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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised this is a big deal, I thought it was well accepted. (Other) Phoenicians did it, Romans practised human (not sure about child) sacrifice and I thought the Carthaginians themselves recorded doing it?

Humans are pretty crazy and we shouldn't pretend otherwise...

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“Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, and human sacrifice is found in many historical societies, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon”

The whole article is about this not being well accepted by ancient authors nor by modern historians, that’s why it’s a big deal

No the article is about how child sacrifice by Carthaginians was widely accepted by ancient (Greek and Roman) authors, but has been doubted by (some) 20th Century historians and archeologists.

I guess it depends on what it means "accepted"; my sentence is indeed ambiguous.

Romans did not accept (like) the fact that Carthaginians sacrificed children. They did accept (acknowledge, which is a much better word here) the fact that children were sacrificed there.

Some modern historians/archeologies did not acknowledge (nor presumably like) that at all.

Not much of anything the Carthaginians recorded survived. Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek. So nearly everything about Carthaginian history is naturally controversial for that reason.

> Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible

Ehh, we still remember they exist. How many other civilizations have been so thoroughly eradicated that we don't even remember them at all?

many! mostly nature-friendly ones lacking concrete perhaps?

> was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek.

Physical destruction/genocide wasn’t really necessarily for that. Texts written on papyrus just don’t last very long. Nothing survives from the Etruscans either and the Roman never actively suppressed their culture as far as we know. People just stopped speaking the language and texts were no longer copied.

We know so much about many middle eastern civilizations exclusively because they were using clay tablets and liked making inscriptions on rocks. Had they used more perishable materials we’d know significantly less about them than the Carthaginians.

I'm pretty sure that the total destruction of their cities, and all institutions of their society is one of the main reasons nobody was around to preserve their language or history. There are almost no primary sources of Carthaginian history, the only real close-to-contemporary sources are an incomplete account from Polybius (a Greek, who lived as a Roman slave), and Livy (a Roman aristocrat born 100 years after the destruction of Carthage). If you want to make statements about what Carthage and it's people were like, your options for source material are a mostly destroyed archeological record, or second hand accounts from outsiders mostly comprised of Carthage's enemies.

Yes, but that more or less applies to every civilization besides Greeks and Romans regardless of what happened to them (and even the amount of Greek/Romans text that have survived is tiny). Maybe Egypt is an exception.

For instance most of what we know about ancient Persia comes from Greek sources. As far as we know more the Greek/Romans had preserved much more information about Achaemenids than their Sassanian successors.

Even if Carthage was somehow semi peacefully annexed into the Roman empire and and their upper classes were assimilated into the Roman society over time more or less the same thing would have happen (just that we’d have had a longer window during which Punic texts could’ve been translated to Greek/Roman). This happened all the time after all.

> I thought it was well accepted

I was in a museum in Sardinia (was part of Carthage) sometime ago and saw some of the tophets mentioned in the article. The argument from the linked article was repeated on one of the info boards - that the Romans demonized their enemies and lots of our sources on alleged child sacrifice come from them. I am not sure about the Carthagenian sources on the matter, but they did not make it into the argument, so I assume the evidence was either slimmer or newer.

There are other (non-Roman) sources describing child sacrifice in Phoenician societies.

Yeah, but they weren't exactly friends with the Phoenicians either, were they?

Why didn’t they accuse their other enemies of this?

Anyway, on balance I think it’s pretty reasonably to say that it’s more likely that Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice to some extent.

Romans almost exclusively only sacrificed foreigners who were basically subhuman (and even that was exceptionally rare). Sacrificing your own citizens was something else…

as late as the 19th century, "accepted practices of the time" was a defense for some genocides. Source: british historians documenting acts of war by early British Kings

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