I remember reading an analysis of a script written during the wars of Carthage with Rome which had this incredible meaning: "Stop adopting slave children to sacrifice them so that we have a favorable outcome, it needs to be your actual children".
Most if not all Mediterranean civilizations practiced child sacrifice, for Minoans the keywords for those with access to scientific papers is "The Southern House of Knossos" and ofcourse the 14 youths being sent each year to the Minotaur
Most Ministries of culture of the respective countries have not financed further research to this arguably interesting topic
Given the paucity of Punic texts that we possess, I'd be surprised to learn that this script of which you speak is in any language other than Latin.
Most, if not all civilizations, practice child sacrifice to this day. It's called war, and it's practiced to such a ritualistic, feverish pitch that it may as well be a public festival glorifying death and national identity.
The "proof" that the Carthaginians, Canaanites, and Bronze Age Minoans practiced child sacrifice begs a misanthropic perspective from the start. While our modern society may think nothing of animals, and even reject the notion that they possess a soul, this was certainly not the case for the Etruscans or Canaanites. We have ample evidence, in the case of Etruria, that children who died prematurely were embalmed and buried with the remains of household pets, in the hope that the souls of both the animals and the children would be enticed to reincarnate in the presence of their living loved ones again. Being as close to residential districts as they were, these Carthaginian "tophets" served the same purpose--directing the souls of those who perished to return in new forms. The concept that these children were murdered to appease barbarous, foreign gods exposes a level of ignorance and anti-Semiticism that is unfortunately altogether too familiar in the modern-day.
As for the "Southern House of Knossos", the keyword here is "excarnation" and is an alternative method of mummification.
I want to make a plug for the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Last month was the Carthage episode. Here's the audio version(video version hasn't been released yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mqX9twdyYo
Child sacrifice was part of Semitic culture. The story of Issac and Jacob (Ishmael and Jacob in the Arab scriptures) teaching against the practice of child sacrifice is pretty good evidence that it was an old practice and that Hebrew and Arab cultures were trying to move on from it. Phoenicians, also Semitic, never moved on from the practice.
Well, either they did or they didn't. The confusion comes when we try to apply modern outlooks to people from a different civilization, and end up saying "well, I'd never do that, so neither would they," and we end up ignoring evidence that doesn't fit our preconception of the world.
A simple fact of history being controversial is a function of bias. The worship of Moloch and its attendant ritual of child sacrifice is attested to in many scriptures.
Not really. My ancestors were Norse and practiced human sacrifice. There are also some archeological findings indicating that they also practiced child sacrifice. Doesn't bother me at all, I sm not my ancestors.
I think the most charitable interpretation of OP is that there is no controversy over the fact that pagan Semites practiced ritual human (child) sacrifice.
I'm drawing a blank here, but what do you mean "state-sanctioned castration"? Do you have examples?
The only thing I can think of is the chemical castration that is done to sex offenders or to treat cancer, but for the most part, this is done to adults, and not children.
Or are you referring to something else that would affect children of both sexes?
As the other poster mentioned they're referencing treatment of trans children.
They are also factually incorrect as surgical intervention is not and has never been part of the recommended treatment for children. As such their intentions are either misinformed or malicious.
> Interestingly, child sacrifice is still with us, in the form of state-sanctioned castration. Plus ça change...
This isn't happening.
Intersex children being force-ably sexually re-assigned, that was a thing we did for a long time and which has only barely slowed in recent times. The only sexual modification of children going on is the regularization of the body.
Great timing on empires who sacrifice children. Today this article about Instagram facilitating child sex trafficking was released. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/instagram-facilitates-vast...
Mel Gibson is about to release a four part documentary about child sex trafficking and sacrifice. I expect to see a bunch of reminders of how Mel is antisemitic and such to gatekeep people from watching it.
I am surprised this is a big deal, I thought it was well accepted. (Other) Phoenicians did it, Romans practised human (not sure about child) sacrifice and I thought the Carthaginians themselves recorded doing it?
Humans are pretty crazy and we shouldn't pretend otherwise...
“Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, and human sacrifice is found in many historical societies, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon”
The whole article is about this not being well accepted by ancient authors nor by modern historians, that’s why it’s a big deal
No the article is about how child sacrifice by Carthaginians was widely accepted by ancient (Greek and Roman) authors, but has been doubted by (some) 20th Century historians and archeologists.
I guess it depends on what it means "accepted"; my sentence is indeed ambiguous.
Romans did not accept (like) the fact that Carthaginians sacrificed children. They did accept (acknowledge, which is a much better word here) the fact that children were sacrificed there.
Some modern historians/archeologies did not acknowledge (nor presumably like) that at all.
Not much of anything the Carthaginians recorded survived. Their civilisation was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek. So nearly everything about Carthaginian history is naturally controversial for that reason.
> was destroyed as thoroughly as possible, and the only proper accounts of it are Roman and Greek.
Physical destruction/genocide wasn’t really necessarily for that. Texts written on papyrus just don’t last very long. Nothing survives from the Etruscans either and the Roman never actively suppressed their culture as far as we know. People just stopped speaking the language and texts were no longer copied.
We know so much about many middle eastern civilizations exclusively because they were using clay tablets and liked making inscriptions on rocks. Had they used more perishable materials we’d know significantly less about them than the Carthaginians.
I'm pretty sure that the total destruction of their cities, and all institutions of their society is one of the main reasons nobody was around to preserve their language or history. There are almost no primary sources of Carthaginian history, the only real close-to-contemporary sources are an incomplete account from Polybius (a Greek, who lived as a Roman slave), and Livy (a Roman aristocrat born 100 years after the destruction of Carthage). If you want to make statements about what Carthage and it's people were like, your options for source material are a mostly destroyed archeological record, or second hand accounts from outsiders mostly comprised of Carthage's enemies.
Yes, but that more or less applies to every civilization besides Greeks and Romans regardless of what happened to them (and even the amount of Greek/Romans text that have survived is tiny). Maybe Egypt is an exception.
For instance most of what we know about ancient Persia comes from Greek sources. As far as we know more the Greek/Romans had preserved much more information about Achaemenids than their Sassanian successors.
Even if Carthage was somehow semi peacefully annexed into the Roman empire and and their upper classes were assimilated into the Roman society over time more or less the same thing would have happen (just that we’d have had a longer window during which Punic texts could’ve been translated to Greek/Roman). This happened all the time after all.
