Were living Children Sacrificed to the Gods? No

Were it not for a few classical accounts, scholars would probably not attribute the burials in the Carthage Tophet to child sacrifice. Some of the more sensational stories, such as those related by the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus, have been picked up in modern times and passed off as the entire truth. In the 19th century, for instance, Gustave Flaubert described Punic child sacrifices in his novel SalammboÆ; he had no evidence at all, except for the classical sources. What if, however, the classical sources are unreliable? Indeed, what if all the evidence regarding the burials—either from literary […]