The Carthaginians Read online

  Greeks and Romans nearly always avoided using Phoenician and Carthaginian deities’ own names, preferring to identify them with deities of their own. Melqart was thus treated as Heracles (Hercules in Latin), Tanit as Hera or, in Latin, Juno – in Roman North Africa she would be named Juno Caelestis – while Eshmun was normally identified with Aesculapius, though occasionally, it seems, with Dionysus or even with Heracles’ protégé Iolaus. Other equivalents were again flexible: Reshef is usually thought to have been equated with Apollo, but this is debated; Baal Sapon may have been identified with Poseidon (Neptune) but so too it seems the obscure Baal ’Rš; Shadrap was sometimes seen as Dionysus, occasionally as Apollo. Baal Hammon himself certainly seems meant when Hanno’s Periplus, Diodorus and some others write of ‘Cronus’, and in Roman times he was Latinised as Saturn, the Romans’ name for that god. But references to Zeus or Jupiter, for instance in Hannibal’s treaty, Nepos and Livy, should mean him too – or possibly, but not as convincingly, Baal Shamim despite his less prominent role at Carthage and lack of association with Tanit.55

  It is often thought that particular families, at least among the aristocracy, paid special reverence to one or another divinity as their protector or patron. This did happen elsewhere – the Fabian family at Rome, for instance, performed strict cult-duties to an unknown god at a site there – so it may equally have featured at Carthage. On the other hand, the examples thought to show it are not compelling. A votive inscription seems to speak of ‘Baal of the Magonids’ (b‘l mgnm) in a dedication, along with Baal Shamim, Tanit pene Baal, and Baal Hammon. In turn, Hannibal’s family is widely supposed to have revered Melqart as their special god. Yet rather than an undisputed reference to the Magonid family, b‘l mgnm may mean ‘Baal of gifts’ (the gift-giver) or ‘Baal the shield’ (the protector) – other senses of mgn which are also plausible. In Hannibal’s case, his only known connection with Melqart was in offering sacrifice and vows in 218 in the god’s temple at Gades, the oldest Phoenician shrine in the western Mediterranean. One or more coins issued by the Barcids in Spain are thought to portray Melqart, but even if that were certain (actually it is very debatable) it would not explain other Barcid coins or, more important, convey anything about the generals’ own devotions.

  Hannibal and his family really had more to do with Baal Hammon and Tanit. His father made him swear a famous childhood oath, never to be friendly with the Romans, at the altar of ‘Jupiter’. When his brother-in-law Hasdrubal founded the city of New Carthage in Spain around 228, its four most conspicuous temples were dedicated to ‘Asclepius’ (Eshmun), ‘Hephaestus’ (probably Kusor), ‘Aletes’ (perhaps a Spanish god) and ‘Cronus’, but the temple of Melqart – there must have been one – was much less prominent. Livy reports Hannibal sacrificing to ‘Jupiter’ before his first battle in Italy, and ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ head his treaty-oath. Years later he chose the temple of Hera, at Cape Lacinium (Capo Colonna) in Greek southern Italy, to house a bronze inscription with a Punic and Greek account of his great campaigns. No doubt he venerated Melqart too, but scarcely in first place. As the treaty-oath implies, a Carthaginian leader held all his city’s deities in religious regard, even if he might feel a special reverence for certain ones.

  Disputes will continue about who are mentioned under the Greek names in the treaty’s list. Zeus and Hera look like Baal Hammon and Tanit pene Baal: if the names mean Melqart and Astarte instead, it is hard to see where else the two dominant deities of 3rd-Century Carthage occur, especially as there is no mention of Cronus. As mentioned earlier, Apollo is commonly viewed as meaning Reshef and Heracles as Melqart, while ‘the daemon of the Carthaginians’ (it has been suggested) was Astarte; her position next to Melqart in the list would certainly fit. Eshmun might be tentatively identified with Iolaus, but who are the gods represented as Ares, Triton and Poseidon, not to mention all the unnamed divinities? The list continues to be open to a range of theories, perhaps insolubly.

