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Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say
Past Horizons ^ | Wednesday, January 22, 2014 | Maev Kennedy for The Guardian

Posted on 01/23/2014 5:51:08 PM PST by SunkenCiv

Just as ancient Greek and Roman propagandists insisted, the Carthaginians did kill their own infant children, burying them with sacrificed animals and ritual inscriptions in special cemeteries to give thanks for favours from the gods, according to a new study. “This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn’t want to believe it,” said Josephine Quinn, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford, who is behind the study, with international colleagues, of one of the most bitterly debated questions in classical archaeology.

“But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favours but fulfilling a promise that had already been made...

“The inscriptions are unequivocal: time and again we find the explanation that the gods ‘heard my voice and blessed me’. It cannot be that so many children conveniently happened to die at just the right time to become an offering – and in any case a poorly or dead child would make a pretty feeble offering if you’re already worried about the gods rejecting it.”

“Then there is the fact that the animals from the sites, which were beyond question sacrificial offerings, are buried in exactly the same way, sometimes in the same urns with the bones of the children.”

(Excerpt) Read more at pasthorizonspr.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: carthage; godsgravesglyphs; romanempire; tophet
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To: ClearCase_guy

There is a difference between “I am not convinced” and “I am certain that the exact opposite is true.”


21 posted on 01/23/2014 6:30:32 PM PST by JoeDetweiler
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To: SunkenCiv

The Cartheginians, like the Aztecs, got what they deserved. Everyone moans about the beatdown that the Spanish Conquistadors dealt the Aztecs but that is only because the modern mind cannot conceive the depravity of the Aztec empire. The cities of Carthage and Tenochtitlan were evil and needed to be destroyed. Western civilization is the heir of the Romans and of the Spanish Conquistadors.


22 posted on 01/23/2014 6:33:36 PM PST by WMarshal (Free citizen, never a subject or a civilian)
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To: Harmless Teddy Bear

I’m a student of classical literature. I have not noticed any correlation between brilliant artistic production and ... the kind of place where I’d like to live. (I live in a bland suburb near a Walmart, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.)

The height of Greek artistic production was during the Peloponnesian War, when Greeks were going unspeakable things to one another all over the Mediterranean. Nobody wants to live through that, if they’re sane.


23 posted on 01/23/2014 6:34:39 PM PST by Tax-chick (Well, that went badly.)
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To: SunkenCiv

The Lesson here is that no culture that practices child sacrifice will last.


24 posted on 01/23/2014 6:35:13 PM PST by Bayard
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To: ClearCase_guy

The book of Jeremiah says the Jews put their kids through the fire, a sacrifice to Moloch.


25 posted on 01/23/2014 6:38:22 PM PST by AppyPappy (Obama: What did I not know and when did I not know it?)
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To: Mikey_1962; ClearCase_guy; dfwgator; JoeDetweiler; Caipirabob; GeronL; JRandomFreeper; SunkenCiv; ..

Carthaginians were Phoenicians but a colony.

............
And the Phoenicians were Caananites.

These were the people whom the Israelites were supposed to completely exterminate when they came out of Egypt in roughly 1200 BC (or roughly 1400 bc)

Why were they susposed to exterminate the Caananites? Because they practiced child sacrifice and all sorts of abominable sexual practices including homosexuality—

The Israelites killed many of the Caananites but they did not exterminate them. Because they did not exterminate the Caananites—they wound up adopting their ways over and over again. This included child sacrifice. There is in Israel a valley called the valley of hinnom where they performed these sacrifices. Because they did the detestable practices of the Caananites, the Israelites kindled God wrath against them. The first temple and Jerusalem were destroyed in 589 BC.

By the time of Jesus nearly 600 years later, the practice of Child sacrifice had disappeared from Israel and the surrounding roman provinces. The Phoenicians had been subdued by the Romans who found child sacrifice to be detestable.

Human sacrifice however, continued outside the boundaries of the Roman empire. Julius Caesar reported that the Gauls would build large wooden structures in the shape of a man and tie many men to the edifice to be burned. When the romans invaded Britian the last redoubt of the druids was on the isle of man. There were hundred of human sacrifices there after the battle that preceded its capture. In saudi arabia,—just beyond Roman control — there are reports that at the time of Jesus the moon goddess there was voracious in her appetite for human sacrifices.

People little appreciate how really really dark demonic and tortured the ancient world was—and how we are today coming dangerously close to tipping over into that age again.


26 posted on 01/23/2014 6:39:35 PM PST by ckilmer
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To: Bayard
I think the real lesson here is that the winner writes the history.

/johnny

27 posted on 01/23/2014 6:46:11 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: ckilmer

America has sacrificed 55 million of its own children to the god of atheist socialism.


