The Bloodcurdling Sacrifices Of Phoenicians | Blood On The Altar | Timeline

three thousand years ago in what is modern-day Lebanon lived one of the most sophisticated people of the ancient world the Phoenicians at its height the Phoenician Empire rivaled the great civilizations of ancient Egypt Greece and Rome but is there a dark side to this enigmatic people many archaeologists and historians believe they also sacrificed their own children in horrifying religious rituals we have this a massive very dramatic right taking place in the dark involving the cutting of the throat and bloodletting accompanied by musicians the Phoenicians had a sacrifice er someone who was especially adept with the knife and good slit throats very effectively a blood sacrifice on the altar accompanied by the actual cremation on a funeral pyre did these blood curdling rituals actually take place other scholars dismiss the stories as an ancient smear campaign in reality child sacrifice never existed it's a tale invented by the many detractors that the Phoenicians civilization is hurt in the century from the Greeks and the Romans all the way up to the 20th century that the second feature or elemental name is Tito three months ago a group of world-renowned scientists traveled to a small island off the coast of Sicily on a special mission 6000 funeral urns have been discovered here containing the charred remains of cremated Phoenician children are these the bones of infants who were sacrificed or are they merely the cremated remains of children who died of natural causes by subjecting the remains to cutting-edge forensic analysis and DNA testing it may finally be possible to discover the truth about this extraordinary people [Music] called the canaanites in the Bible the Phoenicians established a vast maritime Empire sailing all over the Mediterranean trading gold and silver olive oil and fine wine Phoenician settlements have been discovered in Sicily Spain and Cyprus [Music] but Carthage in modern-day Tunisia was the jewel of the Phoenicians commercial empire the city boasted vast libraries temples and Bloor courts carthaginians lived in huge blocks of flats six storeys high the ruins of this great city which once rivaled ancient Rome have been discovered on the bursar hill outside tuners american historian glen marco was commissioned by the british museum to write the first major study on the Phoenicians for 30 years the city was an extraordinary architectural wonder and it would be amazing to be here at Carthage two centuries before Christ to see this incredible residential complex of six story buildings and looming up into this God being dwarfed by these structures as you're walking up the streets of the city we're at the basement level of one of these massive six-story apartment complexes that the Carthaginians built on the Pierces slope we know this because of the extraordinary thickness of the exterior walls of this building and the shear capacity of these massive underground cisterns more than 20 cubic meters that serve an enormous number of people these water cisterns served up to 60 people living in each apartment block remains show that each home had its own tiled kitchen and bathroom but Carthage was to become a victim of its own success jealous of their commercial empire first the Greeks then the Romans waged war on the Phoenicians in 264 BC Rome launched the first of a series of military campaigns against the Carthaginians known as the Punic Wars for over a century the Phoenicians resisted Rome and the name of their leader is still associated with power and strength the one finishing personality known to us today as Hannibal great general of the second Punic War that crossed the Alps with a troop of soldiers mounted on elephants and nearly brought the city of Rome to its knees had he done so the whole history of the Western world as we know it today would have been rewritten by the Carthaginians rather than the Romans but barely forty years after Hannibal's death Romans torched and destroyed Carthage contemporary accounts graphically illustrate the bloody and bitter final struggle some were stabbed others were held alive from the roofs of the buildings all places were filled with groans shrieks shouts and every kind of agony old men women and children had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses some of them were wounded some more or less burned all uh during horrible cries others thrust out and falling from such a height with stones timbers and fire were torn asunder into all kinds of horrible shapes crushed and mangled the Romans didn't just defeat the Phoenicians in battle they try to obliterate all trace of their culture and traditions the Roman destruction led to the destruction of the great library Carthage itself and as a result of that we've lost all of the original documents written by the Phoenicians in their own language describing what had actually transpired in the city in the years before the Roman destruction out of the ashes of the Phoenicians defeat rose the mighty Roman Empire which spread through North Africa and much of Europe this monumental amphitheatre at el jem near Carthage towers over the Saharan desert just as Roman accounts dominate our view of antiquity history is written by the victorious and virtually everything we know about the Phoenicians comes from their enemies first the Greeks then the Romans they wrote a fanatical and bloody religious practices during the height of one orgiastic right Phoenicians men sometimes castrated themselves in an attempt to emulate their goddess Astarte Astarte was a goddess of fertility and famous across the ancient world perched high on a mountain air achayan sicily was once the site of a shrine to Astarte according to the romans behind these walls the Phoenicians practiced a ritual of sacred prostitution this Norman castle was built on the site where in Phoenician times the vast temple to a start a stood Gaius sir Vario is the author of a book about the Phoenicians in Sicily this is an extraordinary mystical place people flocked here