The Tophet of Carthage

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A traveler standing in the Salammbô quarter of modern Tunis, a short walk in from the sea, looks down into a shallow excavated hollow crowded with carved limestone slabs. Some lean; some have toppled; a few were sheltered by a brick vault thrown up in Roman times, when the ground above had already been built over twice. Under the slabs, packed down through a depth of more than a meter and across many overlapping layers, lie the urns — small, thick-walled clay jars, thousands upon thousands of them, each sealed and set into the earth. Inside almost every one are burnt bones. The bones are mostly those of the very young: newborns, infants of a few months, the unborn, and mixed among them the charred remains of lambs and kids. This is the most famous and most disputed acre of ground the Phoenician world ever left behind.

The Carthaginians had a name for it that has not survived. The word now fixed to the place, tophet, is a borrowing — taken by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars from the Hebrew Bible, where Topheth is a site of burning in the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. The transfer of the name was a scholarly act of interpretation before a single urn was lifted, and it carried an accusation built into it. To call the precinct a tophet is already to read it through the eyes of the people who feared and condemned the rite.

A precinct on the edge of the city

Carthage was founded on the Tunisian coast in the late ninth or eighth century BCE by settlers out of Tyre, the most aggressive of the Levantine Phoenician cities, and the precinct in the Salammbô district appears to be as old as the colony itself. The lowest deposits reach into the eighth century; the latest belong to the city’s final decades before Rome erased it in 146 BCE. For something on the order of six hundred years, urns were carried down and set into this same ground, generation over generation, until the layers stacked into a low artificial mound of vows.

It was never a temple in the Greek or Roman sense — no roofed cella, no cult statue housed within walls. It was an open-air sanctuary, a walled enclosure under the sky, the type the Levant had long known as a high place. The dead were not laid out as bodies. They were burned elsewhere and the cinerary remains gathered into a jar, the jar buried, and over many of the jars a stone marker raised. The earliest markers are plain — sometimes a small undecorated cippus, sometimes a crude pillar — but from roughly the fifth century BCE the carved stelae multiply, and on them appear the two names that govern the whole place.

The greater part of the inscriptions open with a fixed formula of dedication: to the Lady Tanit Face-of-Baal and to the Lord Baal Hammon. Baal Hammon was the supreme god of the western Phoenician world, a lord of sky and fertility whom Greeks and Romans answered with the names of Kronos and Saturn. Tanit, who in the Carthaginian dedications comes to stand first, bore the title pene Baal, the face of Baal — the countenance through which the high god turned toward those who called on him. Her emblem is everywhere on the stones: a flat-based triangle or trapezoid, surmounted by a horizontal bar and a disk, the figure modern scholars call the sign of Tanit. Cut, abstracted, repeated by the thousand, it became the visual signature of Punic religion, the mark a worshipper left to show whose precinct this was. The deeper theology behind these two — the storm-god Baal of the Ugaritic and West Semitic world, the goddesses of Canaan from whom Tanit descends — belongs to the religion of the Phoenicians at large; what the precinct fixes is the cult act itself.

Stelae in the Tophet of Salammbô, Carthage; the brick vault is a Roman-period construction over the older sacred ground. Photograph by Patrick Giraud, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

What the urns hold, and what the stones say

The physical pattern is consistent enough that no one disputes it. A jar is buried; it contains cremated bone; the bone is overwhelmingly that of the newborn and the young infant, with a meaningful share of the perinatal and the unborn; mingled with the human remains, in many urns, are the burnt bones of young sheep or goats — sometimes a lamb or kid alone, sometimes a child and an animal together. Above some of the jars a stele was raised; on a stele an inscription was sometimes cut; and the inscription, where legible, names the dedicator, names the two deities, and asks that the god hear the voice and grant the blessing. The dedicator vows or gives thanks. The grammar is the grammar of an offering.

The crux lies in one recurring word. A number of the inscriptions use the term mlk, conventionally vocalized molk — and mlk is not a name of either deity in these texts but a term for a category of offering. It appears in compounds: molk adam, which seems to mean an offering of a human; molk immor (rendered on later Latin-letter African stones as molchomor), an offering of a lamb. Here the dispute starts, because the compounds can be read two ways. They may distinguish the offering of a child from the offering of an animal given in a child’s stead — a substitution, the lamb redeeming the infant, as a ram once redeemed Isaac on Moriah. Or they may simply catalog two kinds of thing that could be vowed into the same sacred ground. The same four consonants stand behind the biblical Molech (or Moloch), the power to whom, in the Hebrew Scriptures, children were “passed through the fire.” Whether mlk names a god or names a rite is one of the oldest threads in the whole tangle, and the inscriptions of the precinct lean, on balance, toward the rite.