I was in a museum in Sardinia (was part of Carthage) sometime ago and saw some of the tophets mentioned in the article. The argument from the linked article was repeated on one of the info boards - that the Romans demonized their enemies and lots of our sources on alleged child sacrifice come from them. I am not sure about the Carthagenian sources on the matter, but they did not make it into the argument, so I assume the evidence was either slimmer or newer.
Romans almost exclusively only sacrificed foreigners who were basically subhuman (and even that was exceptionally rare). Sacrificing your own citizens was something else…
as late as the 19th century, "accepted practices of the time" was a defense for some genocides. Source: british historians documenting acts of war by early British Kings
Ritual sacrifice, including of children is well documented all across the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice). So it's not a question of likelihood, we've dug up plenty of gravesites documenting it especially in Mesoamerica. There's even some modern examples, with an isolated tribe of Chilean natives sacrificing a 5 year old after the 1960 Valdivia earthquake.
You have it sort of backwards. These practices are only 'horror' by modern standards, it doesn't make sense to disregard history because we live by other values than an ancient civilization.
I think the fact that it seems incredible to us that people could sacrifice their children is a testament to the advance of civilisation.
children were not always so precious. if memory does not fail me, in the 20th century, there were still laws that stated that children were property of their parents who disposed of their lifes as they wish. that means you could kill your child without consequences. child labor : legal. etc...
They lived at the Malthusian population limit of their ecosystem anyway.
Sacrificing children was just another way to get rid of excess population and would absolutely improve the lives of whoever was left.
Any children not sacrificed would have to die by disease, war, or starvation at some point anyway, because again, the population cannot grow above the Malthusian limit.
This core concept - that preindustrial people all lived at their Malthusian population limit - is incredibly important in understanding the preindustrial world and it's shocking that it's not more broadly understood and applied.
They mention it was documented by the Greeks & Romans, but was dismissed at the time as politically motivated slander. Those records plus physical evidence give it more weight, so I say the former is more likely.
You would be surprised: a child that was difficult to provide for and had no future of providing for you in your old age wasn't that hard to discard even 100 years ago.
In a society where tons of kids are born and half of them don't live to see their fifth birthday, children's lives are a lot less valuable than in the Western societies of 2023, where kids are something of a rare resource and they are expected to live full, long lives.
This difference needs to be taken into account when thinking about various probabilities in the past.
Psychologically, I don't think the value of children has changed. Mourning the death of children is as ancient a literary trope as any.
But from a microeconomic point of view, children were more valuable in pre-industrial times. Most people worked in agriculture or the trades and lived in multi-generation households, and children were necessary to help with chores and eventually take over the main occupation and care for the elder parents. There was no retirement fund, just your children. Food and clothing were more expensive and childbirth was risky, so children represented a major investment. That they were sacrificed is a testament to how much value people placed on the ritual, not the lack of value of children. See also how valuable farm animals were sacrificed.
That is definitely true, we have diaries from folks who lived in the 1600s in London where you have the different reactions to their children dying at different age. They loved and cared for them but with close to a quarter of kids dying in their first year, it was something most families came to expect and experience but that they never completely numb to. When an older child died, it was an even bigger deal because they'd got past that dangerous first few years and you weren't expecting it.
What's interesting is that a "good" name would often be reused when a child died. So a former leader of my country had three daughters called "Catherine" (IIRC), but two are buried beside each other in a small gold mining town's cemetery, having died young, the last Catherine living to adulthood.
History as social science was basically invented between 19th and 20th century. Ancient writers generally had agenda and they happily filled missing pieces with ideologically-fueled speculation.
but, intelligence is not new. There were astute readers at that time, too. So there must have been a spectrum, and reading people knew something about that spectrum.. from fawning sycophants of the current despot, to tellers of tall tales, to scholars, and those close to traders and travelers.
Child and human sacrifices were surprisingly common across the world. Many countries had to pass special laws to ban these practices - but it hasn't yet been rooted out.
Romans practiced ritual human killing, too. They acted very haughty about others doing it, but they buried people under a temple when Hannibal whomped them at Cannae and they very happily and publicly performed ritual killings of prisoners of war during triumphs. Cato thought that was fine--why then, not, Roma delenda est?
Another example that comes to mind: the xōchiyāōyōtl in Mexico did involve human sacrifice, and it even was a nontrivial ramp-up in the act from pre-Mexica societies. Such acts then used in part to legitimate oppressive activity by European colonizers. They needed, after all, to be civilized. But contemporaneously Christopher Columbus himself, the guy who's got pictures in American government buildings, instituted "bring us impossible amounts of gold every year or we chop off your hands" and "test your swords' sharpness by hacking off children's legs" when lording over the Taino.
This is not an incongruity that can be reconciled, it must be understood and accepted, and the idea of "taking sides" in this flippant way for a conflict two thousand years old is deeply, deeply foolish.
> Eradicating the whole civilization because of some obscure practice that most of the civilizations at the time practised to some extent?
That wasn’t even close to the to being the reason or even one of the reasons why they did that.
> He was a racist, war criminal and very corrupt politician.
Weren’t they all? You couldn’t be a military leader without being a war criminal or a politician without being corrupt by modern standards. That wasn’t really possible in the ancient world..
Feigning shock or disgust at ancient practices might be fun but it’s pretty futile..
There are still significant artifacts from Carthage and the city rose back very quickly. My guess is that the same-same of war happened: The elite were killed but the rest of the population was spared. Rome probably spread this rhetoric to embolden its image. Let's just say this was a different time.
No it’s not. It’s a bit more documented than some previous examples but we have written evidence for this occurring in the middle east and archeological evidence that would suggest it in many other places..
Rome declared war on Carthage when it tried to expand West (Modern day Algeria). Carthage was warned about this but decided to try its' hand. Let's just say that the Roman at the time were not Chamberlain.
He wanted to destroy and almost exterminate/enslave a massive city for much more practical reasons than stopping child sacrifice (which was a side note at best..). How could you question that?
For instance Plutarch and Livy described one of the campaigns he lead in Spain.
Every successful military commander in ancient Rome was a war criminal by modern standards. That not a particularly interesting statement considering how obvious it is but it’s not like anyone could disagree with it.
In many cases, we should look at a civilization's institutions rather than at its individuals to judge its degree of "advancement". Institutions are often much closer to the ideals of a society than its people.