from all over the military it was really old and this was a place where sacred prostitution took place and the prostitutes were girls from what we would say a good family offering their virginity to the goddess Astarte according to Roman and Greek historians it was common practice among Phoenician aristocrats to bring their virgin daughters to the temple when they reached the age of puberty the girls had to go to the temple of a start a and stay there and be lain with strange men the high priests would then force them to have sex with visiting foreigners who paid the temple handsomely for the privilege the stranger was viewed as an emissary from the gods after intercourse the girl had made herself holy in the sight of a start aid and went away home very young girls were actual prisoners until they were at the flood so the pretty girl could get home but quite quickly after giving up the virginity while the ugly one had to wait to be picked up according to Greek and Roman accounts sacred prostitution took place in Cyprus Tunisia and Sicily they claimed the Phoenicians exported their grotesque religious practices as they sailed across the Mediterranean and beyond but the classical writers did praised the maritime prowess of this merchant race the Phoenicians were the first to use the stars for navigation the Phoenicians were the first to circumnavigate Africa they sailed from Egypt and it was not until the third year that they returned [Music] this for nation ship the only one of its kind to be excavated reveals their revolutionary shipbuilding technique 3,000 years before IKEA the Phoenicians produced prefabricated vessels which were transported in sections across their empire putting sections together was aided by another new invention the alphabet a matched a B to B and so on according to the Greeks and Romans wherever they settled the Phoenicians brought with them both new advances and dark practices by far the most terrifying allegation was child sacrifice in times of war famine or pestilence the Phoenicians sacrificed their own infant children in crises of great danger it was a custom of the Phoenicians to give freely their best loved children in sacrifice as a ransom to the avenging demons those given up were slaughtered in the mystic rites the Phoenicians it was said sacrificed their children to appease their bloodthirsty gods [Music] while Hammond and his wife tan eat Valentin each took many forms they could have an animal face or be human Bar was often represented as a disc and a crescent his wife tan eat as a triangle with outstretched arms some historians believe ball was the root of the word Beelzebub who today we associate with the devil according to the Greek and Roman accounts the ceremony of child sacrifice began with the parents handing over their baby to the high priest to be anointed with perfume and oils [Music] meanwhile the sacrifice er an assistant priest made preparations for the baby's death [Music] Oh Oh [Music] the priest carried the baby at the head of the procession to the sacrificial altar in a sacred precinct known as at affect these grinning masks have been found in Phoenician sights they were probably hung on walls to ward off evil spirits in the next world but some experts believe they were worn by the parents to hide their grief [Music] even the Romans not known for their humanity claimed to be shocked at a religious ceremony where babies had their throats cut they would bring to the altars children whose age evokes pity even among enemies to think that men was so barbarous so savage that they gave the name sacrifice to the slaughter of their own children [Music] some accounts imply that dead baby's face was covered with a grinning mask before it was thrown onto the funeral pyre when the flames fall upon the body the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing thus it is that the grin is known as sardonic laughter and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of the wailing should not reach the ears of the people the blood of the child was collected and used to anoint the altar they sometimes sprinkle children's blood upon the altars they thus implored the favor of the gods through the blood of those sacrificed [Music] [Music] [Music] the quantity and detail of the Greek and Roman accounts of child sacrifice meant that for hundreds of years they were generally accepted as fact but in the 19th century historians increasingly began to dismiss these ancient sources as biased and unreliable it's a debate that has continued to this day professor piero but Aloni has spent years studying the excavations in carthage he's internationally recognized as a world authority on the Phoenician civilization in reality child sacrifice never existed it's a tale invented by the many detractors that the Phoenician civilization has had during the centuries starting from the Greeks and the Romans all the way up to the 20th century Wow it's clear that finishes we're not well-loved among Greek and Roman peoples who would be very difficult to just toss aside all of these citations and say they're completely tendentious and have no root in routing in actual fact the academic debate intensified when archaeologists excavating Carthage uncovered this turf at a Phoenician sacred precinct underneath these standing stones similar to gravestones were thousands of urns containing charred remains of human infants many believe this could be the site where the ritual sacrifice of children actually happened you might wonder why a sophisticated people among the most sophisticated in the Mediterranean or even the world at that time would have indulged in such a barbaric practice of child sacrifice and I don't pretend to have all the answers but I do they did practice child sacrifice on an institutional level 100 professor Larry stager of Harvard University led the international team that fully excavated the Carthage - FET in the 1970s [Music] really very good a bucket the sheer scale of what they uncovered was extraordinary [Music] he had maybe 20,000 over 200 year period in ancient