  What form Carthaginian theology took (if theology is the right term) is not known, save that Melqart, there as well as in Phoenicia, underwent a ritual of death followed by rebirth, either daily or yearly. The priest who performed the rite bore the impressive title of ‘awakener of the god [sometimes ‘of the dead god’] with the scent of ‘štrny’, or perhaps ‘the husband of ‘štrny’. The obscure ‘štrny is known only in this context, though she must be divine too and is sometimes thought to be an aspect of Astarte. We have already met one of the Awakeners: ‘Hanno, sufete and chief of priests (rb khnm, or rab kohanim), son of Abdmilqart’, whose stele lists his priestly role as well. The priesthood was plainly important enough to be taken by leading men in public life. The Awakening rite spread and endured beyond Carthage, for Yazim (Y’zm), a great-grandson of Masinissa king of Numidia, held the priesthood in his own country during the last years of the 2nd or early in the 1st Century.

  Belief in a mortal person’s life after death is suggested by the food and drink utensils often placed in tombs to accompany the dead, and again, though not very specifically, by the tomb-paintings at Kerkouane’s Jebel Mlezza. One depicts a bird like a rooster – perhaps the deceased person’s soul – in the air next to a mausoleum of the Thugga type, while in another it approaches the walled city which may represent the city of the next world. How a person qualified for a restful afterlife, what rituals were needed to ensure safe passage, or even whether it involved the gods themselves in any way, it would be interesting to know.56

  THE ‘TOPHET’ AND CHILD SACRIFICE

  The best-known cult practice at Carthage were the urn-burials dedicated to Tanit and Baal in the so-called ‘tophet’, where the earliest burials in the nine-level site date to the 8th Century and the latest to Carthage’s final years. It was noted earlier that ‘tophet’ is merely a term of convenience: what such cemeteries were called in Punic is not known, whereas tophet (with other transliterations like topet, topheth, tofet) was, according to the Old Testament, the name of a site in the narrow valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, in which male children were sacrificed to the Phoenician Baal until the late 7th Century. Crowded with cremation urns which are often, though not always, accompanied by dedicatory stelae, the Punic site has stirred debate ever since urns taken for scientific investigation revealed the ashes and bones of very young children: chiefly infants, stillbirths and some foetuses, in some cases accompanied by bones of animals (mostly young sheep and goats). Similar human and animal remains, though on nothing like the same scale, had previously been found at Nora, Tharros and Motya. Again, a well-known stele from the ‘tophet’ of Carthage depicts a priest in a flat-topped cap, with his right hand raised in a gesture of respect or supplication, and a baby borne in the crook of his left arm – supposedly on the point of being put into Baal’s red-hot embrace. All this fuels the linked questions of child sacrifice and human sacrifice at Carthage and her dependencies.

  Greek and Roman writers often claim that the Carthaginians practised a rite of sacrificing chosen Carthaginian children to the gods – more specifically, to their chief god ‘Cronus’, Baal Hammon. Cleitarchus, an early commentator on Plato, and then Diodorus both give a pathetic description of infants being placed on the arms of a bronze statue of ‘Cronus’ over a blazing fire, so that they would fall still living into the flames. Plutarch writes that rich parents without children bought children of poor families to sacrifice them; the grieving mother must look on without shedding a tear or the payment was forfeited, while the children’s screams (he adds) were drowned out by ritual flutes and cymbals.

  The most famous episode of sacrificed children is reported by Diodorus for the year 310. Facing defeat from the invading forces of Agathocles, the Carthaginians realised that they had brought disaster on themselves through their cavalier attitude towards the gods, especially Cronus who – instead of receiving the sacrifice of the noblest children – had long been fobbed off with substitutes purchased and then nurtured for the rite. So now two hundred noble children were sacrificed to him by
the state, and three hundred others voluntarily by families anxious to clear themselves of suspicion.

  Other source items, varying in relevance, have been adduced in support, including the children ‘passing through fire’ in the Jerusalem ‘tophet’ and several Biblical reports of kings sacrificing their firstborn sons to placate their gods. In Justin, Herodotus and Diodorus respectively, there are accounts of Carthage’s 6th-Century leader Mazeus putting to death his son Carthalo for disrespect, of Hamilcar during the battle of Himera in 480 burning ‘entire bodies’ (of humans, or animals?) and then leaping into the sacrificial fire himself on losing the battle, and of Himilco, the general campaigning in Sicily in 406, seeking to appease Cronus by sacrificing a boy to the god as an epidemic raged in his army.