28 posted on 01/23/2014 6:49:11 PM PST by ThanhPhero (Khách sang La Vang hanh huong tham vieng Maria)
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To: AppyPappy
"The book of Jeremiah says the Jews put their kids through the fire, a sacrifice to Moloch."

Notice it says "through the fire" not "into the fire" meaning a cleansing not sacrifice. They were not burned but passed through by adults holding them. It was a rite of cleansing albeit a dangerous one for both.

However -

"As a god worshipped by the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Moloch had associations with a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice by parents. Moloch figures in the Book of Deuteronomy and in the Book of Leviticus as a form of idolatry (Leviticus 18:21: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch"). In the Old Testament, Gehenna was a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various Baalim and Caananite gods, including Moloch, sacrificed their children by fire (2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6)."

29 posted on 01/23/2014 6:49:44 PM PST by SkyDancer (Imagine a world without politicians, lawyers and federal judges.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Sacrifice of children was pretty common, apparently. It happened in Israel, too. But maybe the common element is the Phoenicians.

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech
Lev 18:21 (KJV)

Moreover thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter, 21 That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?
Ezek 16:20-21 (KJV)


30 posted on 01/23/2014 6:50:01 PM PST by Rocky (The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. George Orwell)
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To: Tax-chick
I doubt that they are sane if by sane you mean grounded in reality.
31 posted on 01/23/2014 6:51:43 PM PST by Harmless Teddy Bear (Proud Infidel, Gun Nut, Religious Fanatic and Freedom Fiend)
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To: Salvavida
Our society sacrifices children to Convenience, and Fulfillment, and Career.

No need to wag fingers at the ancients for their bloody-handed idolatry, when we can find it on an industrial scale right here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the ...

32 posted on 01/23/2014 6:53:45 PM PST by NorthMountain
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To: SkyDancer

Well, God sent the Jews into captivity for it so I’m thinking it wasn’t harmless. Just a guess.


33 posted on 01/23/2014 7:01:01 PM PST by AppyPappy (Obama: What did I not know and when did I not know it?)
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To: WMarshal
Everyone moans about the beatdown that the Spanish Conquistadors dealt the Aztecs but that is only because the modern mind cannot conceive the depravity of the Aztec empire. The cities of Carthage and Tenochtitlan were evil and needed to be destroyed.

Western Civilization has taken its Judeo-Christian heritage so much for granted that many modern first-worlders think that human nature alone would make such depravity impossible. But understanding its wrongness is LEARNED. It is TAUGHT. You aren't born knowing that you don't kill fellow humans for your own gain if you think that's what you have to do to get what you want. IT'S TAUGHT. An individual has to learn, if by osmosis (which is what's happened in the West) how to respect human life and dignity.

We have a "first world" that's free of slaves specifically because of Christian influence, the "do unto others" ethic. It's taken many many generations and blood and borne fruit -- our "first world" where we take that fundamental moral cornerstone for granted.

Had those self-murdering civilizations remained unknown to the West, they would eventually have gone extinct. They would never thrive, the same as Islamic countries never thrive.

Missionaries in the 1800s who went to primitive cultures had to have been either raving lunatic mad, or to have had cojones of some kind of steel. The practices they must have encountered, but could never discuss in polite society!

34 posted on 01/23/2014 7:03:35 PM PST by Finny (Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. -- Psalm 119:105)
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To: Harmless Teddy Bear

It seems like some people are drawn to turmoil. I’m drawn to boring sameness.


35 posted on 01/23/2014 7:04:21 PM PST by Tax-chick (Well, that went badly.)
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To: AppyPappy

Well I was going on the operative word “through” rather than “into” .... but yeah. That happened. Several times. Never learn.


36 posted on 01/23/2014 7:20:25 PM PST by SkyDancer (Live your life in such a way that the Westboro church will want to picket your funeral)
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To: Caipirabob

“This is something dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn’t want to believe it,”

I wonder if some future society will be so appalled by what they will learn about our current sacrificing of our babies that they will not want to believe it.


37 posted on 01/23/2014 7:30:40 PM PST by Blue Collar Christian (Vote Democrat. Once you're OK with killing babies the rest is easy. <BCC><)
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To: Tax-chick
I have lived in "colorful" areas much prefer to live places where saying you got cut means a glass broke not someone tried to kill you.

Here's to bland and boring!

38 posted on 01/23/2014 7:34:38 PM PST by Harmless Teddy Bear (Proud Infidel, Gun Nut, Religious Fanatic and Freedom Fiend)
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To: SunkenCiv

Bookmarked.


39 posted on 01/23/2014 8:02:12 PM PST by Inyo-Mono (NRA)
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To: SunkenCiv

Didn’t the Spartans expose their disabled newborns to the elements and wildlife?


40 posted on 01/23/2014 8:36:48 PM PST by SuziQ
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