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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Couple of issues there; you’d have to question the independence (at the remove of time it’s impossible to know if there was a single source), and if you’re going to take attestation by multiple ancient writers as strong evidence of a thing, well, you’re going to end up believing some odd, and often contradictory, things.

That sort of evidence isn’t nothing, but _in itself_ you probably need to be very careful with it.

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I don't dispute that, but we have both multiple written sources about the practice and the Tophet of Carthage is an actually existing cemetery containing both young children and animals. So while there is no definite evidence in one way or the other, I would argue it's not outlandish to assume that the written history is to be trusted here.

> you’d have to question the independence

The Greeks had no issue describing the bizarre Etruscan custom of no exposing “excess” female infants and treating the more or less equally to boys.

Killing infants or even young children was really not a big deal in the ancient word. Viewing it as some act of extreme evil is mainly a Christian thing…

Oh, sure; I'm strictly talking sourcing independence (none of these are primary sources, and what _their_ source was is generally unclear). To be clear, I'm not saying Carthaginians didn't sacrifice kids, I'm saying that claims from Plato and Plutarch, _in themselves_, are not great evidence for this.

> Plato and Plutarch, _in themselves_, are not great evidence for this.

Why? That’s more evidence than we have for many other things we ‘know’ about the ancient world. We often have just a single source written down by somebody less reliable than Plutarch or Plato.

I mean we’d find something corroborated by two ancients authors sufficient for most other events which weren’t as controversial (purely from a modern perspective)

But this is exactly the point of the paper, that you have to question that, but for me the tombs are very precise.

"In some cases, however, the inscriptions make explicit reference to human victims, with expressions such as »zrm»ˇs(t), (a person who has not yet reached maturity) and mlk b–l (an offering of a citizen); in the Hellenistic period the phrase mlk »dm (human offering) is found. An interpretation of these construct phrases as ‘offering by a citizen/human’ rather than ‘offering of a citizen/human’ must be ruled out by the fact that the phrase mlk »mr is also found at both Cirta and Carthage: ‘offering of a sheep’ (Amadasi Guzzo 2007–2008: 350)."

It's the quotation of source material love the most about this comment

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