Carthaginian Human Sacrifice

Should the Carthaginians perform human sacrifice in my TL?


  • Total voters
    83
Would it be credible for the killing of children to be turned into the offering of them alive to the gods' service? After all, the temples will do far better from bondservants for life, than from ashes.
 
I'd read that but the awful colour scheme and paragraphing is hurting too bad.

Anyway, I'm voting "Yes", although it'd probably be an occassional, maybe once-a-year type thing, and not a daily.
 
There's evidence of sacrifice yes. But I don't believe it was a common occurrence. It's not like the Aztecs with several hundred victims a year. As others have said I think the sacrifice of altered funeral rites for stillborn children is more likely.
 
The bible is full of human sacrifice.
Oh how stupendously out of context... [FONT=Verdana,Arial]I'm not even going to bother[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial][FONT=Verdana,Arial][FONT=Verdana,Arial] refuting any of those claims besides saying, "Read the context!" If someone has a reasoned argument, we could take it to PM or chat or somewhere else, but all I see now is cherry-picked verses whose context proves my case for me.
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Sior

Banned
Oh how stupendously out of context... [FONT=Verdana,Arial]I'm not even going to bother[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial][FONT=Verdana,Arial][FONT=Verdana,Arial] refuting any of those claims besides saying, "Read the context!" If someone has a reasoned argument, we could take it to PM or chat or somewhere else, but all I see now is cherry-picked verses whose context proves my case for me.[/FONT]
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At the risk of being banned you god botherers are really touchy!
 
Human sacrifice is tough to define. The Israelites were not motivated by "God will be pleased because he likes death/ is hungry", it is essentially a scorched earth policy aimed at making it easier for them to resettle the land later. No survivors=no conquered people=no native uprizings=longer surviving Israel. As such I consider the israelites abnormally brutal conquerors, but not practitioners of HS.

As for the Carthaginians, I'm not an expert, but I expect that they did practice human sacrifice on occasion (and I voted to reflect such). Human sacrifice was only really taboo amongst the Greeks and Romans (and arguably the Jews), and we only tend to consider it wrong because of their prevelance over Carthage, Egypt, the Celts, and the many other sacrificers around them. I can see no reason why carthage gives a crap what the Romans think about sacrifice, and they might even practice with increased frequency as a way of showing how their gods are stronger than Rome's gods.
 
Could you infer that Phoenicians also engaged in human sacrifice? Was human sacrifice common among Semitic peoples prior to recorded history?
 

CalBear

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Didn't I come in here and kick someone for flame baiting on page one?

I did.

Guess you figured that there is a one flamer per thread limit.

There isn't.

See ya' in Seven.

BTW: Just to be really clear, the actions here have everything to do with trying to flame the thread and/or derail it into a fight about religion. That is simply NOT going to happen here. Don't care which religion. Not going to get a flame war going here.

Next person who tries to start a flame war goes for good.
 
Since I doubt the main focus of your timeline is a Carthaginian sacrifice abolitionist TL I think that it should be a small topic barely notable, if it were the focus I would say "Yes" enthusiastically however because that is unlikely I voted "Sometimes".
 
A) When Hannibal made his oath to his father that he would always fight the Romans, Hamilcar was holding young Hannibal over a fire pit sacred to Ba'al in the event he might say "No Dad"

For A... where on earth did you hear that??? Salammbo, or something? (haven't read it, but I understand that Hannibal is nearly sacrificed in it, so...)

The usual story with Hannibal and Hamilcar and the sacrificial chamber where he promised to fight to destroy Rome usually involves Hannibal wantingto go to Spain with his father, and swearing this in front of a sacrificial victim (probably an ox or something), NOT him being dangled over a fire until he does what his father says. Livy says this, a man who isn't exactly Hannibal's greatest PR man. If he really wanted to make Hamilcar and Carthage look bad and evil and all that, he could've did that right there.

Anyways, more to the point, sometimes seemed too odd of an answer to me - you can either put human sacrifice in your story or not, if it's included, then it is - so that's why I ended up voting yes, even though I'm probably closer to the "sometimes" on the poll. Look, human sacrifice is not totally proven, but it seems to me that it is much more likely that it did happen then didn't. It's fairly well established that it happened in Tyre and other Phoenician cities, and there's no reason to believe it didn't extend to the Daughter City. There is the evidence Cook mentioned that Goldsworthy mentions, and Miles comes to a similar conclusion despite for much of his book attacking ancient Greek and Roman historians for propagandizing against Carthage (much of which is wholly valid, I will say). In fact, Miles quotes a stele that says:

It was to the Lady Tanit Face of Ba'al and to Ba'al Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!

That seems rather like child sacrifice to me.

As to what child sacrifice was actually like (assuming that it is true, of course), it seems that many of the children that may have been sacrificed were of the wealthy, which is interesting - you'd think that the lower classes would be the ones to sacrifice their children, especially in Carthage, where there was a small and distinct highest class, and a very large lower class. So it seems to me that a fair amount of it must have been individual efforts to cure times of familial trouble or something. On the state level, it seems to have been done to cure the city of recent plagues - literal, or more figurative ones like poorly-going wars against the Romans and Greeks and whatnot. In either case, it was probably a last resort sort of thing - like the quote above suggests, Carthaginian families did love their children and wouldn't have been particularly keen to sacrifice their children for many reasons (crazily enough, they weren't monsters!), so it'd have to be something really bad that needs a lot of divine help to get Carthage or the individual family out of. So it probably wouldn't be too common. But it would happen.
 
Didn't I come in here and kick someone for flame baiting on page one?

I did.

Guess you figured that there is a one flamer per thread limit.

There isn't.

See ya' in Seven.

BTW: Just to be really clear, the actions here have everything to do with trying to flame the thread and/or derail it into a fight about religion. That is simply NOT going to happen here. Don't care which religion. Not going to get a flame war going here.

Next person who tries to start a flame war goes for good.

Thanks CalBear, as you said, the last thing we need is a religious debate. Anyways, to the non-flamers here, thank you very much for all your input. My final decision has been to include child sacrifice, but only when things are inconvenient, as the general consensus is that it wasn't a common occurence and was meant to reverse bad fortune.
 
My final decision has been to include child sacrifice, but only when things are inconvenient, as the general consensus is that it wasn't a common occurence and was meant to reverse bad fortune.
I don't think that's how it was in the real Carthage, but if you want to picture it like that in your timeline, that's fine. Perhaps you could leave it vague until a century or so after your PoD, and hint that one early PoD might have been its developing into that? That way, you might be able to let your timeline sort of satisfy everyone's perspective on the debate.
 
I don't think that's how it was in the real Carthage, but if you want to picture it like that in your timeline, that's fine. Perhaps you could leave it vague until a century or so after your PoD, and hint that one early PoD might have been its developing into that? That way, you might be able to let your timeline sort of satisfy everyone's perspective on the debate.

I was thinking that I would include a religious leader becoming quite popular in Carthage who has been influenced by Aristotle's hierarchy of souls, and he interprets it as being appropriate to substitute larger numbers of animals to be sacrificed, rather than children.
 
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