  Diodorus later reports a Carthaginian army in 307 sacrificing chosen victim-prisoners by fire after a great victory over the invader Agathocles – only to suffer suitable punishment when their own camp caught alight, killing many. When plague struck the Carthaginians, Justin asserts, they would appease the gods by immolating – that is, sacrificing by fire – both grown men and immature boys. Alexander the Great’s biographer Curtius Rufus states that the Carthaginians persisted in sacrificing a freeborn boy down to the destruction of the city, implying that this happened at moments of crisis (in contrast to their mother city Tyre when besieged by Alexander). Then, imaginatively if quite fictitiously, the epic poet Silius Italicus transports envoys from Carthage to the victorious Hannibal in Italy with an order that he hand over his son for that year’s sacrifice; Hannibal refuses, promising instead to shed Roman blood to please the gods. More noteworthy is a remark by the Christian writer Tertullian, himself a Roman Carthaginian, that in his own day around ad 200 the rite of infanticide was still performed in secret, even though banned by the Roman authorities.

  What most of these writers have in common is the claim that Carthaginians carried out child sacrifice. In detail, though, there are disagreements and contradictions among themselves and with the archaeological evidence. Mazeus’ son is an adult – in fact is the priest of Melqart at Carthage; Hamilcar at Himera is a suicide and there is no claim about him acting out a rite; both the sacrifice in Sicily in 406 and the mass killings in 310 were to appease an angry god in a crisis, whereas Curtius and Silius make child sacrifice a regular yearly rite and Diodorus implies that regular sacrificings had been the norm. Plutarch describes the children bought from poor mothers as having their throats cut, not as being cast into fire; he is also the only one to include childless couples among the sacrificers, contradicting the other sources who insist that the sacrificed victims had to be the parents’ own. Still more strikingly, it is older children and even grown men who are given to the god or gods by Biblical sacrificers, by the Carthaginians in 409 and 310, and in Curtius’, Silius’ and Justin’s reports – not infants. In 307, supposedly, it was foreign prisoners after a victory, in other words adult men: a unique event, and a suspect one since (as Diodorus takes care to stress) it promptly brought condign catastrophe down on the perpetrators, whose own camp burnt down with heavy loss of life.

  None of this incoherent variety makes the written reports look especially reliable. The evidence from the ‘tophet’ presents difficulties in turn. The bones of animals, especially lambs, accompany human bones in some of the urns studied, but most urns contain only human or animal remains respectively. Animal bones are found in larger percentages from earlier periods, like 30 per cent in the 7th and 6th Centuries, than in deposits of the 4th to 2nd Centuries (10 per cent). Analyses of the human bones from urns at Carthage and elsewhere – Motya and Tharros, for instance – show that the great majority are of infants, including some stillborn, or foetuses; the very few exceptions included children between two and four years old, and (at Carthage) a single older child aged between six and twelve. In some urns, the remains of a stillborn child and of an older child were placed together; and on current evidence this other child was normally only a few months older. There is also forensic evidence suggesting that many or most of the infants had died before being cremated. Nor (another noteworthy point) are children’s remains at all common in ordinary necropoleis. It should be added that there is no sign, so far at least, of a mass cremation of many hundred victims like the one that Diodorus reports for the year 310.57

  Some stelae from various ‘tophets’, including ones later than the year 146, state that a named person dedicated a mlk, a mlk ’dm, a mlk ’mr, or a mlk b‘l to Baal Hammon (or Baal Hammon and Tanit), often with the pious formula ‘because he heard his voice’. The meaning of the phrases with mlk, itself pronounced molk or mulk and meaning ‘sacrifice’, is disputed. Some interpretations make mlk ’dm the sacrifice ‘of a male (victim)’ and mlk ’mr that ‘of a lamb’, while mlk b‘l is taken to mean a sacrifice ‘to Baal’. In other views, mlk b‘l is taken neutrally to mean ‘sacrifice of a victim’ or, rather surprisingly, ‘sacrifice of a citizen’; some reject the meaning ‘lamb’ for ’mr (indeed by itself ’mr can mean ‘word’); and a mlk ’dm could mean, not ‘sacrifice of a man’ – an odd term if a baby was meant – but one ‘of reddening [or rouging]’ – a rite, that is, for which the priest put on red-ochre colouring for ritual purposes.