For example, in many countries, people are quick to suspect someone, whereas the judicial system sees a defendant as innocent until proven guilty. (Imperfectly, of course, but better than what people do.)
Mimetic Theory, developed by Rene Girard, is a good entry point for modern people to get some insight into why this practice was (and still is in some places) so common.
Typically the gods did not look favorably on inferior product being placed on the alter. Even King Kong demands the hottest young babe in the tribe, does he not? Did anyone ever “sacrifice” hoary old men or women to gods? (Only in passage of kingship did humans ritually kille the elder males.)
So “religious” thinking would tend to demand something dear. This is inline with an inherent bug in human psyche — a false thought - that God wants something from us and is prone to making unreasonable demands from humanity.
We live in an age so devoid of sacrifice that it's hard for us to wrap our heads around why this was so common and so important. This act would add a layer of irrefutable legitimacy to the groups religious beliefs, and as such would make those beliefs into a unbreakable social bond. Grief is a powerful social glue, and when you use it so intentionally and solemnly it becomes a core part of the social fabric that held these groups together for hundreds of years in an ultra-hostile environment.
“Strictly speaking, you see, it’s prayers that go up to the gods,” said the priest doubtfully.
“As I understand it,” said Moist, “the gift of sausages are offered to Offler by being fried, yes? And the spirit of the sausages ascends unto Offler by means of the smell? And then you eat the sausages?”
“Ah, no. Not exactly. Not at all,” said the young priest, who knew this one. “It might look like that to the uninitiated, but, as you say, the true sausagidity goes straight to Offler. He, of course, eats the spirit of the sausages. We eat the mere earthly shell, which believe me turns to dust and ashes in our mouths.”
“That would explain why the smell of sausages is always better than the actual sausage, then?” said Moist. “I’ve often noticed that.”
The priest was impressed. “Are you a theologian, sir?”
There is this possibility to consider. Another Muslim Saint, Junaid (R), said “Water takes the color of the cup it is poured in”. The Prophet (SAWS) said “There is no I but Allah”.
You can always fashion a new cup to suit your contingent condition. But the spirit of Sacrifice, and the Enjoying of the pleasures is eternal and immutable. Is it possible that ritual sacrifice, however distorted by the understanding of ancient people, is an intrinsic impetus of the conscious knowing, feeling, desiring (and at times afflicted) being known as Human, guiding us to detachment so that we may too enjoy without attachment, like God.
Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack. There is a reason that this practice crops up in various civilizations seemingly independently, and it is not a pretty one - at least not by contemporary moral sensibilities.
It is impossible to understand the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac, for example, without addressing the context in which such a narrative was popularized and eventually codified into a sacred text.
> Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack.
Maybe not. Humans first do something practical, and then use rituals and tradition to justify it.
Here's an alternative scenario:
In an age where abortion had a higher chance of killing the woman than childbirth, this was the only practical abortion.
It's only after the fact that it gets justified as a sacrifice demanded by the gods.
And once the practice is accepted, the next step is to forcefully sacrifice the children of your political enemies, i.e. the woman is not making the choice here.
Is there an objective reason to find infanticide worse than abortion, besides cultural mores? It's worse for the performer, certainly, because you have to look at it before you kill it, but a newborn doesn't have any more personality than a fetus.
Well, I think abortion should be allowed until the child is 18. Basically, if parents think their child is a disappointment they should be allowed to cut their losses and start over. /s
If an infant is able to survive outside of another person without being hooked up to modern medical equipment I would say there is a very big difference between it an something which cannot.
If an infant is able to survive outside of another person without being hooked up to modern medical equipment I would say there is a very big difference between it an something which cannot.
What happens when we invent artificial wombs? It isn't that far away.
I'm saying the morality shouldn't depend on the convenience of technological limitations. A hundred years ago a six month fetus wasn't viable. Now they are. Would abortion still be moral if we could instantly and painlessly teleport a fetus into an artificial womb?
or men having children, which would both be a highly desirable option for society as well as completely knocking the (specious) women's rights/controlling (specifically female) bodies argument out from the equation.
Would it be acceptable to you to surgically remove the arm of, say, a 10 week old fetus, on the grounds that it is not able to survive outside the womb and therefore is just a piece of the mother's body at that point?
What would be the point of doing that? Let's go for something more relevant: would it be acceptable to you for me to force you to give a pint of blood every day to keep alive someone in a coma who could not live but for your blood?
would it be acceptable to you for me to force you to give a pint of blood every day to keep alive someone in a coma who could not live but for your blood?
Apt if the creation of the fetus wasn't your choice, but inaccurate if it was. If someone loses their balance and you grab their hand to stop them falling off a cliff, is it murder to deliberately let go before they regain their balance? Why can a person be legally compelled to sustain the life of a child after birth but not before?
What point do you need, isn't it a private matter to be decided only by the person who is housing the fetus?
But let's say there was a medical reason to do so for the sake of a child who was already born perhaps extremely premature and lost an arm in the process of extraction. By the standards given above, the already born child outranks the one still in the womb, and should be entitled to the arm if the owner of the womb agrees to donate it.
Your example is so far from relevance as to be really just an attempt to change the subject. The existence of some random person in a coma, unless they are my own child, or perhaps a clone, is not contingent upon actions undertaken with the participation (willing or not) of my reproductive system.
That’s not the only practical abortion, abortion existed in ancient times too. However, even after birth there were easier methods, infant exposure was common and is far easier for parents than sacrifice
>Humans first do something practical, and then use rituals and tradition to justify it.
take this and combine it with sibling
>And I think the conclusion of the Phoenicians was that people get away with, and are even rewarded for doing evil things, because the gods are into that sort of stuff.
"Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed, and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors, and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun."
That is from Ecclesiastes 4. The author was talking about the problem of evil - power was on the side of the oppressors. People were being evil, and getting away with it.
There's this idea that "the problem of evil" is, why does God permit this? I think that's too convenient. When people are being evil, and getting away with it, that's a problem not just for people who believe in a good God, but for people who believe goodness matters.
And I think the conclusion of the Phoenicians was that people get away with, and are even rewarded for doing evil things, because the gods are into that sort of stuff. The gods are sickos, so you're pretty much screwed, but get their attention with a ritual act of cruelty, and you might get a share of their power.
