The seventh–sixth century prophet Jeremiah famously fulminated against Judahites who sacrificed their children to Moloch in Jerusalem’s Ben Hinnom Valley (Jeremiah 32:35). The author of Leviticus also forbade the practice (Leviticus 18:21), indicating that he too believed that infant sacrifice to foreign gods was indeed occurring. According to 2 Chronicles 28:3, even King Ahaz engaged in the practice; in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, “He [Ahaz] burned his sons in fire, in the abhorrent fashion of the nations the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites.”
Nothing has been found in Jerusalem’s Hinnom Valley to suggest that child sacrifice occurred there. Instead, debate has focused on a number of tophets, or infant cemeteries, at Phoenician (or Punic) sites in the western Mediterranean, chiefly Carthage.
BAR has already described the Carthage tophet at some length and considered the question of whether the hundreds of charred infant remains buried in small urns were the result of high infant mortality rates or the result of religious sacrifice.a055The directors of the most recent excavations concluded that the latter was the case. Subsequently, in another Biblical Archaeology Society publication, Archaeology Odyssey, a debate was published between a Tunisian authority, who denied the charge of infant sacrifice, and the American scholars who took the opposite position.b
Much of the early debate—going back to the 19th and early 20th centuries—focused not only on the Biblical passages cited above, but also on several ancient authors. Greco-Roman historians like Diodorus and Plutarch describe the fiery practice while Church Fathers such as Tertullian condemn the Carthaginians for their child sacrifice.
Archaeologists also rely on inscriptions on many of the stelae associated with the infant burials that record that vows to Tanit and Ba’al Hammon have been met.1 Other evidence points in this direction: Some of the tophet urns from Carthage contained incinerated animal remains (sheep, goats and even birds), suggesting that this was a site dedicated to both human and animal sacrifices.
If this is so, then we would expect the age of the tophet infants to differ from the norm for infant deaths and be restricted to a specific age group. The usual method of determining the age of skeletonized remains is by examination of bone size and tooth development. But different standards are needed for determining the age of cremated bones and teeth because of heat-related changes in their structure. My colleagues and I have investigated the extent of such changes in the cremated tophet infants from Carthage and used the results to calculate their age. Our results showed that the age of the cremated infants was inconsistent with that of infants dying of natural causes. Based on these data, we have concluded that indeed the infants in the cemetery at Carthage were sacrificed as an offering to the gods.2 Our analysis has not gone unchallenged, however.3 And we have responded.4
The Carthage tophet, located adjacent to the ancient Phoenician harbor near modern Tunis, Tunisia, is the largest tophet yet discovered. Successive excavations at the site have uncovered hundreds of funerary urns dating from the eighth to second centuries B.C.E. We examined 342 of these tophet urns. All contained incinerated remains. The majority were infants, the rest young animals, mainly sheep and goat. In most cases the urns contained the remains of one individual, but in some cases partial remains of up to three infants were present, and occasionally human and animal remains were comingled. Similar findings have been reported from other tophets in the Mediterranean illustrating that humans and animals were treated in the same ritual manner at these sites.5
We found that many of the tophet bones had cracked and warped due to incineration, and had shrunk by different amounts, thus limiting their reliability for age estimation. In contrast, the developing tophet teeth were well preserved and most (87 percent) showed similar changes indicating that they had been burnt to the same extent (temperatures of at least 700 degrees Celsius [1292 degrees Fahrenheit]). As teeth grow in length, the enamel and dentine increase in thickness, such that teeth at the same stage of development resemble one another in these measures. To examine the extent to which the tophet teeth had been affected by incineration, we compared them with a control sample of non-incinerated teeth of the same type and length. Using a battery of methods, we found that the enamel and dentine in tophet teeth were consistently thicker for the same length compared 056to teeth in the control sample. We found that length measurements in the tophet teeth consistently underestimated age by between four to six weeks, so we corrected age estimations accordingly.
