Carthage Must Be Destroyed
Page 9
Melqart, despite his pre-eminence in the Tyrian pantheon, and in other major western Phoenician colonies such as Gades and Lixus, never held the same dominant position in Carthage, although he remained a senior member of the gods, with his own temple in the city, and priests who practised the sacred rite of egersis.43 Instead, the two most significant deities in Carthage were Baal Hammon and his consort, Tanit. The latter, although often referred to as the ‘Face of Baal’ on Carthaginian inscriptions, does not appear to have played a junior role to her husband. The distinctive sign of Tanit–an outstretched stylized figure–is found on many of the steles in Carthage, and she was often represented as the patroness and protector of the city, a significant promotion for a goddess who had previously been a minor deity in Phoenicia.44 In contrast, Baal Hammon, who was often represented by a crescent moon, was a major god in the Levant. The term ‘Baal’ was a title or prefix meaning ‘Lord’ or ‘Master’, and was given to a number of different gods. The meaning of ‘Hammon’ is less clear. It may come from the Phoenician linguistic root hmm, meaning ‘hot’ or ‘burning being’, indicating that he was ‘Lord of the Furnaces’.45
The separate development of Carthage is demonstrated not only in the promotion of a new celestial order distinct from that of Tyre, but also in the ways in which that order was honoured. From the third millennium BC onward Near Eastern texts allude to the practice of molk (mlk), which simply meant ‘gift’ or ‘offering’. The word was often used for the sacrifice of firstborn children to appease the gods when communities were facing a particularly calamitous situation. The Old Testament provides a number of examples of molk. In the Book of Exodus the Israelites are given the command that ‘the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me’. The sacrifice of sons by two Judaean kings is also referred to, as is a Jewish backlash against the (supposedly) foreign practice.46
Some rather dubious later Greek sources claimed that the Phoenicians, in times of grave peril, had also resorted to the sacrifice of the sons of princes by beheading them in honour of their god El, in pious emulation of the deity himself, who had offered up his only son, Ieud, to save his land from disaster.47 In terms of archaeological evidence, however, only one confirmed tophet–the name given by modern scholars to the sacred enclosures where these sacrifices are supposed to have taken place–has so far been discovered in the Levant, and only one stele that alludes to a molk sacrifice.48 In the Book of Genesis, Abraham, after being tested by God, was allowed to sacrifice a ram as substitute for his son Isaac, and scholars have thus argued that in most instances young animals were sacrificed in place of human children. Indeed, it appears that the practice of molk sacrifice had completely died out in Phoenicia by the seventh century BC.
Nevertheless, a number of ancient Greek references to the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice have survived.49 The fullest and most dramatic description comes from the pen of the Sicilian historian Diodorus: ‘There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus [the Greek equivalent of Baal Hammon], extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereupon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.’50 The third-century-BC philosopher and biographer Cleitarchus also evoked the ghastly image of the limbs of the children contracting and their open mouths looking as if they were laughing as they were consumed by the fire.51 According to the first-century-AD Greek writer Plutarch’s On Superstition, parents avoided sacrificing their own infants by replacing them with purchased street children, whose mothers would lose the fee they had been paid if they cried or mourned for their lost offspring. Loud music was also played at the sacrificial area to drown out the victims’ screams.52
These accusations might have been put down to nothing more than Greek slurs if it had not been for the determined sleuthing of two minor French colonial officials, François Icard and Paul Gielly, in the 1920s. Icard and Gielly had become increasingly suspicious of a Tunisian stone-dealer who kept on appearing with very fine Punic steles. One example had particularly grabbed their imaginations. It was engraved with the image of a man wearing the cloak and headdress of a priest, his right hand raised in supplication and his left cradling a swaddled infant. The inscription bore the letters MLK. Had the stone-dealer stumbled across the sacred precinct where the Carthaginians had continued the macabre traditions of their Phoenician ancestors? One night, acting on a tip-off, the two Frenchmen surprised their quarry digging up steles in a field not far from the site of the great rectangular harbour. After coercing the owner of the land into selling them the plot, the two men set to work. What they found further fuelled their suspicions: a series of votive offerings, each consisting of a stele listing dedications to Baal Hammon and Tanit, and usually accompanied by a terracotta urn containing calcified bones and sometimes jewels and amulets. When the contents of the urns were analysed, it was ascertained that virtually every one contained the burnt remains of young children. The tophet had been found. Later French excavations confirmed this as one of the oldest areas of Phoenician Carthage.53
Further analysis showed that the tophet at Carthage had been in use since at least the mid eighth century BC. It was also clear that the western Phoenicians had continued with molk sacrifice long after their Levantine cousins. There had been three distinct phases of activity at the site. The first dated from around 730 to 600 BC and was marked by increasingly elaborate votive monuments, which eventually included crude obelisks and L-shaped throne monuments called cippi. Analysis of the contents of the urns and others found later showed that they contained the burnt remains of both young humans and animals.54
The tophet at Carthage has been so badly disturbed by the generations of archaeologists who have worked there that it is almost impossible to re-create the physical environment in which the rites took place. Other tophets elsewhere in the western Mediterranean are much better preserved. For example, the tophet at Sulcis off the coast of Sardinia consisted of a large rectangular enclosure delineated by massive blocks of the local trachyte on a rocky outcrop. With its thick walls and water cistern, it appears that this tophet also doubled up as a defensive refuge for the inhabitants of Sulcis in times of trouble.
