Carthage Must Be Destroyed (12 page)

The everyday nature of these offerings strongly suggests that the Carthaginians expected the afterlife to be similar to the life that they had lived on earth. Grave inscriptions support this theory, speaking of a soul that eats and drinks, and warning the living against opening the grave and disturbing the deceased.
³¹
The Carthaginians appear to have believed that the soul split into two when a person died. The
néphesh
, the physical part of the soul, stayed in the tomb and had the same needs as a living person, whereas the spiritual embodiment of the dead person’s soul, the
rouah
, left to reside in the world of the dead.
³²

Wealthier individuals were often buried with a number of luxury items that tell us much about Carthage as a consumer and increasingly a producer of such goods. Although at first luxury goods were imported from the Levant, Egypt and other areas of the Near East, by the mid seventh century Carthage had become a major manufacturer itself through the establishment of an industrial area just outside the city walls, with potters’ kilns and workshops for purple-dye production and metalworking.
³³
The city now became a major manufacturer of terracotta figurines, masks, jewellery and delicately carved ivories, which were then exported throughout the western Phoenician colonies.
³⁴

However, the growing regional importance of Carthage cannot be measured by its industrial output alone. The city was now a major consumer of food and raw materials that the limited nature of its hinterland meant it could not produce for itself. This in turn would have had a major impact on the organization of other Phoenician colonies in the central Mediterranean. In Sardinia during the seventh century BC, for instance, Phoenician colonists built a series of new settlements, some of them clearly fortified, at Othoca (near Tharros), Bithia, Cuccurredus, Monte Sirai and Pani Loriga (built by Sulcis). These new foundations were very different from the older colonies, in that they lacked religious and public buildings, as well as significant populations. Their intended purpose appears to have been to secure access to the fertile plains and metal-ore-rich mountains of the interior.
³⁵
The growth of these settlements coincided with the disappearance of Nuragic-manufactured amphorae, used for the transport of metal ore and foodstuffs, from Carthage’s archaeological record.
³⁶
This suggests that these new settlements were part of a deliberate Phoenician strategy to take control of the means of production on the island, in order to service the growing Carthaginian market.
³⁷

The intricate construction of some of the early tombs in Carthage and the richness of the burial goods–including gold medallions, pendant necklaces and earrings, delicately carved ivory mirror handles and combs, as well as large numbers of enamel-coated or faience amulets and scarabs, often depicting Egyptian deities and pharaohs used to ward off evil spirits–confirm that the opportunities the city presented had attracted members of the Phoenician mercantile class, and that this group of leading citizens quickly accrued even more wealth.
³⁸
Carthage therefore appears to have been established as a proper colonial foundation with a core group of the Phoenician mercantile elite, and it was this group that would control Carthage for most of its existence.

Later Greek claims that Carthage was a monarchy ruled by ‘kings’ until the sixth century BC appear to have been built on a misunderstanding of its oligarchic government.
³⁹
From its earliest beginnings the city was ruled by an aristocratic cabal referred to as the
b’lm
, the lords or princes, who controlled all the important judicial, governmental, religious and military organs of state.
⁴⁰
At the apex of this hierarchy was a family whose wealth and power set them above fellow members of the elite at that particular time. Greek writers would call them ‘kings’, and they seem to have held some kind of executive power over their fellow citizens, particularly in regard to the command of the Carthaginian military. From the last decades of the sixth century to the first decade of the fourth the supreme family was the Magonids. The Carthaginian ‘kings’, however, were apparently not confined to one particular family, which strongly suggests that, although they may have held monarchical powers, the ‘kings’ were not hereditary, and that their powers were allotted by a consultative council of elders.
⁴¹
The Elissa story would have acted as a powerful tool for legitimizing the privileged status of a Carthaginian elite who were unlikely to have such exalted origins as hers. At the same time, the idea of a first female queen who died childless not only stood as a neat justification for the oligarchic system, but also denied any hereditary right to autocratic power.

The obvious pride that the Carthaginian elite took in their Tyrian heritage should not be mistaken for a slavish adherence to the mother city’s economic and political agenda. Carthage very quickly showed that it would plot its own course through the choppy waters of Mediterranean power politics by maintaining a strong trading relationship with Egypt at a time when the Phoenician cities had been forbidden from such activities by their Assyrian ‘ally’.

The same autonomous character is also seen in the religious life of the city. Religious ritual lay at the heart of Carthage’s developing identity, not least because it provided a vital tool for elite political control. As in the Near East, the temples were Carthage’s greatest and wealthiest institutions, and it was members of the elite who constituted the chief-priesthoods that governed them. The larger temples employed considerable numbers of specialist staff. The scribes, choristers, musicians, light attendants, barbers and butchers were needed to ensure the correct performance of the sacred rites due to the deity whose dwelling it was. Such was the level of organization that tariff lists were issued setting out the cost of particular sacrifices, with offerings banded into different price categories. Such documents not only guaranteed the livelihoods of the legion of Carthaginian priests and temple workers, but also provided some consumer protection to supplicants, as they gave notice of the fines that could be levied against those priests who abused the pricing structure.
⁴²
Not only did members of the elite oversee these sprawling organizations and their vast resources, but the temples also served as the venues for the dining clubs with ritualistic functions to which they belonged.

