The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  Ritual and Cult

  Phoenician and Punic religion was open to foreign cults, assimilated to a greater or lesser degree. The Egyptian gods merit particular mention, especially those related to the world of “magic” (a term which mostly denotes an alien type of religious practice): Bes, Horus, Isis, and Osiris are present not only at Byblos (traditionally linked to Egypt) but also elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Greek deities also entered into the official Carthaginian religion: the cults of the Cereres, Demeter, and Kore, were introduced in the Punic metropolis in 396 bce. We are dealing with a special phenomenon—as in the case of the healer-gods—which responds to new needs of the faithful, probably no longer satisfied by the traditional cults. In turn, Phoenician and Punic deities were also welcomed by neighboring cultures in some cases, as in Anatolia and Egypt. A special case is that of Israel, where the cults of Phoenician Baal, Ashtart, and Asherah were widespread in domestic religiosity and even at the royal court, as evidenced by the Bible itself, in addition to epigraphic evidence.

  In line with the Levantine traditions, Phoenician and Punic cults included acts such as prayer, divination, and ritual practices such as offerings to the deities, both bloodless (food, drink, precious objects, etc.) and bloody (mostly sheep and goats, cattle, birds). Administrative documents called “tariffs”—displayed at the entrance of temples and sanctuaries—bore the sacrificial terminology and the regime of offerings, as well as the payments from the faithful to the clergy for the celebration of sacrifices. The existence of cultic associations, often devoted to particular gods, is also well attested by written sources.

  What one expects from a god is not always the same, whether at the level of personal and family devotion or at the level of collective and public worship. In the second case, the request is to protect the king (or the chief), the dynasty, and the community as a whole, as well as to ensure peace and prosperity, defense from external enemies, and protection from natural disasters. In order to bring this about, a specific cult is dedicated to the deities, administered by priests and celebrated in solemn contexts such as urban sanctuaries or other public shrines. Within this framework, individual needs are secondary to the problems of the community. Therefore, it was natural that the individual worshipper chose particular forms of private devotion in order to be heard by the gods. In the less formal sphere of private worship, the gods were felt to be closer and more willing to accept requests concerning the health of the individual, his offspring, his material well-being, and his daily misadventures. This type of popular devotion was chiefly performed in simple cult places, such as small rural sanctuaries or humble household chapels.

  However, our distinction between private and public worship is not always clearly applicable; often the two spheres were closely linked, especially in smaller communities where individual interest and collective interests overlapped even more. In an ancient society like the Phoenician, where interrelations between the human and divine spheres, as well as the ritual dimension, were absolutely central, it is not unexpected to find a well-structured and developed priestly organization (Amadasi Guzzo 2003). Cult professionals of different types and functions are quite well documented in our sources, and although they mostly were temple personnel, we cannot exclude the possible existence of “freelance operators.”

  As for kingship, the sovereign is often the high priest in name or fact, while the king delegates on the various priests to manage the relationship with the gods. This royal function is attested in both epigraphic and literary sources. Indeed, sometimes the policy of kingship was to place the cultic title before the royal title in order to stress the king’s full submission to the divine owner of the state. The clearest evidence of this phenomenon comes from Sidon, where the kings belonging to the Eshmunazor dynasty (sixth–fifth centuries bce) were priests of Ashtart (Xella 2017b). It is difficult to say whether the aforementioned practice was unique to this Sidonian dynasty, owing perhaps to the cultural and religious climate of the Achaemenid period, but other evidence speaks in favor of a special relationship between the king and the goddess Ashtart, both at Sidon and in other major Phoenician centers. Regarding Byblos, from the funerary inscription of Batnoam (ca 350 bce; KAI 11), mother of king Azzibaal, we learn that Paltibaaal, her husband and father of the king, was priest of the Baalat, but he was not king. Although we lack other explicit data, documents like the Yehawmilk stela (KAI 10) clearly show the local king in a cultic attitude in front of the Mistress of Byblos.