Analysis of the human bones and burnt remains at Carthage has shown that the vast majority come from either stillborn or newborn infants, which is strongly suggestive of death by natural causes. These findings have been backed up at the tophet of Tharros on the island of Sardinia, where only 2 per cent of the children were more than a few months old.55 One suggested explanation is that the molk sacrifice involved not human sacrifice per se but rather the substitution of the dead for living victims, and that when none of the former was available a bird or animal was sacrificed instead.
Those who are sceptical of claims that the Carthaginians and other western Phoenicians practised child sacrifice also point to the supposed lack of children’s graves found in cemeteries during this period (of more than 2,000 graves so far discovered, only about 100 have contained the bones of infants)–odd when one considers that infant mortality rates in this period have been calculated at as high as 30 to 40 per cent. These objections lead to the theory that the tophet was in fact a place of burial for those who had not reached the age of a fully fledged member of the community. The customary placing of tophets at the fringes of the city suggests that the victims were considered to be on the fringes of society. The molk ceremony would therefore have acted as an introduction of the dead child to the god or goddess, rather than as a sacrifice.
Although such conclusions correlate with the material from the early phases of activity at the Carthaginian tophet, they work far less well with later evidence. When the contents of the urns from the fourth and third centuries BC were analysed, they were shown to contain a much higher ratio of human young. Furthermore, whereas the human remains from the seventh and sixth centuries BC tended to be of premature or newborn babies, the single interments from the later period were of older children (aged between one and three y
ears). Some urns from this phase even contained the bones of two or three children–usually one elder child of two to four years, and one or two newborn or premature infants. The age difference between them (up to two years) suggests that they may have been siblings. One possible explanation is that neither stillborn children nor animal substitutes were now considered enough to appease Baal or Tanit, and that an elder child had to be sacrificed as a substitute when a particular infant promised to the deity was stillborn. In inscriptions incised on to the steles, Carthaginian fathers would routinely use the reflexive possessive pronoun BNT or BT to underline the fact that their sacrificial offering was not some mere substitute, but a child of their own flesh. One of many such examples from the Carthaginian tophet makes the nature of the sacrifice explicit: ‘It was to the Lady Tanit Face of Baal and to Baal Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!’56
The argument that the tophet was some kind of cemetery for children is undermined by the fact that the ratio of children’s burials found in cemeteries in Punic Carthage correlates well with comparative evidence from elsewhere in the ancient world. In fact, the lack of recorded remains may well be the result of archaeologists simply not recording small and often badly preserved children’s bones. Contemporary Greek writers thought that the Carthaginians were performing child sacrifice, and the archaeological evidence means that their claims cannot merely be brushed aside as anti-Punic slander.
The conclusion to be drawn is that during periods of great crisis the Carthaginians and other western Phoenicians did sacrifice their own children for the benefit of their families and community. The archaeological evidence also clearly shows that the tophet was no dark secret but a symbol of western Phoenician prestige. The possession of a tophet was a mark of great distinction, limited to the largest and wealthiest settlements, and the children who were offered up for sacrifice were mostly the offspring of the elite.57 The rites that took place in the tophet were, however, considered central to the continued well-being of the whole community, and were officially sanctioned by the public authorities.58
The continuing significance of the tophet in Carthage and in other western Phoenician settlements shows the continuing importance of Levantine heritage to their citizens, but at the same time the growing political and cultural cleavage between the new and old communities. The fact that the tophet thrived as a religious institution in the West, centuries after it had become defunct in the Levant, was more than a mere reflection of the innate conservatism of immigrant communities. Indeed, it was a symbol of the vibrancy and coherency of a western Phoenician world that was beginning to emerge from the shadow of its beleaguered Levantine cousins.
THE RISE OF A MERCANTILE SUPEROWER
In 573 BC, after a thirteen-year siege, Tyre was forced to sign a humiliating peace with the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Traditionally, scholars believed that it was the demise of Tyre as an independent mercantile power that sent the Phoenician colonies of the far West into the economic crisis that enveloped them around the same period.59 In fact both events were symptoms of the same malaise: the collapse of the value of silver. Such had been the oversupply of silver to the Near East that by the beginning of the sixth century BC, the trans-Mediterranean traffic between Spain and the Levant had dramatically declined.