Melqart, despite his pre-eminence in the Tyrian pantheon, and in other major western Phoenician colonies such as Gades and Lixus, never held the same dominant position in Carthage, although he remained a senior member of the gods, with his own temple in the city, and priests who practised the sacred rite of
egersis
.
⁴³
Instead, the two most significant deities in Carthage were Baal Hammon and his consort, Tanit. The latter, although often referred to as the ‘Face of Baal’ on Carthaginian inscriptions, does not appear to have played a junior role to her husband. The distinctive sign of Tanit–an outstretched stylized figure–is found on many of the steles in Carthage, and she was often represented as the patroness and protector of the city, a significant promotion for a goddess who had previously been a minor deity in Phoenicia.
⁴⁴
In contrast, Baal Hammon, who was often represented by a crescent moon, was a major god in the Levant. The term ‘Baal’ was a title or prefix meaning ‘Lord’ or ‘Master’, and was given to a number of different gods. The meaning of ‘Hammon’ is less clear. It may come from the Phoenician linguistic root
hmm
, meaning ‘hot’ or ‘burning being’, indicating that he was ‘Lord of the Furnaces’.
⁴⁵

The separate development of Carthage is demonstrated not only in the promotion of a new celestial order distinct from that of Tyre, but also in the ways in which that order was honoured. From the third millennium BC onward Near Eastern texts allude to the practice of
molk
(
mlk
), which simply meant ‘gift’ or ‘offering’. The word was often used for the sacrifice of firstborn children to appease the gods when communities were facing a particularly calamitous situation. The Old Testament provides a number of examples of
molk
. In the Book of Exodus the Israelites are given the command that ‘the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me’. The sacrifice of sons by two Judaean kings is also referred to, as is a Jewish backlash against the (supposedly) foreign practice.
⁴⁶

Some rather dubious later Greek sources claimed that the Phoenicians, in times of grave peril, had also resorted to the sacrifice of the sons of princes by beheading them in honour of their god El, in pious emulation of the deity himself, who had offered up his only son, Ieud, to save his land from disaster.
⁴⁷
In terms of archaeological evidence, however, only one confirmed tophet–the name given by modern scholars to the sacred enclosures where these sacrifices are supposed to have taken place–has so far been discovered in the Levant, and only one stele that alludes to a
molk
sacrifice.
⁴⁸
In the Book of Genesis, Abraham, after being tested by God, was allowed to sacrifice a ram as substitute for his son Isaac, and scholars have thus argued that in most instances young animals were sacrificed in place of human children. Indeed, it appears that the practice of
molk
sacrifice had completely died out in Phoenicia by the seventh century BC.

Nevertheless, a number of ancient Greek references to the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice have survived.
⁴⁹
The fullest and most dramatic description comes from the pen of the Sicilian historian Diodorus: ‘There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus [the Greek equivalent of Baal Hammon], extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereupon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.’
⁵⁰
The third-century-BC philosopher and biographer Cleitarchus also evoked the ghastly image of the limbs of the children contracting and their open mouths looking as if they were laughing as they were consumed by the fire.
⁵¹
According to the first-century-AD Greek writer Plutarch’s
On Superstition
, parents avoided sacrificing their own infants by replacing them with purchased street children, whose mothers would lose the fee they had been paid if they cried or mourned for their lost offspring. Loud music was also played at the sacrificial area to drown out the victims’ screams.
⁵²

These accusations might have been put down to nothing more than Greek slurs if it had not been for the determined sleuthing of two minor French colonial officials, François Icard and Paul Gielly, in the 1920s. Icard and Gielly had become increasingly suspicious of a Tunisian stone-dealer who kept on appearing with very fine Punic steles. One example had particularly grabbed their imaginations. It was engraved with the image of a man wearing the cloak and headdress of a priest, his right hand raised in supplication and his left cradling a swaddled infant. The inscription bore the letters
MLK
. Had the stone-dealer stumbled across the sacred precinct where the Carthaginians had continued the macabre traditions of their Phoenician ancestors? One night, acting on a tip-off, the two Frenchmen surprised their quarry digging up steles in a field not far from the site of the great rectangular harbour. After coercing the owner of the land into selling them the plot, the two men set to work. What they found further fuelled their suspicions: a series of votive offerings, each consisting of a stele listing dedications to Baal Hammon and Tanit, and usually accompanied by a terracotta urn containing calcified bones and sometimes jewels and amulets. When the contents of the urns were analysed, it was ascertained that virtually every one contained the burnt remains of young children. The tophet had been found. Later French excavations confirmed this as one of the oldest areas of Phoenician Carthage.
⁵³

Further analysis showed that the tophet at Carthage had been in use since at least the mid eighth century BC. It was also clear that the western Phoenicians had continued with
molk
sacrifice long after their Levantine cousins. There had been three distinct phases of activity at the site. The first dated from around 730 to 600 BC and was marked by increasingly elaborate votive monuments, which eventually included crude obelisks and L-shaped throne monuments called
cippi
. Analysis of the contents of the urns and others found later showed that they contained the burnt remains of both young humans and animals.
⁵⁴

The tophet at Carthage has been so badly disturbed by the generations of archaeologists who have worked there that it is almost impossible to re-create the physical environment in which the rites took place. Other tophets elsewhere in the western Mediterranean are much better preserved. For example, the tophet at Sulcis off the coast of Sardinia consisted of a large rectangular enclosure delineated by massive blocks of the local trachyte on a rocky outcrop. With its thick walls and water cistern, it appears that this tophet also doubled up as a defensive refuge for the inhabitants of Sulcis in times of trouble.