Phoenicians all across the Mediterranean interacted with indigenous populations, which had different effects and consequences in regard to the funerary realm. One avenue of research deals with the interpretation of objects of local tradition (e.g., pottery, pins) as grave goods found together with Phoenician and Punic objects. For instance, cooking pots of local origin in the Phoenician necropoleis from Sardinia and Sicily have highlighted the ethnic identity of these local peoples (Delgado and Ferrer 2007: 54–55; Guirguis 2010: 19–28). In turn, the deceased often came from families with members of different origins, whether through mixed marriages, contacts, or alliances, which explains the often “entangled” funerary landscape. This social entanglement may also account for the coexistence of inhumation and incineration rites in the same cemeteries, as at Carthage. Moreover, mobility among Phoenicians and other communities was considerable. The epigraphic evidence from Kerkouane (Tunisia), dated to the fourth century bce, indicates as much, with epitaphs at the entrances of tombs with Semitic, Greek, and Italic roots (Prados 2012: 147). We can also mention the burial of Phoenicians from Sardinia in the necropoleis of Cádiz, judging by the shape of the pit and the oil bottles used (Belizón Aragón et al. 2014: 215–16) and the tombs of wealthy citizens of Carthage found at Monte Sirai (Guirguis 2010: 179), also identified on the basis of the shape of the tombs and their grave goods.
Conclusion
It is important to note that the evidence discussed in this chapter accounts for a wealthy minority of the population. From the exclusive and elitist tombs of the Andalusian coast (Trayamar, Casa del Obispo), to the exclusive rural hypogea of Ibiza or Monte Sirai, and even to the more standardized and apparently egalitarian tombs recorded in Al-Bass, all cemeteries have provided a scarce number of burials that do not correspond with the demography as calculated from the settlements. Although we still must be cautious in calculating the number of people buried, as several factors may be distorting the evidence (e.g., partial excavations of necropoleis, ancient removals, and reuse of tombs), it is likely that some part of the population did not perform burial practices of the type that left remains visible to the archaeologist, but this does not mean they did not perform funerary rituals as well.
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Chapter 21
The Tophet and Infant Sacrifice
Matthew M. Mccarty
Discoveries and Questions
On a dark January night in 1921, two civil servants in Carthage followed a man they suspected of dealing in illicit Punic antiquities to his clandestine excavation on a property known serendipitously as Salammbô, after the eponymous heroine of Flaubert’s 1862 novel. Upon arresting him, the administrators began the first of a long series of excavations, making a discovery that has captured modern imaginations.
These amateur archaeologists and their successors discovered, buried at Salammbô, layer upon layer of ritual deposits, some of which had been commemorated with stone monuments (figure 21.1). Each deposit consisted of one or more buried urns that contained the burned bones of children and/or lambs. Almost immediately, this discovery was trumpeted as evidence of Phoenician child sacrifice, and it fundamentally reshaped European attitudes toward the Phoenician-Punic past in North Africa (McCarty 2018b).
Figure 21.1 View of stratified offering deposits in the Carthage tophet (ca. 750–300 bce).
Source: Photograph from ASOR excavations, courtesy of Lawrence Stager, Director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon.
The site in Carthage is not unique in the Phoenician world, but it stands as the largest of more than one hundred similar sanctuaries that were used over a millennium. Together, these sites have been dubbed “tophets,” after a biblical site where worshippers “burned sons and daughters in a fire” (Jeremiah 7:31–32). Yet this group of sites raises questions that continue to generate debate: What is the nature of the rite represented at these sites? Was it live child sacrifice, or simply a special practice of disposing of and sanctifying infants who had died of natural causes? Where did this rite originate? How did the rite change (or not) as the Phoenician world was incorporated into the Roman Empire?
While study of these sanctuaries has continued almost unabated for the last hundred years (D’Andrea 2018), two developments—apart from postcolonialist spurring efforts to reject child sacrifice as an Orientalist fantasy—necessitate a comprehensive analysis. The first is the availability of new archaeological data that has been carefully collected an
d analyzed by interdisciplinary teams. The results of the ASOR excavations at Salammbô (1976–1979) are reaching publication, and a host of first-century bce tophets have been excavated in Tunisia in the past three decades: at Hr. el-Hami (Ferjaoui 2007), Hr. Ghadyadha (M’Charek et al. 2008), Althiburos (Kallala and Ribichini 2014), and now Zita. Given the late date of many of these new finds, the second development is renewed interest in Hellenistic/Roman tophets that had not been examined systematically since Marcel Le Glay’s Saturne africain (Le Glay 1961–1966; D’Andrea 2014; McCarty, in press).
These new finds introduce the largest impediment to understanding tophets: filling gaps in ancient data with material from very different times and places, under the assumption that religious ideas, practices, and systems were largely unchanging through antiquity (e.g., Bénichou-Safar 2010). This interpretive practice can be necessary and helpful; for example, the term mlk, found on Phoenician tophet inscriptions, was only deciphered with the help of third-century ce Latin tophet inscriptions which demonstrated that the word denoted a type of sacrifice rather than the god “Moloch” (Eissfeldt 1935).
Still, significant changes in the rites and their framework occurred over the course of a millennium, not least because tophet rites were often personal and individualized. The chief argument of this chapter is that there was no single, monolithic “tophet phenomenon” in antiquity but, rather, a loosely connected bundle of ritual forms and frames that could create imagined connections and boundaries among groups separated from one another in time and space. Each ritual performance was enacted by individuals embedded in both specific communities and affected by the wider social, economic, and political changes that transformed the Phoenician-Punic world. As a result, it is essential to both localize and historicize religious practices, even when they appear quite similar in form.
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