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Various Greek and Roman sources describe and criticize the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning. [12] Classical writers describing some version of child sacrifice to "Cronos" (Baal Hammon) include the Greek historians Diodorus Siculus and Cleitarchus, as well as the Christian apologists Tertullian and ...
Diodorus Siculus refers to them at length in connection with the attack on Carthage by Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse: [23] "They [the Carthaginians] considered that Cronus was also hostile to them, because they, who had previously sacrificed the best of their sons to this god, had begun secretly buying children whom they then fed and sent to ...
The KNMY inscription (KAI 79 or CIS I 3785) is an inscription in the Punic language from Carthage that is believed to record a so-called "molk" child sacrifice. [1] The text is inscribed on a 55 cm high stela that was discovered in 1922.
''Offering to Molech'' in Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us, by Charles Foster, 1897.The drawing is a typical depiction of child sacrifice. Child sacrifice is the ritualistic killing of children in order to please or appease a deity, supernatural beings, or sacred social order, tribal, group or national loyalties in order to achieve a desired result.
The sacrifices are portrayed in an orientalist and exoticized fashion, with children sacrificed in increasing numbers to burning furnaces found in the statue of the god. [66] Flaubert defended his portrayal against criticism by saying it was based on the description of Carthaginian child sacrifice found in Diodorus Siculus. [64]
The Christian apologist Tertullian, about 200 CE, states that although the priests who sacrificed children had been crucified by a Roman procurator, "that holy crime persists in secret". [59] Another Christian writer, Minucius Felix, claims that Punic women aborted their children as a form of sacrifice. [60]
Accounts of child sacrifice in Carthage date the practice to the city's founding in about 814 BC. [278] Sacrificing children was apparently distasteful even to Carthaginians, and according to Plutarch they began to seek alternatives to offering up their own children, such as buying children from poor families or raising servant children instead.
Baal Hammon was known as the Chief of the pantheon of Carthage and the deity that made vegetation grow; as with most deities of Carthage, he was seemingly propitiated with child sacrifice, likely in times of strife or crisis, or only by elites, perhaps for the good of the whole community. This practice was recorded by Greeks and Romans, but ...