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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

It's usually to promote the academics, their paper, and their institutions. Is there a goal I am missing here?

The author credited is Josephine Quinn, a subscriber to intersectionality who wishes to provide an assumption for easy consumption that it wasn't just Africans and Aborigines who subscribed to barbarism (her assumption). Her assertion is that as the western world is based on the ancient Greek and Roman world (again her assumption) and that they were barbaric and that therefore we in the west are not better than them (again her assumption, not mine).

Carthaginians were neither Roman nor Greek. In fact, for a long time it was assumed that Carthaginian child sacrifice practice was just Roman propaganda about their enemies. I fail to see how acknowledging that Berber ancestors likely practiced child sacrifice says anything about modern Western world.

I mean, there was plenty of objectionable (by modern standards) behaviour practiced in both Rome and Ancient Greece that there’s really no reason to somehow try and pull Carthage into it.

She has no more or less evidence than anyone previous when this was published.

It's a directed attempt to create a history based entirely on speculation. The language treatment on the linked page screams it out

> And the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.

and

> 'But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks and Romans against their political enemy, and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander.

and

> 'Dismissing the idea of child sacrifice stops us seeing the bigger picture'

It's not history (and certainly not science as other people here say) - it's polemic reinterpretation to meet a narrative from someone who's pet interests are "colonialism", "postcolonialism" and how evil it is.

You’re probably right, but nothing you’ve said will convince anyone that you are. If you want people to take your argument seriously, you have to do more than point out the author’s biases. You have to engage with her arguments and say why they are flawed.

That she has the same source material as has been available for a millenia and came to a different conclusion to anyone else should be the first hint.

That may well be true, but it doesn't absolve us of the need to look at her evidence and arguments in the context of the wider scholarship. If she's right, then she's right, regardless of her political motivations.

Anyway, if that is what she's up to, it's less irritating than the usual approach of pretending non-Western ancient societies were enlightened communitarian paradises.

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