A Punic stele in the Tophet of Carthage incised with the sign of Tanit. Photograph by “Shoestring”, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The charge of the enemy

The reason the precinct carries the weight it does is not the urns. It is a chorus of ancient writers who say, in plain words, that the Carthaginians burned their own children for the gods.

The testimony runs across centuries and genres. Plato, in the dialogue Minos, notes in passing that the Carthaginians sacrifice their own sons to Kronos as a thing they hold holy and lawful, where Greeks would hold it abomination. Cleitarchus, writing in the late fourth or early third century BCE, supplies the image that fixed itself in the Western imagination: a bronze statue of the god with downturned, sloping arms, into which a living child was placed, so that the body slid from the heated metal into a fire-pit below, while the parents looked on without weeping and a noise of pipes and drums covered the sound. Diodorus Siculus, in the first century BCE, fastens the rite to a specific catastrophe — the year 310 BCE, when the Syracusan adventurer Agathocles had landed an army in Africa and the city stood in mortal panic. The Carthaginians, Diodorus writes, concluded they had angered Kronos by substituting purchased and foreign children for their own, and in atonement offered up two hundred children of the noblest families, with three hundred more given voluntarily; he too describes the bronze image and the rolling into the fire (Library of History XX.14). Centuries later the Christian apologist Tertullian, an African himself, throws the rite in the face of Roman officials who, he claims, knew and tolerated it in his own day.

These are damning witnesses, and they agree. They are also, almost without exception, the testimony of enemies. Plato and Diodorus and Cleitarchus were Greeks whose cities had fought Carthage for the length of the western Mediterranean’s history; Tertullian was a Christian arguing against the cruelty of a pagan order. The charge of human sacrifice was, in the ancient world as in the modern, the standard instrument for blackening a rival civilization, and it had been laid against the Phoenicians as a people long before any Greek set foot in Africa. The Hebrew Scriptures, which condemn the very rite the precinct’s borrowed name evokes, belong to a neighbor of the Canaanite world and a rival of its gods. To weigh the classical sources is to weigh the question of how far the worst thing said about a people, by the people who hated them, should be believed.

The argument over the bones

For most of two centuries the texts were all there was, and the texts said sacrifice. The modern controversy turned the inquiry onto the urns themselves.

In 2010 a team led by the physical anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz published, in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, an osteological study of the cremated remains from hundreds of urns recovered in the Salammbô precinct (the cemetery argument). Their reading of the bones found an age profile heavily weighted toward the prenatal and the newborn — a great many who had died at or very near birth, some who appeared never to have drawn breath at all. That distribution, they argued, looks like the ordinary, terrible attrition of perinatal and infant mortality in an ancient population, not like the deliberate selection of healthy children old enough to be led to an altar. On this reading the precinct is a cemetery: a sacred ground reserved for those who died too young to be buried among the adult dead, cremated and dedicated to Tanit and Baal Hammon, given over to the gods because they had been lost rather than because they were taken.

The reply came fast and sharp. In 2011 Patricia Smith and colleagues, working from the Harvard excavations of the precinct, contested the very basis of the aging: cremation shrinks and warps bone unpredictably, they argued, and the heat-corrected measurements pushed the ages downward, so that children who died at several months were being read as newborns. Correct for the distortion, they held, and the population includes plenty old enough to have been killed. Then in 2013 a study in Antiquity by Paolo Xella, Josephine Quinn, Valentina Melchiorri, and Peter van Dommelen pulled the strands back together (the sacrifice argument). Set the dedicatory stelae, the mlk vocabulary, the animal substitutes, and the unanimous classical testimony beside the bones, they argued, and the convergence points one way: the precinct is first of all a sanctuary, and the depositions are offerings. No ordinary community, they noted, buries only its infants in a separate consecrated enclosure marked with vows to the gods; the selectivity itself asks for explanation.