Our results showed that most infant deaths at the Carthage tophet (67 percent) were of infants aged one to two months. This age distribution differs markedly from that characteristic of infant mortality profiles in past societies, or even present-day communities without access to modern medical care, as reported by the World Health Organization. In these societies, up to 55 percent of the infants die aged less than three months, with the death toll remaining high and fairly constant for the remaining 45 percent over the following months. This is not the case for the Carthage tophet where infant mortality is concentrated in the first three months and is extremely low in later months. The tophet age distribution at Carthage therefore represents a selection of a specific age group that differs significantly from natural mortality patterns.
As noted above, our results have been challenged by Professor Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues. They argue, “Tophets were cemeteries for those who died shortly before or after birth, regardless of the cause.”6 The ages at death as determined by Schwartz et al. are shown in the graph. If you add their deaths at 1–2 months to their 56 percent of deaths at or before birth, the total is 68 percent of their sample, compared to 67 percent in our study. The critical difference is that Schwartz et al. concluded that the 68 percent included infants who died before or at birth, that is, infants who would be inappropriate for sacrifice. We attribute these differences to the fact that Schwartz et al. failed to account for the shrinkage of incinerated teeth and therefore concluded that the infants were younger than they in fact were. This in turn was based on their erroneous assumption that the infant teeth were sufficiently mineralized to withstand shrinkage from incineration or that the teeth were protected by the jaw bone from shrinkage during incineration. Thus, they made no allowance for shrinkage of teeth when estimating age. In fact, the teeth became smaller as a result of incineration and thus belonged to somewhat older infants than would be the case if they had not been incinerated. Except for this error, the ageing by us and by Schwartz et al. is remarkably similar.
For those who wish, the details of our alternative analyses and the way in which they affected our conclusions regarding the age of the Carthage infants can be followed in the academic journals cited above.
The only difference between the results shown here by us and by Schwartz et al. turns on the ageing of the youngest age group. The fact that we found the average age at death to be between one and two months, rather than newborn, makes it highly unlikely that the tophet infants died from natural causes.
In short, the most parsimonious explanation of the scientific evidence is that the incinerated infants in the Carthage tophet were sacrificed to the gods.
The seventh–sixth century prophet Jeremiah famously fulminated against Judahites who sacrificed their children to Moloch in Jerusalem’s Ben Hinnom Valley (Jeremiah 32:35). The author of Leviticus also forbade the practice (Leviticus 18:21), indicating that he too believed that infant sacrifice to foreign gods was indeed occurring. According to 2 Chronicles 28:3, even King Ahaz engaged in the practice; in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, “He [Ahaz] burned his sons in fire, in the abhorrent fashion of the nations the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites.” Nothing has been found in Jerusalem’s Hinnom Valley to suggest that child sacrifice occurred there. […]
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“An Odyssey Debate: Were Living Children Sacrificed to the Gods?” “No,” M’Hamed Hassine Fantar; “Yes,” Lawrence E. Stager and Joseph A. Greene, Archaeology Odyssey 03:06
Endnotes
1.
P. Xella et al., “Phoenician Bones of Contention,” Antiquity 338 (2013), p. 1199.
2.
P. Smith, G. Avishai, J.A. Greene and L.E. Stager, “Aging Cremated Infants: The Problem of Sacrifice at the Tophet of Carthage,” Antiquity 85 (2011), p. 859. They were excavated by the ASOR Punic project between 1975 and 1980.
3.
J.H. Schwartz et al., “Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants,” PloS ONE 5 (2010), online p. e9177; J.H. Schwartz et al., “Bones, Teeth, and Estimating Age of Perinates: Carthaginian Infant Sacrifice Revisited,” Antiquity 86 (2012), p. 738.
4.
P. Smith, G. Avishai, J.A. Greene and L.E. Stager, “Age Estimations Attest to the Practice of Infant Sacrifice at the Carthage Tophet,” Antiquity 338 (2013) p. 1191 .
5.
F. Fedele and G.V. Foster, “Tharros: Ovicaprini Sacrificali e Ritu ale del Tophet,” Revisti di Studi Fenici 16 (1988), pp. 30–45.
6.
Schwartz et al., “Bones, Teeth, and Estimating Age of Perinates,” pp. 738–745.