`Ibn Arabi has a splendid take on the entire affair. I read it in Toshihiko Izutsu’s Sufism and Taoism and it blew me away. In the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture, the story is touched upon, with an angel arriving just in the nick of time to tell Abraham to cease:
“””And when they had both submitted and he put him down upon his forehead, 104. We called to him, "O Abraham. You have fulfilled* the vision." Indeed, We thus reward the doers of good. Indeed, this was the clear trial. And We ransomed him with a great sacrifice”””
*Ibn Arabi has this as “you have believed the dream”.
“”” Then when the boy reached the age to work with him, Abraham said, “O my dear son! I have seen in a dream that I ˹must˺ sacrifice you. So tell me what you think.” He replied, “O my dear father! Do as you are commanded. Allah willing, you will find me steadfast.”
”””
In Izutzu [1] we read how Ibn Arabi, a very influential Muslim mystic-saint, had read the narrative as Abraham being still in thrall of the illusion of materiality (“the world”) and reading the signs of God literally. This vision then, a great trial, was entirely designed to knock sense into him, awakening him to a higher consciousness.
Abandoning/exposing infants (especially girls) was very widespread in the ancient word. It’s possible that ‘sacrifice’ was just a way to justify it through some ritual.
This didn’t really change untill the chirch started equating it with murder.
The Romans claimed this about themselves, but I'm not sure they're completely credible, at least about human sacrifice. The Roman Triumphal parade, for instance, included marching captured prisoners of war (often numbering in thousands), who would be led through the triumphal route up to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. There, the prisoners would be executed. The Romans may have claimed that they weren't committing human sacrifice, but this seems hard to believe, given that the soldiers were killed on the grounds of the temple of their chief god, literally honored with the title "best and greatest."
On the whole, the Romans were quite enlightened compared to the other brutal civilizations of the ancient world, being governed more by law than superstition, but they still had these quirks that wouldn't be eradicated till Christianity replaced the state religion.
One needs to be very careful about which things to label human sacrifice. It is possible to be very "inclusive" there. One popular example is the expression "sacrificed on the altar of progress", and the works of philosophers such as Adorno and Horckheimer on the topic, who argued that human sacrifice just takes a different form in modern civilisation, but is still present e.g. as victims of car traffic, suicides from depression or industrial accidents. Imho, this only serves to hinder any kind of productive discussion because things tend to be not comparable in any way if terms are _that_ mushy.
I'd define anything as human sacrifice that the culture performing the act would label thus. E.g. we, as a modern civilization, don't call an abortion, war or execution "human sacrifice", so it isn't. The Romans didn't consider executing prisoners as such, because the prisoners were just subhuman and it was just an execution, so it isn't. The Carthagians seemed to think they were doing a human sacrifice, so yes, they were.
> One popular example is the expression "sacrificed on the altar of progress", and the works of philosophers such as Adorno and Horckheimer on the topic, who argued that human sacrifice just takes a different form in modern civilisation, but is still present e.g. as victims of car traffic, suicides from depression or industrial accidents. Imho, this only serves to hinder any kind of productive discussion because things tend to be not comparable in any way if terms are _that_ mushy.
I'm not talking about car (or chariot?) accidents here, I'm talking about literally thousands of people being executed on the grounds of a temple dedicated to Rome's chief god. Certainly people died in the Circus Maximus, and that is just sporting accident. I wouldn't even call gladiatorial combat human sacrifice, since it was mostly an entertainment spectacle in a more brutal time.
We're talking about Romans taking prisoners captured in war, marching them to one of the most significant religious locations within the sacred boundaries of the city, and executing them.
My issue with just trusting the ancients is that they sometimes aren't trustworthy. It's very possible that Rome didn't admit this was human sacrifice because Roman culture condemned human sacrifice, and kind of turned a blind eye to the ethics of this ritual.
No. Human sacrifice, in the definition I have given, has a clearly defined purpose (which I didn't state, because I thought this was implicit): Winning favour with the god(s). That only works in any religion I know of if you declare the purpose of making a sacrifice before the gods in some way.
The Romans did this through the ritual of immolation, where the animal was marked as a sacrifice by spreading mola (wheat spelt) and salsa (salt) on it. No immolation, no sacrifice. If they killed someone without immolation, to them it didn't have the purpose of pleasing the gods and thus wasn't human sacrifice. Edit: "immolation" in this context might be somewhat different in the english meaning. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mola_salsa for what I mean.
A lot of religions (don't know about the Roman in that aspect) also frown upon the intent of a sacrifice being impure: If you do the sacrifice with more than just the goal of pleasing God, e.g. to additionally get rid of that obnoxious goat/cock/person/..., then God won't be pleased.
Why not just kill them on the Campus Martius, then? Or in the middle of the Forum? Or even on the steps of the Senate house, to symbolize the supremacy of Roman state institutions?
It's not the killings of prisoners themselves - those were common throughout the ancient world, alongside slavery. It's the fact that they killed them at the temple to the chief god.
In ancient religions, and especially Canaanite there was a great emphasis on bringing your best offerings to god, best fruits, most expensive wine and top meat.
It will be unusual that for children the unwanted ones suddenly are considered a good offering
> It will be unusual that for children the unwanted ones suddenly are considered a good offering
Seems like a win-win for me. The child is suddenly no longer unwanted but your ‘most prized possession’.
To be serious I’m not necessarily claiming that sacrifice was a direct alternative to infanticide just that there might have been some links and generally the fact that infanticide was quite widespread made sacrifice a bit more palatable.
Maybe it started by people sacrificing what they considered most valuable to them -- their children.
Or maybe it started in a time of famine or other stress, where the young children were likely to die anyways. The reasoning of it seem to be 1.) Sacrifice your child and maybe make a god bring rain or otherwise change the situation. Or 2.) Do nothing and the kid dies anyway, and the famine (or whatever) continues.
> It is impossible to understand the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac
Huh? It is quite easy to understand for me.
Abraham and Sarah were childless and Sarah was infertile/too old DRC. Abraham prayed for an heir and miraculously Sarah gives life to Isaac.
Yahwe demands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the most precious "thing" he has, to test his belief.
Since Abraham does as he is told, a angel stops him from killing Isaac in the last second.
Then he is promised by Yahwe his descendants that his descendants will be plentiful.
A myth/fairy tale IMHO but to each the most. Dawkins said that the god from the old testament is one of the most vile characters humans ever made up. To sick/tired to give examples, there are many.
> Dawkins said that the god from the old testament is one of the most vile characters humans ever made up.