Tyre thus no longer received its former protection from its reputation as the dominant player in the precious-metals market, and many of the smaller Phoenician trading stations along the southern coast of Spain now faced doom. The only reason for the existence of many of these settlements had been the small-scale trade facilitated by the cargo ships which passed by on the Gades route, and once these ships were gone these communities were quickly abandoned. In contrast, the Phoenician colonies of the central Mediterranean seem to have emerged from this economic crisis relatively unscathed, probably because their primary focus was the north–south Tyrrhenian axis and its links with the Aegean.60
For Carthage, the disappearance of Tyrian shipping in the region appears to have presented a major opportunity to expand further its own trading networks, particularly in regard to the supply of goods and raw materials from the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and the Levant.61 The collapse of the Levantine–Spanish trade routes, which had played such an important part in the early development of Carthage, would now be the catalyst for what one German scholar has termed ‘Der Aufstieg zur Grossmacht’–‘the rise of a superpower’.62
The nature of this new superpower has been much debated. Many historians, influenced by the great empires of both the ancient and the modern worlds, have been content to view Carthage as an imperialist power which quickly sought to dominate the lands of the western Mediterranean through military and economic pressure.63 Hostile ancient Greek historiography and more modern prejudices have combined to create an image of the Carthaginians as aggressive and pernicious oriental interlopers whose one clear aim was to overrun an ancient world already imbued with Western civilization. This is particularly true in the case of Spain, where the Carthaginians have often been blamed for the demise of the old Tartessian kingdoms. Keen to promote the idea that Tartessus had been a great Western civilization –indeed an occidental Troy–some scholars have argued that ancient Andalusia was subjected to a brutal invasion by the Carthaginians in the late sixth century BC.64 These claims appear to be validated by much later Roman sources, who report that the Carthaginians had treacherously seized Gades after its hard-pressed citizens had begged them to provide help against hostile Spanish forces.65
These were not the only accusations of imperialism levelled at Carthage’s actions during this period. According to the third-century-AD Roman historian Justin (himself drawing on the lost Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus), Malchus, a Carthaginian general or ‘king’, after overrunning much of the island of Sicily was heavily defeated in Sardinia in the mid sixth century BC. Unwilling to accept such a humiliation, the Carthaginian Council of Elders punished the general and his remaining troops by sending them into exile. However, Malchus and his soldiers, indignant at the severity of the sentence–especially as they had enjoyed considerable success in the past–rebelled. After putting Carthage under siege, Malchus captured the city, although eventually he was himself put to death after being accused of plotting to be king.66
Justin would also report that later in the sixth century BC another Carthaginian general, named Mago, supposedly sent an armed force to Sardinia under the command of his sons Hasdrubal and Hamilcar. This expedition almost ended in disaster when Hasdrubal died of battle wounds, but the Carthaginians eventually managed to establish themselves in the southern half of the island, and forced several of the indigenous tribes to withdraw into the mountainous interior.67 There is indeed good archaeological evidence for unrest on the island in the mid sixth century BC. The Phoenician stronghold settlements at Monte Sirai and Cuccurredus were both abandoned, the latter after being burnt down, and the major Nuragic settlement at Su Nuraxi was violently destroyed.68
These dramatic stories of a tyrannical and acquisitive Carthage in the sixth century BC must be treated with a good deal of scepticism, particularly as they were written both in a much later period and at a time (after the Punic wars) when such negative stereotyping was firmly fixed in the Greek and Roman cultural imagination. On Sardinia, there is no sign of a long-term Carthaginian occupation during this period. The violence and unrest evident in the archaeological record might well indicate disturbances between the Phoenician and indigenous populations, or even internecine conflict between Nuragic groups.69
If the stories concerning Malchus and Mago have any basis in truth, then they may be literary embellishments of long-distant memories connected with a short-term Carthaginian intervention to protect Phoenician interests on the island. In the first half of the sixth century BC, Carthage was still reliant on overseas imports for around 50 per cent of its food, and Sardinia remained an important source of supply.70 Indeed, Carthag
inian strategy on the island during the sixth century BC, rather than being one of aggressive conquest, appears to have centred on improving the collection and transportation of agricultural produce and other raw materials from the interior though the foundation of two new towns, Caralis (Cagliari) and Neapolis.71
In southern Spain there is also no convincing evidence for a Carthaginian invasion. The collapse of the Tartessian kingdoms has nothing to do with a Carthaginian invasion and everything to do with internal feuding and the collapse of the Levantine metal trade, the main source of wealth for the elite.72 Even if the Carthaginian military interventions mentioned in later sources did take place, they must have been of a temporary nature, for there is no archaeological evidence of a prolonged occupation of southern Spain. Carthage did partially step into the economic vacuum created by the collapse of the Levantine–Iberian metal trade, but only in a strictly limited way. There was some Carthaginian colonization in Andalusia (such as at Villaricos), but most efforts appear to have been directed towards the reorganization and expansion of existing Phoenician settlements such as Malaga and (on Ibiza) Ebusus.73 It was not until the late fifth/ early fourth century that Carthage began to acquire direct control of overseas territory, and even then this did not fit comfortably into any model that we might view as ‘imperialistic’. There is little evidence of territorial conquest, administrative control, collection of taxes, commercial monopolies or the appropriation of foreign policy.74