  With scholarly investigations still being made, a definite answer to the question of child sacrifice is not possible yet. Even so, some comments can be made. First, the normal urn-deposit in the ‘tophet’, especially at Carthage, was usually one of newly-deceased or still-born infants, or foetuses. Second, very few features of the ‘tophet’ burials match the descriptions in Greek and Roman writers, who claim to be describing the normal rites for human sacrifice at Carthage (above all, the writers depict the victims as older children and sometimes grown men). Third, the presence sometimes in one urn of two babies, unequal in age but close, is inexplicable if the Carthaginians were supposed to be sacrificing one child at a time, and nonsensical if the sacrificed one was supposed to be just the firstborn. It would, though, make reasonable sense if both had died of natural causes in the same period, especially as it is not necessary to suppose that both were always from the same family. Fourth, the inconsistencies among the written sources, and between them and the archaeological evidence, make it virtually impossible to use either to reinforce the other. The sources, incidentally, never mention the ‘tophet’ under any name or say anything about what happened to the sacrificed remains.

  A Latin inscription of the 2nd or 3rd Century bc, from the town of Nicivibus in Numidia (today Ain N’gaous in Algeria), records parents sacrificing a lamb in gratitude to Saturn – the Latin name for Baal Hammon – for the life of their daughter Concessa. They call the lamb a ‘substitute’ (pro vikario) and the rite a molchomor, which seems to be their transliterated version of mlk ’mr, and use the telling phrases ‘breath for breath, blood for blood, life for life’. While this is often viewed as sacrificing a lamb in order to avoid sacrificing their Concessa, it looks just as likely that the lamb was given to Baal because the god had not taken Concessa’s life – in other words, that she had recovered from a serious illness or accident. The animal bones in separate ‘tophet’ urns may have a similar explanation while, conceivably, those in the same urn as an infant’s remains may be a sacrificial thanksgiving to Tanit and Baal for not taking a second child as well.

  The stele of the priest and baby, and Tertullian’s statement about baby-sacrifices still being done secretly in his day, need to be considered. The stele does not in itself depict a sacrifice: interpreting it as doing so is based on assuming that it matches the descriptions in Diodorus and other sources. Strictly speaking, the male figure holding the baby is simply making a gesture of prayer, blessing or greeting: equally likely, then, he may be giving thanks for the baby or offering a blessing on its behalf. Tertullian’s statement should carry particular weight, if we can be sure that he is reporting fact; at the same time, it needs to be noted that he is writing as an assertive defender of Christianity against allegations of secret Christ
ian lusts and crimes (including infanticide), while making no claim of having seen the sacrifice rite himself or even of relying on an eyewitness.

  Regular and widespread sacrifice of one’s children would be remarkable, though not literally unthinkable, in societies where many children died at birth or before reaching the age of one. Although there are no figures for Carthaginian society, it is generally estimated that in the Roman world of the first three centuries ad (the period of ancient history with the fullest evidence) one in every four babies – or even one in every three – died as infants from natural causes. Small children were again more vulnerable than most adults in epidemics and times of scarcity. If the Carthaginians, and other Phoenician settlers in North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia, were sacrificing still other children of theirs, they were regularly jeopardising their own communal survival.58

  The contradictions in the written sources and the near-disconnection between them and the archaeological evidence (itself open to other explanations) make it hard to believe that this did happen. If Tertullian can be trusted, together with Diodorus’ reports of the boy sacrificed in Sicily in 409 and of the child-holocaust of 310, it may be deduced that at certain moments of stress, public or private, the killing of a child was done as an appeasement of the god; and further, that a state sacrifice was rare and, if it did occur, involved an older child or children. Just possibly the child six to twelve years old, whose remains have been found in the ‘tophet’, was a deliberately sacrificed victim (in some assessments, he was a negro boy and so perhaps a slave). On the evidence too, it looks as though a victim was not always kin to the sacrificers, or an infant. The ‘tophet’ itself, almost entirely devoted to infants, foetuses and animals, will have had minimal connection to such acts.