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 ...
The Conquistadors were helped by the smaller tribes who were sick of being the slaves of the Aztecs.
Great soliloquy from a great movie.
is that based on a real story?
Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.
There are variations on whether he actually did it or not but there appears to be no contention on that he was willing to do so.
bttt
Carthage was a civilzation of evil. God may very well have used the Romans to do His will: killing them off, and salting the ground so that Carthage could never return.
They worshiped Baal, and Hanibal, the general that so terrified the Romans, his name means “Beloved of Baal”.
I may be wrong, but wasn’t it someone other than a Spartan who sacrificed his daughter (Iphegenia sp?)before the departure to Troy (Agamemnon?). I believe this was a motive for his wife to destroy him.
Of course, the torture and fires of the Inquisition were soft and fuzzy. Also, the fact that the Tlaxcallans were Cortez’s allies against the Aztecs, since they were tired of being the “bread” of the Aztecs did not prevent Spaniards from mistreating and robbing them over the centuries.
All ancient societies had a problem with infant mortality, and with the mothers dying in labor. The Carthaginians and Phoenicians were unique in this creepy practice of sacrificing their own children to some blood-hungry deity. OTOH, we see a big test for Abraham who’s told to sacrifice his son Isaac just to see if he’s truly obedient, and then told to stop.
That’s an interesting denial, and that’s exactly what the issue is in the first place — the Carthaginian practice was denied for many years on no basis whatsoever.
It’s the other way around — the history book writes the winner.
They had a spot (still there, obviously) called “the place of rejection”. The high-end citizens would meet there, inspect the baby, and “vote him off the island” if not “perfect”. They just hurled the infant to his death. Members of the two royal houses were by and large not put through this, and none of the girl babies. The goal was to maintain the fitness of the master race which made up the army and ruled the whole area. There were no walled settlements allowed, and no weapons allowed among those under the thumb of Sparta.
They brought the practice with them from Tyre.
His wife was an adulteress and gold-digger.
Agamemnon didn’t want to make amends with Diana (the Greeks were being kept from departure for Troy) and balked at the sacrifice, so Odysseus cooked up a deception. It’s a story with a lot of variations which probably reflect the otherwise obscured theological struggles of classical Greeks. In one version she isn’t willing to be sacrificed and her mouth is stuffed with cloth to keep her from hurling a last-minute curse on her own family. In another, she’s spirited away to become a priestess of Diana just before she’s sacrificed.
http://www.stanford.edu/~plomio/iphigenia.html
Thanks JPB.
Excellent point.
This is extrapolated into our society for individuals such that any criminal who produces something that can be portrayed as of literary or artistic merit somehow therefore becomes less of a criminal and should be immediately released.
There is, BTW, little or no archaeological evidence for this practice in Phoenicia or Israel.
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