That’s just pure demagoguery. There are plenty of examples of much crueler cults we just don’t have as many surviving texts describing their practices.
Compared to someone like Huitzilopochtli Yahweh was pretty chill…
1. God promises Abraham that his descendants will be numerous as 'stars in the sky'
2. Abraham and Sarah have 1 kid in their old age: Isaac, the only chance for God to fulfill the promise
3. God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his compliance indicates his faith in God's promise (that it can happen outside of his control, and beyond his knowledge)
4. God stops it and provides a 'ram in the thicket' as substitute, note the sacrifice still occurs.
5. Sacrifice is required to save the Israelites in Egypt from the angel of death, Passover begins.
6. We see a whole system and culture of sacrifices instituted in the tabernacle and later the temple as a method of 'atonement'
7. Jesus presents himself as the ultimate atonement or 'propitiation', closing the circle
Essentially in the Bible sacrifice is integral to the entire story, beginning to end. In some ways the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is a peek into the nature of justice and how in the Biblical God's conception of justice wrongdoing must be paid for by blood, just not necessarily the blood of the perpetrator themselves. All members of Israel are responsible for providing their sacrifices indicating that no one is free from guilt providing the backdrop for Christianity's pessimistic take on the nature of Man.
Imagine if someone came up to you tomorrow and said "God talked to me and told me I also need to sacrifice my child." You'd assume they were crazy, hopefully to the point of calling the authorities.
It's impossible to look at that story from a modern context and think Abraham's actions are remotely right or rational. Why would anyone trust a god who does that? But if child sacrifices are a somewhat common thing, Yahwe looks like the good god who doesn't actually make you kill your kid, just asks that you're willing to kill your kid.
It took several thousands of years for us to come to this conclusion.
In the ancient word god/gods/divine spirit/etc. offered a perfectly reasonable explanation of how and why the world works. There were simply no better alternatives..
Reading comments like this is so surreal. Millions of very normal, well-adjusted people around the world feel that God speaks to them. Have you literally never interacted with a religious person before, or are you just an idiot?
My mother donates 10% of her income and volunteers at homeless shelters because she feels that God wants her to. Other than that she lives like pretty much everyone else. Oh no, so terrible! Someone get this woman into the asylum!
Yes, I have interacted with plenty of religious person,s this is where my personal stance and comment above are rooted. Yes, I know these people are well integrated into society. But this doesn't change my analysis. I consider religious nuts at least untrustworthy and in some cases outright dangerous to others. If someone spends his whole life in such an elaborate hallucination, nobody knows what they are capable of if an extraordinary situation happens to them. BTW, I had the pleasure of being sent to a catholic school for eight years. There, I learnt that church-goers and their minions are not to be trusted. BTW, I appreciate you calling me an idiot. Nothing else expected, that is why I keep away from your sorts.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve met this particular delusion before: someone who was bullied by a teacher or something and now they think they have it all figured out.
I’m sorry you experienced this trauma or whatever. It has damaged your worldview to the point where someone calling you an idiot once is irrefutable proof that we should shun and discriminate against an entire group of people. Usually we call that bigotry though, and we don’t feel sorry for people who practice it.
And while we are throwing out FWIWs, I myself am not religious.
> And while we are throwing out FWIWs, I myself am not religious.
But judging from your way of remote diagnosing people over the internet, you are at least a very qualified psychiatrist, right?
You aparently dont consider religious people untrustworthy and protentially dangerous. That is fine, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I don't share yours. EOT.
EOT? No, it’s not. You cannot discriminate against people because of certain characteristics. To do so is wrong. Race, age, gender, sexuality, nationality - and also religion.
You don’t need to be a qualified psychiatrist to have a moral compass.
I can’t believe I’m explaining religious freedom to someone on HN. This website is supposedly full of smart, enlightened progressives. We figured out it is wrong to hate people for their religion like 300 years ago?…
North Africa / Fertile Crescent are not as fertile as say the Nile or the deep European forests. There are also much less rivers in these civilizations. My guess is that this was a measure of population control as the natural death rate was not high enough for the region. Since there was no birth-control method, the only method left is to kill the kid.
It's a good idea to disguise this as "child sacrifice" as in the "GOD" asked you to do this. Kind of make you at ease with the decision and execution since you'd not do it on your own.
But hey, that's just my guess and am a random dude on the Internet.
North Africa / Fertile Crescent are not as fertile as say the Nile or the deep European forests
North Africa and the Fertile Crescent are great examples of climate change.
They're deserts now but they were lush fertile lands several thousand years ago. The Nile floodplain was also substantially larger and more fertile than it is today.
Violence and the Sacred is a book that tries to answer, among some other things, why ritual sacrifices used to happen. I haven’t finished it yet, René Girard could perhaps be a bit meandering, but it’s an insightful read so far (and impossible to do justice in a summary).
He observes that in older human societies a transgression could easily lead to an infinite loop of vendetta-like bloodshed. He also observes that sacrifices always targeted a victim that is nearly a member of society (if not an actual human outcast or child, then an animal which people like and are reasonably close to on a daily basis) but never quite.
Part of his theory appears to be that ritual sacrifice (a murder that follows a particular procedure) eventually emerged as a viable steam vent that made societies more resilient. It lets out the impulse that causes members of society to be violent to each other, but focuses this impulse on someone who is adjacent to yet outside of that society, carries no social function, and is unable to push back or seek revenge, thus defusing the impulse safely (for society).
(A functioning justice system in modern civilization performs a similar role, taking revenge out of the hands of the victim.)
Any references, or we are supposed to go off your word? René Girard gives plenty in the book.
He also notes that sacrifice of an outcast is a thing, I think I mentioned it already: once a person is stripped of his or her membership in society, that person becomes a perfectly valid sacrificial scapegoat—no matter whether that person used to be a warrior or a noble.
Note also that, while we are talking about ritual sacrifice here, plain simple murder was as much of a thing back then. The two are very different things.
Most classical histories include some ethnographic descriptions of foreign rituals. Check out Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, etc.
For a modern and extensive compilation, Frazer famously wrote a huge multi-volume work that documents sacrificial myths from all over the world in The Golden Bough. He selects and uses them to make his own argument, but you’re not likely to find a more comprehensive compilation.
I’m not sure why you are bringing abortion into this. The Carthaginian’s would not consider what they were doing abortion and most modern people would also not consider this related to abortion. Is there some correlation that you wanted to make?
