This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries. The paper is published in the journal Antiquity.ĭr Josephine Quinn of Oxford University's Faculty of Classics, an author of the paper, said: 'It's becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. The research pulls together literary, epigraphical, archaeological and historical evidence and confirms the Greek and Roman account of events that held sway until the 1970s, when scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda. The paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the 'tophets' – ancient infant burial grounds – simply as child cemeteries are misguided.Īnd the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.
A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods.