  Also for Tyre there is evidence of the king performing the central priestly function. The Jewish historian Josephus relates that King Itto-Baal was a priest of Ashtart (Joseph. Ap. 1.123). The famous king Hiram I not only founded the Milqart temple at Tyre but also was the first to celebrate the ceremony of the egersis of the god (Joseph. A.J. 8.145–46; cf. id., Ap. 1.117–19). The Greek term refers to a solemn yearly ceremony, when a special mythical event, the death and resurrection of Milqart, was celebrated through a complex ritual. As pointed out, the details of the rite are unknown. The main officiator was named miqim elim, “he who awakes the god,” and at least in early times, it was an exclusive royal function, subsequently attested also in the Punic world for members of the elite.

  Direct epigraphic sources furnish remarkable information about terminology and typology of the priests. Normally, they are attached to different holy places, including the tophets. Owing to the particular nature and distribution of our sources, most of the available information relating to the priesthood concerns Carthage: a few extraordinary Carthaginian texts known as “sacrificial tariffs” (KAI 74, 75) inform us about the system of offerings and the regimen of payments in urban temples. Moreover, the cult personnel active in the Ashtart sanctuary of Kition, on Cyprus, is mentioned in an important administrative text (IK C1).

  As for the technical terminology, specialized cult functionaries—both male and females—and other personnel are known from our sources. The standard term for “priest” in Phoenician—as in other Semitic languages—is khn, and the clergy was under the guidance of rb khnm, “high priests.” The term kmr is also documented at Kition, possibly related to the cult of the god Baalshamem (IK F 2B) and, much later, at Althiburos, in Tunisia (KAI 159, 7). As for the Punic world, we possess evidence of a more structured hierarchy. Another position, the function of which we can perceive only partially, was “chief of the gatekeepers” or “responsible for the gates” (of the sanctuary). Probably at a lower level, another type of cult operator was called “slave” or “servant”—both male (ʿbd) and female (ʿbdt and ʾmt)—almost always attached to a particular sanctuary. In addition, we know that other personnel were active in the sphere of temple economy, such as barbers, cooks, butchers, and singers. Some cult places were centers for the accumulation of wealth, or at least possessed their own economic structure, including employees of various types. In this respect, mention must be made of people who exercised prostitution, chiefly female but also male, in temple contexts; although not all scholars agree on the existence of this practice and the term used for it, available evidence makes it likely to have existed at least in some sanctuaries, such as Kition (Cyprus), El-Kef (Sicca Veneria), and Eryx (Sicily).

  Finally, our knowledge of the Phoenician and Punic festive system is extremely scanty if we exclude the feast celebrated by the mqm ’ʾlm, the ritual banqueting activity exercised by a religious association called mrzḥ, and a few other faint pieces of evidence. The month names might indicate festive celebrations connected with the cult, but this is all very hypothetical.

  The Tophet

  Any discussion of Phoenician and Punic religion must include the issue of the tophet. Known conventionally through the biblical term (2 Kings 23:10; Jer. 7:30–32, 19:3–6, 11–14; Job 17:6; Isaiah 30:31–33), these are open-air child cremation sanctuaries spread throughout the central Mediterranean (North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta, but not [yet?] in Phoenicia) from the eighth century bce until the second century ce (Xella 2013).

 
A basic distinction must be made between two “generations” of tophets. On the one hand, there are those founded between 800 and the fourth century bce: Carthage, Sulci, Motya, Tharros, Bithia, perhaps Malta, Sousse, Nora, Cagliari, Monte Sirai (in approximately chronological order of their foundation), whose patron was Baal Hammon (together with Tinnit only at Carthage); the earliest of these aforementioned sanctuaries (i.e., Carthage, Sulci, Motya and Tharros) were founded by Levantine Phoenicians almost at the same time as their respective cities. On the other hand, there are the North African tophets, founded under direct or indirect (posthumous) Carthaginian influence starting from the fourth–third centuries bce: El-Hofra/Constantine, Médeina/Althiburos, Maktar, Mididi, Teboursouk, Guelma, Sabratha, and many others; these continued to be active also after the fall of the Punic metropolis (146 bce), but their existence ceased in the late second or early third century ce, when they generally became sanctuaries dedicated to the god Saturn and his bride Caelestis, the Latin heirs of Baal Hammon and Tinnit.