Perhaps they knew something we didn't know. I'm convinced human sacrifice is more than just, lets appease this deity or usher in a form of eugenics/genocide. These people were far more advanced then we give them credit for.
> It is interesting that civilizations have engaged in ritual sacrifice. The question is why?
A few thoughts:
- Sacrifice and civilization are closely related. To live in a society you have to sacrifice some autonomy, some of your (and your family's) goals and some resources. Further, to prepare for the future you have to make a sacrifice in the present. Many people even sacrifice their present selves for their future (not born yet) offspring. It is only logical (if a bit esoteric) then, to think that making a bigger sacrifice will transmute into bigger positives.
- Christianity (not that familiar with Judaism or Islam) was revolutionary because Jesus already made the ultimate sacrifice, essentially freeing everyone from the obligation.
- If one takes a sober view, the history of ritual sacrifices has not ended (and probably never will). Mao was willing to sacrifice millions to bring about Communism (read: Paradise / heaven on earth). Similarly for the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Red Khmer, Robespierre etc. They all explicitly stated in their own writing that the deaths were a worthwhile sacrifice. That is the psychopathic variant of ritual sacrifice, slaughtering a goat to Zeus looks a lot more tame and rational in comparison, no?
We can safely add plenty of liberal democracies to that list if the criteria is "willing to cause the deaths of millions to realize their political project". At the very least Britain and the US.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth bringing it back around to politics (I wish I lived in a world where I didn't have anything to say about it), but cancel culture has shown that people still love to gather 'round for a good old fashioned sacrifice.
Homeboy just compared human sacrifice to [current social justice talking points]. Most who died of covid were overweight, old, and had preexisting medical conditions related to lifestyle. They contributed to their own "sacrifice".
People who wonder how we justified sacrificing humans before. This is how.
We legitimately believed that sacrificing humans was helping prosperity, etc. We’re doing the same now with a few extra steps of indirection and abstraction.
Authoritative religious figures stealing baby from a mothers arm and the local shaman sacrificing it on an altar = same as driving a car. Hacker news is a RIOT.
I think it still exists in some extreme groups. Just think about any cause worth dying for an you essentially find an argument for a sacrifice.
In fact I remember the Texas governor Dan Patrick saying a lot of grandparents would be willing to sacrifice themselves during Covid for the economy (oddly he did not seem to be willing to lead by example).
To be clear, I do not object to the concept of abortion. I welcome it, in fact, because I don't generally like other people and I don't expect them to get better. That being said, I still consider the practice to be barbaric. The very same practice that I support, yes. Does that make me a barbarian? I think it actually does. If that is what I am, then I have accepted it.
That's a fine skeptical attitude, but to put it into practice you'd have to be familiar with the relevant scholarship, read the paper, independently verify its arguments and claims, and come to an informed conclusion. You'd also have to be familiar with the standards of evidence used in the relevant fields, which aren't the same as the standards of evidence used in the hard sciences—they can't be because it's largely impossible to carry out experiments and there is a paucity of available evidence.
It's mostly abduction—the best explanation for the available evidence—which wouldn't fly in the hard sciences, but it's all that's available to archeologists and ancient historians. If your heuristic is "hard proof or bullshit," you'll inevitably reject everything that comes out of these fields. (also, history isn't any sort of science, soft or otherwise; it's a branch of the humanities).
Science? That would be my first guess unless there's reason to suspect otherwise. The underlying paper was published in an academic journal with at least some history, so that speaks for the authors intend.
The fact that there's a press release about it stems from the need for marketing on the university side and it's correct to be skeptical, but I can't see any indication that they misrepresent the papers findings.
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 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.
Well you're not a historian right? So you can always opt to have no judgement.
But, in any given field, the job is to sort the probable propositions from the improbable.
The dialectic, the article establishes, amongst historians has been:
Yes, there was sacrifice, the greeks/etc. said so
No, there wasn't, we believe propaganda too readily
Yes, there was, multiple sources (incl. archeology) now corroborate
I agree with your scepticism about the "speculative sciences" insofar as these speculations should determine high-risk policies today. But the job of "scientific history" is to produce better interpretations than those "floating around in popular folk history".
How about this: my family gave me a firsthand account of what happened at the end of WW2 in my hometown (which was mass executions by a mob, with all the kids invited to come and see, one of those kids was my grandfather, grandmother and another one of those kids became professor and bartender in the student union). They used a bridge over the central river in the town and hung several dozen people, including 1 kid. People watched from the next bridge over, the kids were given most of the front part of the bridge to look on. My grandmother claims she didn't dare leave. For weeks afterwards, dozens of people disappeared or were outright found murdered in the street before revenge killings slowly died down. This was in the center of Northwest Europe.
I also know what the history books and the state says, namely that no such thing happened.
In fact this happened in essentially every town, all but the smallest, in Northwest Europe. There were local differences. In some cities kids got executed because of who their parents were. Sometimes the Nazi soldiers were gone, people in hiding came out, and the local government turned out to have internalized Nazi ideology ... and executed them. Mostly the government never looked at it's own role in what happened, and CERTAINLY never did anything to return possessions of deported people, mostly but certainly not exclusively Jews. Sometimes opportunists used the opportunity to execute local rich families or rival farmers and confiscate their possessions. In another relatively famous story, the local police commander knew that civil servants and things like notaries, but also some youth services related clergy, were cooperating with the Nazi government ... and executed them. In some places it even came to a battle between pro- and anti-Nazi forces (yes, after liberation).
You will find some reference to some of what happened in history books about the South Part of the Netherlands, but this happened everywhere. The government denies it happened in my hometown, and in fact denies it happened anywhere in the country. A general amnesty was declared by the Americans some months later, mostly out of total desperation that they were losing everyone, and that it needed to stop and instead they'd do the Nuremberg trials, which were limited to the worst of the worst, and exclusively people from the actual Nazi party.
Of course, all the European governments did all decide they were never going to repay or return anything that was stolen, not to Jews, not to those rich families, not to the Church, nothing. War pensions were awarded to survivors of the camps, the same or similar to what was awarded to soldiers.
Western European Governments just wanted control, and let murders happen, provided official documents "confirming" possessions of goods stolen through massacres, if only they were allowed to stay in power.
This included falsifying birth certificates for a LOT of children where, shall we say, parental responsibilities were redistributed. This practice would continue for decades after the war ended.
