinn and a group of Punic archaeologists and historians from Italy and the Netherlands shared their discovery in the scientific journal, Antiquity. "The inscriptions are unequivocal. Time and again we find the explanation that the gods 'heard my voice and blessed me'. It cannot be that so many children conveniently happened to die at just the right time to become an offering and in any case, a poorly or dead child would make a pretty feeble offering if you're already worried about the gods rejecting it," Quinn theorized.

The burial sites also had remains of animals that were also used as sacrificial offerings and were buried in the same way as the children who were cremated. "There were perhaps 25 such burials a year, for a city of perhaps 500,000 people," Quinn shared, mentioning how the number of burials discovered was far too few to represent all the stillbirth and infant deaths in Carthage. The experts looked into the fact that Carthage was far bigger than Athens and for many centuries, it was more influential than Rome.

"Perhaps the reason the people who established Carthage and its neighbors, left their original home of Phoenicia, modern-day Lebanon, was because others there disapproved of their unusual religious practice," Quinn added. "Child abandonment was common in the ancient world and human sacrifice is found in many historical societies but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon. Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth. They were so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren't welcome at home anymore."