  The territorial location of the tophet is always related to the urban planning of the settlement: it is liminal to the settlement, and its area is never displaced, although it can be enlarged or partially restructured. Interestingly, tophets have been found in settlements destined to become important urban centers and to act as “landmarks” for other minor centers and whole regions.

  The characteristic findings of the tophet are urns and stelae. The urns (the true object of the offerings) contain the cremated bones of children (generally, newborn or very young), animals (lambs and kids, also very young) or both together; they are the basic elements in these sanctuaries and cannot be displaced. The stelae, inscribed or blank, appear chronologically later and can be displaced or reutilized.

  Even today, some scholars claim that no real human sacrifice was performed in the tophet, but that it was a special necropolis used to receive children who had died of natural causes. In fact, both direct—strictly archaeological, epigraphic, osteological (Melchiorri 2013)—and indirect sources—biblical and Classical texts—consistently indicate the bloody nature of the sacrifices and the function of the victims as offerings, children and animals alike. According to the votive—and never funerary—nature of all the dedications inscribed on the markers, expressing joy and gratitude to the gods, and an important series of other clues, the sacrificial interpretation emerges as the most plausible, even though many other aspects of the phenomenon remain to be clarified.

  In essence, the tophet was the sacred place where worshippers performed rites related to the fulfilment of vows concerning severe individual or collective crises (personal/family health, assistance in a journey, in war, famine, epidemic, problems of offspring; our sources give many possible reasons for this and others are theoretically also probable). In exchange for divine favor, they promised to offer the gods what was most precious to them: a son or a daughter.

  The sacrificed infants were neither necessarily firstborn nor all male. The bloody rites were relatively limited in number, if considered over a lengthy span of time, and the number of the cremated individuals cannot absolutely correspond to the infant mortality rate of this epoch. In fact, the tophet was not the theatre of numberless massacres but, rather, only of a certain number of ceremonies considered to be sacred and pious, and the bloody rite was the extrema ratio chosen in critical situations or to prevent or ward off future dangers. As for the victim, it might be a living son or daughter, but also the next to be born, not yet conceived or still in the mother’s womb; in any case, a predestined child, from that moment on, was dedicated to Baal Hammon and Tinnit. It cannot be excluded that also handicapped or sick children were included among the victims (there are cases of cremated children who were not newborn). If the divine favor was granted, the promised child, alive or already deceased, had to be offered to the gods in fulfilment of the vow: the ritual killing was followed by the cremation of the corpse and various other offerings (including animals).

  Inscribed stelae (when present) are clear evidence of this process: the vow has been pronounced (ndr); the gods have granted their favor (šmʿ ql brk); and the promised child has been “sent” to them, either ritually killed (if alive) and then cremated, or only cremated in case of miscarriage or premature death. Of course, the celebration and the thanksgiving attested by the inscriptions are not for the death of the victim but, rather, for the divine favor granted, thanks to the propitiatory action of the child, “sent” (mlk) to the gods and benevolently received by them.

  This overall interpretation of tophet rites is a work in progress, but it has many evident advantages in comparison with other hypotheses formulated to date. First, it is coherent and founded on direct (archaeological and written) evidence, particularly as regards the votive nature of the inscriptions; second, it does not at all contradict Classical or biblical sources; third, it does not force us to perform “interpretative acrobatics” in order to explain the occasional presence (if any) of foetuses in the urns; fourth, it can also explain the role of lambs and kids as sacrificial victims per se (in several cases, perhaps, as substitutes for the children) or as destined to “accompany” the infant humans, also by virtue of their own very tender age; finally, it accounts for the relatively slow frequency of the sacrifices (at Motya, one or two every two years; at Tharros, more or less one per year; at Sulci, even less frequently).

  It is certain, however, that other ceremonies were performed in the tophet (e.g., substitution rites [animal/human], but also bloodless offerings, libations, ritual banquets, ceremonies with dances and songs), but the molk sacrifice was the qualifying ritual of this sacred place. (See also separate chapter on the tophet, chapter 21, this volume.)

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