> My growing distrust of soft sciences over the past few years means that this article did not move the needle in me to believe Carthage practiced child sacrifice, not one millimeter.
There is a trove of independent historic stories and tales about child sacrifice in Carthage from Plutarch, Plato and even the Bible. In some sense I think it would more obvious than not to assume that child sacrifice did take place.
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.
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.
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)."
> There is a trove of independent historic stories and tales about child sacrifice in Carthage from Plutarch, Plato and even the Bible.
So? Historic stories and tales from a time when those things weren't written down but handed orally from generation to generation are generally far removed from the truth.
After all, even in an age where almost everything is written down we still battle to separate baseless accusations from substantiated facts.
Why do you think they weren’t written done? Carthage and many other from which we have no surviving texts were highly literate societies and there is no reason to think that Greek or Roman historians did not use those sources.
Roman brothel excavations (in the old vincas, villages surrounding Roman frontier forts) would have numerous (>50) holes chipped in the sod with sad remains of tiny human bones. The unwanted children of the employees of the brothel, the unwanted and unsupportable offspring of Roman soldiers sowing their wild oats and not stepping up.
Not a thing to debate. Sure infant mortality was bad back then but not that bad. And no wanted, loved child got stuffed into a hole chipped in the sod back of the brothel.
I believe the article is about ritual sacrifice, to a deity, and not what you describe that to me just sounds like the misery of no practical means of contraception or abortion.
True. This was to show that child death was no big deal. That was being disputed and compared to modern sensibilities. Just illustrating how vastly differently ancient people viewed this.
The "soft sciences" are harder (more difficult) to do than the "hard" sciences in many ways.
Less evidence just laying about just waiting to be tested (archaeology, ancient history), non-deterministic subjects (humans), not easily reproducible environments (society). Quantum mechanics has it easy in comparison.
Is it any surprise that the consensus goes back and form a few times.
Even when the hard scientists have something 'simple' to study like the deterministic, macro-scale universe they still get it wrong: how long was the Big Bang Theory not taking seriously?
Just because its difficult doesn't mean we should take speculation and guesses as scientific fact. It's okay to say "we don't know, we'll probably never know for sure".
Especially because the stakes are so much lower. Ancient Carthage really does not matter. The ancient world is full of compelling stories, but ultimately they are just that. Whether Carthaginians sacrificed babies does not matter to the modern world at all.
Carthage was a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians (Sidon, Tyre) were independently described by other cultures as having a national cult that sacrificed children. These descriptions are preserved in the Bible. The struggle with this cult was a significant formative experience of Judaism that lasted many generations.
In this case you have multiple societies independently telling the same thing about the same society. Seems about as credible as it gets in a situation like this.
Also it’s not like killing infants was a big deal for the Greeks. There were even a bit shocked by their perceived lack of female infanticide in the Etruscan society.
There was no love lost between the Jews and Romans. The civilizations developed independently, and the survival of Judaism required rejection of the Roman world view in most things.
I don’t know. My reading of ancient anti-Christian polemic seems to show that Greeks and Romans familiarized themselves with Jewish sources enough to use them to bolster their arguments. One example being the story of Jesus having been fathered by a Roman soldier named Pantera.
> and my only thought is, did they really have access to so much more credible evidence that all historians before 2014 didn't?
It was really only after the 1970s that academia pushed the no child sacrifice in Carthage narrative. If it’s the modern humanities department that you have a problem with, then the child sacrifice denial is an innovation created by that system to begin with.
Why do you think the Carthaginians didn't sacrifice children? One one hand you have various accounts from different people claiming they did; maybe they were all mistaken or lying or repeating rumors.. nothing solid but claims nonetheless. There's a little bit of archeological evidence to back it up too.
On the other hand you have... what? Are there any surviving ancient claims of the Carthaginians being wrongly slandered with this claim? What is your reason for assuming they did not? Innocent until proven guilty? It's not a court, and by that standard you might as well declare any infamous ancient person innocent since the hard evidence is long gone and none of the claimed witnesses can be cross examined. A modern court couldn't convict Genghis Khan of mass murder and war crimes in absentia, all the remaining evidence against that man is hearsay at best, but I don't think that's a reason to assume he was innocent.
Maybe it's an appeal to the fundamental goodness of human nature? That the Carthaginians are assumed to be innocent because what they're accused of goes against intrinsic human nature? Surely not; human nature includes the capacity for all manner of brutality; proven in the modern era.
As with the Carthaginians, it was also long-fashionable to downplay or even deny Mesoamerican human sacrifice, until the weight of the archeological evidence corroborating the scale of the Conquistadors' accounts became too great: https://www.science.org/content/article/feeding-gods-hundred...
> A lot of things are claimed by researchers in the soft sciences, and I take all of it with a grain of salt
The "soft sciences" have a strong left-wing bias in general (c.f. Haidt), and if anything, the tendency would be to want to downplay the atrocities perpetrated by non-whites, so your skepticism seems misdirected.
It is about time that we call out soft sciences for what they are. Pretty much a hoax and a way to escape real work when going to university. Two of my partners both have academic degrees in soft sciences, one even made it to a PhD. And both pretty much lack understanding of the scientiific process. This is horrifying, because society treats them as if they should know.
"As the relationships between scientific practice and social, archaeological and historical interpretations continue to be debated in the discipline at large (McGovern 1995; Jones 2001; Knapp 2002), it should perhaps not come as a surprise that we insist that it is critical that all types or ‘genres’ of evidence be taken into account in relation to the tophets as both a historical phenomenon and a series of archaeological contexts. We all have to work within the limits of our own expertise, whether as scientists, archaeologists, philologists or epigraphers, but we should also strive in the humanities as much as in the sciences to apply the highest standards of academic rigour, without preconceptions, in order to formulate falsifiable hypotheses and interpretations that take into account the full range of available sources—however strange we may find the results..."
I don't know, that sounds like a pretty good "understanding of the scientific process". (Admittedly, I'm just an astrophysicist, so maybe I don't understand "the scientific process".)
Plenty of engineers, MDs, and other people with credentials from a 'hard' science don't know the scientific process. Just because two people you know also fall into that category doesn't mean we have some sort crisis in academia.