The two positions have hardened rather than merged. Between them runs a narrower channel that much recent work prefers: that the rite was real but rare, reserved for crisis and for vows, and that the same ground also received children who simply died — so that a tophet could be at once a place of sacrifice and a place of burial, the offered and the lost lying side by side under the same sign. The frame of sacrifice — the giving of a thing of value to bind the divine to the giver, the dearest gift purchasing the heaviest favor — explains why a people in terror might offer what it loved most, and why a lamb might stand in when the god could be persuaded to accept it. What it cannot do, from the architecture alone, is tell us how often the substitution failed.

Salammbô, and the name out of Scripture

The modern district that holds the precinct took its name from Salammbô, the imagined Carthaginian priestess of Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel of the Mercenary War — a nineteenth-century French fiction draped over a Punic ruin, which is a fair emblem of how the place has reached the present: always seen through some later eye. The borrowed Hebrew name does the same work at a deeper level.

In the Hebrew Bible, Topheth is a specific cursed place, in the valley of the son of Hinnom — Ge-Hinnom, which wears down in Greek to Gehenna — running below the southern wall of Jerusalem. There, the prophet Jeremiah charges, the people “have built the high places of Topheth … to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire,” a thing, the text has the deity say, that he never commanded and that never entered his mind (Jeremiah 7:31). The book of Kings records that the reforming king Josiah “defiled Topheth” so that no one could make a son or daughter pass through the fire to Molech (2 Kings 23:10), and Chronicles lays the rite at the door of earlier kings of Judah. The valley’s name then traveled forward: Gehenna became, in later Jewish apocalyptic and then in the scriptures read after them, a name for the place of fiery judgment itself.

When the excavators of Carthage reached for tophet to name the Salammbô precinct, they joined two grounds a thousand miles and several centuries apart — a valley outside Jerusalem condemned by Israelite prophets, and a sealed enclosure in Africa where the urns lay undisturbed. The Carthaginians worshipped powers descended from the same Canaanite world the prophets knew, and the kinship is genuine. But the borrowed name pre-judges the African ground by the verdict the prophets passed on the Judean one, and the precinct has worn that verdict ever since.

The “Baal au foudre” stele from Ugarit (Louvre AO 15775), the Late Bronze Age storm-god from whom the lords of the western Phoenician precinct descend. Photograph by Jastrow, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The afterlife of an acre

The precinct lay buried under Roman Carthage for nearly two thousand years. When Rome refounded the city under Augustus, it built over the Punic levels without, it seems, knowing what lay below; the brick vaults that now shelter some of the stelae belong to that overlay. The tophet was rediscovered only in 1921, when two collectors, François Icard and Paul Gielly, traced a flow of votive stelae appearing on the antiquities market back to a clandestine dig in the Salammbô fields and uncovered the deposits. Excavation followed in waves — French campaigns through the 1920s, an American expedition out of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania between 1976 and 1979 directed by Lawrence Stager, whose published count of urns and whose reading of the mlk offering set the terms of the modern sacrifice case. The precinct’s stratigraphy, peeled back, gave the deposits their phases and their span, eighth century to the fall.

Comparable precincts turned up across the Punic west — at Motya off Sicily, at Sulci and Tharros and Nora on Sardinia, at Hadrumetum down the African coast — so that the Carthaginian tophet stands not as a singular horror but as the central and largest instance of a shared western Phoenician institution, the urn-field of Tanit and Baal Hammon. That breadth cuts both ways in the argument: a rite so widespread looks like an established custom rather than an emergency measure, yet a custom of burying one’s sacrificed children for six centuries across a whole civilization strains belief in a way a custom of burying one’s dead infants does not.

What the ground will not yield is a confession. The urns are sealed and the bones are burnt and the people who filled them left their vows but not their reasons. The classical writers supply a reason — the dearest life given to a god who demanded it — and they may be reporting a real and terrible rite, or repeating the oldest slander told about a maritime rival, or both at once, true in the panic of 310 BCE and false as a portrait of ordinary Carthaginian life. The bones supply a population of the very young, which is exactly what a sacrifice of infants would leave and exactly what the natural death of infants would leave, so that the same evidence serves either case. Few questions in the study of the ancient world set the testimony of the enemy so squarely against the silence of the thing itself, and ask the modern reader to choose which to trust. The Salammbô precinct holds, beneath its toppled stelae, the bones and the question both — and offers no way to lift one without the other.

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