The Tophet of Carthage – Religious Sanctuary and Possible Child Sacrifice Ground

“Carthago delenda est”

The Roman statesman Cato is said to have ended all of his speeches with a variant on this phrase, which means “Carthage must be destroyed.” By doing so, he was saying that the growing Rome’s main rival in the Western Mediterranean, the city state and empire of Carthage, must not only be defeated but flattened, erased.

Carthage and Rome had clashed twice already, and Carthage had ultimately lost both times: the first time over Sicily and the second time when Hannibal (a Carthaginian general ruling almost autonomously in Spain) crossed the Alps into Italy. The second war had been a particularly hard fought affair and there was a vocal lobby in Rome to push for war again and finish Carthage completely and utterly.

This happened, and Carthage was raised to the ground in 146 BC, its population sold into slavery. It wasn’t the end for Carthage, though, as it was refounded by Julius Caesar almost exactly one hundred years later and grew to become the second largest city of the western half of the Roman empire and the capital of the Roman province of North Africa.

With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Carthage was conquered by the barbarian Vandals and became their capital before being retaken by the armies of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had survived the fall to become what we now call the Byzantine Empire.

In the last two decades of the 7th century AD it was fought over by the Byzantines and the armies of the expanding Muslim Arab Empire, changing hands several times before being finally captured and destroyed in AD 698. Tunis became the capital and Carthage was never rebuilt, finally being almost swallowed up in the expanding Tunis.

All this explains why there is very little surviving of Roman Carthage and even less of the older Carthaginian city. The shape of the port can be seen in the coast and archaeological digs have discovered the houses of the citizenry, but the main site one can visit is the famous – or infamous – Tophet.

Figure 1: the densely packed stele of the Tophet at Carthage

The Tophet is the sanctuary dedicated to the god Baal Hammon, the main god of the Carthaginians, and the fertility goddess Tanit. It is an open space, shaded by trees and densely packed with stone markers called stele (singular form stela). At first glance one might think these are grave markers, but they are actually markers recording an important sacrifice made to the gods, often naming the person who the stela set up.

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