And if you think that's bad, just wait till you hear about string theory! /s
Honestly this is a thin critique indeed. Social sciences are difficult precisely because they focus on phenomena with multi-factorial causes. Simple, high confidence, predictive theories are rare in psychology, sociology, anthropology etc, not because social scientists are committing a 'hoax'. In part because the factors impacting individual and collective behaviour are profoundly complex. And also because experimentalism in the social world is ethically, practically and epistemically fraught. We can't easily experiment on people or societies, and we can't stand as independent observers of phenomena of which we are part. We can develop hypotheses, develop experiments which attempt to falsify our null hypothesis, triangulate evidence from different observations and so on. We can model, observe, and infer. Over time we can develop frameworks that are measurably useful - from CBT to behavioural economics. But none of this is easy or definitive.
I note how common this perspective - that social science is some kind of conspiracy of faux expertise - is becoming on Hackernews. And how ironic it is, given that it's rooted in a lack of expertise or even familiarity with the topics critiqued.
This is just one forum in which the growing social skepticism of expertise in general, and science in particular is being articulated.
No, this belief is rooted in the observation that many social science fields, like social psychology, have replication rates in the 20% [1] range and are rife with obviously broken experimental methodology - hey let's go poll Amazon Mechanical Turk penny poll pros, and extrapolate it to everybody - perfect! And note that those replication studies are not picking low hanging fruit, they're going after the some biggest, highest impact factor journals there are in these fields. And so what that tells you is that if you take a given study in these fields, took what was said and assumed the exact opposite (or at least that it was not statistically relevant) you'd be right overwhelmingly more often than somebody who took these studies and went 'wow, that's what the science says I guess.'
Furthermore, there is a difference between something being difficult and it being impossible. Many don't realize that astrology was, for many centuries a "real" science, at least as real as modern social science is. It only ended, with some irony, because of the Church. They claimed that astrology's claims to be able to effectively divine the future was heretical and blasphemous, which led to astrology to go from a staple of education and science to being a fringe pseudoscience used for entertainment purposes only. I've no doubt that many practitioners of the time did genuinely feel that what they were doing was simply very difficult. And in fact there probably are some incidental correlations one can draw based on groups across time, so they would be able to show some "real" results, even if the entire field was completely bunk.
There's absolutely no way this is true. In a time where most of your children die of disease, you aren't going to just kill your healthy children for the comedy value. People do a lot of fucked up shit but nobody kills their own children. Other people's children sure. Giving children to the temple so that they'll become exhaulted priests sure. But they would never beat their own children to death because someone said it's a fun idea.
This is one of those moments like when historians say the royal poo wiper is the most prestigious role in court. If historians found modern texts they would think "ass kissing" is the highest ranking role in the country and that people who get selected to that role have all the power and influence.
> In a time where most of your children die of disease, you aren't going to just kill your healthy children for the comedy value.
On the other hand, in a time when there is no contraception available you kind of expect to have up to a dozen children over your lifetime. Sacrificing one of them seems easier that if they were the only child.
More controversially, note that Phoenicia invented the alphabet, had the first maritime global trade empire, colonized Europe in the 13th century BC, and Punic dynasties eventually sat on the Roman throne despite losing the Punic wars ostensibly, with one such Severan emperor dismantling the Pantheon of Jupiter. You can also trace Byzantine dynasties back eastward and later empires too have this connection through dynasties like the Komnenos. So those conspiracy theories claiming Jewish world domination are all rather quaint when you consider that Israel was just a backwater in the classical era and antiquity and it was actually Phoenician merchants who were kingmakers in Babylon and Egypt (due to their control of the Cedars of the Gods which were crucial lumber products for shipbuilding) and would later snowball with their holdings and power as time progressed, or maybe they conveniently fell into obscurity :^)
Are you saying Carthage won after the city of Carthage ceased to exist? Me thinks you've watched one too many "well, ackchyually" youtube videos... Severus was emperor almost 400 years after the destruction of Carthage and you're saying that Rome "ostensibly" won. I mean, what.
Me thinks you’ve watched too many armchair historian videos, actually. Carthage didn’t “cease to exist” lol what, you think the land was actually “salted”? Carthage became one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, then became the capital of the Vandal Kingdom who later sacked Rome, famously.
Salted or not, a city is made up of people, people who were either killed or enslaved. Rebuilt or not, it's not the same Carthage. And if you argue that an emperor from the region 400 years later somehow proves that Carthage didn't lose, you're not a serious person.
The "total destruction" of Carthage was a myth made up and passed along by the Romans as a warning to others. There is substantial historical evidence that "Roman Carthage" was just "Punic Carthage." Archaeologists note that there is substantial mixing of Roman and Punic architecture, meaning that Punic structures were still being constructed even after the city was supposedly destroyed or "rebuilt" as a Roman city.
The ground of Carthage clearly was not salted, as Carthage was able to reestablish itself as a major city.
However, a number of historians note that "salting" in this context is ritual, a small plot of land in a defeated city was ritually salted but the agricultural lands were not since the Romans expected to one day occupy those lands for themselves. Indeed, there is no historical evidence that any culture actually salted the lands of conquered foes, both because it would have been an incredibly stupid thing to do when wars were fought over the right to control agricultural lands, but also because salt was extremely expensive and difficult to acquire in ancient times. ("Salary" is derived from salt, which was so valuable in Roman times that it was used as a measure of value.) The amount of salt that would have been required to salt the lands of Carthage would have equaled the salaries of the entire Roman army. "Salting the earth" as a meme didn't actually arise until the 17th or 18th century, when industrial salt production finally made salt cheap and plentiful.
> So those conspiracy theories claiming Jewish world domination are all rather quaint when you consider that Israel was just a backwater
You realize Phoenicia and Israel are neighbors and two very small countries? The distance from Tel Aviv to Beirut is only 200Km. They are practically the same people except at some point in history they diverged in religion and became hostile to one another. Maybe if they kept sacrificing their children then... okay, I'll see myself out.
Guys the Ashkenazim maintained about 90% genetic isolation for about 1,000 years and they literally lived in cities a couple dozen meters from other Europeans. I'm not wrong.
One was a global trade empire with colonies across the Mediterranean as far as present-day Gibraltar. The other was a desert backwater. The Temple of Solomon was built by the Tyrian king Hiram, Tyre and Sidon being the major cities of Phoenicia, or Canaan.
Most if not all Mediterranean civilizations practiced child sacrifice, for Minoans the keywords for those with access to scientific papers is "The Southern House of Knossos" and ofcourse the 14 youths being sent each year to the Minotaur
Most Ministries of culture of the respective countries have not financed further research to this arguably interesting topic