Carthage that we would estimate were sacrifice that's about or what is it a hundred per year at least so what is this place did parents really bring their children here to be ritually slaughtered or is there a more benign explanation for the turf at the toph it is simply a separate place isolated from the adult symmetry where stillborn children were buried or those who died soon after birth it's important to remember that in ancient times 7 out of 10 children died in infancy of the 3 who survived only one would reach adults so infant mortality was extremely high and these dead children were buried in an honourable way to appease the gods and to help propitiated other birth but effete is at the heart of the debate about whether the Phoenicians did or did not sacrifice their children is it simply a cemetery for babies who died of natural causes or is it evidence of something much more sinister the archaeology doesn't prove one way or another whether it was actually child sacrifice and then being buried in these special burial grounds or was it simply children dying of natural causes being cremated placed in jars and buried in these special precincts it's an arguable question and hasn't been resolved to everyone's satisfaction otherwise we wouldn't still be arguing about it back in the 1970s forensic archaeology was in its infancy but now new scientific techniques may finally be able to settle the argument once and for all what we are able to do today is quite a bit more than we could have done 20 years ago when analyzing what are probably the most important elements of this archeology namely the physical anthropology the bones of the cremated or burnt children in the last three months scientists in Britain and Israel have been using cutting-edge forensic techniques to analyze the charred remains of the children buried in the toe fat the race is now on for a result [Music] matcha a small island off the coast of sicily a hundred miles north of carthage is the site of another Venetian toe fat it could hold the key to the question of whether or not child sacrifice was actually practiced by the Phoenicians earlier this summer Glenn Marco and a group of leading scientists headed off to Machu to try and resolve the issue once and for all in Phoenician times matcha was a city teeming with over 15,000 people but in 397 BC it was destroyed after an extended siege the inhabitants were massacred and the buildings left to rot this disaster is a huge benefit for the team mojo was never fully reoccupied and so the site is not cluttered with the debris of subsequent civilizations this side is significant first of all because in contrast all of the other cities that the finishings occupied which we're always in such amazing locations that they were built upon by the Romans and people's after them because of the remarkable condition of the site we have a number of complexes that are completely preserved one of them is the toe fed like the toe fat in Carthage archaeologists discovered a large walled precinct in Mata they excavated 6,000 clay urns once again filled with charred bones the thousands of urns discovered on the island are now in storerooms under lock and key the hope is that by investigating their contents the scientists will reveal the secrets of the turf at dr. Charlotte Roberts is a biological anthropologist she hopes to discover remains that are sufficiently well-preserved to indicate whether the children were healthy or diseased if they're diseased then it's likely that affects our ordinary cemeteries for children who died from natural causes but if they're healthy then perhaps they died in some unnatural way possibly in a sacrificial Rite a normal skeleton would make her task relatively easy but these remains were cremated 3,000 years ago here we've got one promoted individual we assume and if I just gradually tip this out on the table you can probably understand the problems I'm faced with when it comes to doing an analysis of this sort of material the first thing is it's really fragmented and there are lots and lots of fragments Charlotte's first task is to confirm that the bones are indeed from infants here we've got what looks like a rib from a baby and here I think we've got part of the mandible the lower jaw here yes this looks like part of the skull something called the petrous part of the temporal bone these are the ones that survived quite well in cremation as charlet picks through the bones she makes an unexpected discovery here's a bit of pelvis which i think is from a sheep or a goat here's another animal bone again probably from a sheep or goat and this big chunk is also animal bone and there are different ways of identifying human from non-human the outer layer of the bone here which is called the cortex tends to be more dense and and often thicker than a human bone many of the carthage urns excavated back in the 1970s also contained a mixture of animal bird and human bones but why the evidence can be interpreted in totally different ways there's no dispute that the Phoenicians sacrificed animals in the tur FET so one theory is that the animals and children were sacrificed at the same ceremonies the result was that they're cremated remains got mixed up on the funeral pyre and therefore in the urns sometimes we get bits of the animal or bits of the human together in the same jar and it's unlikely that this is an intentional interment in the jar but just an accident of scraping off the pyre but for other academics it's no accident they believe the Phoenicians deliberately sacrificed birds and animals when they cremated newborn babies who had died of natural causes inside the urns mixed up with the children's bones we also find the bones of small animals which were sacrificed during the cremation ceremony the sacrifice of these small birds or lambs was meant to accompany the child to the other side to the next life this might explain the urns with mixed remains but many of the Carthage urns only contained animal bones in some of these jars for example in this one there wasn't a baby in there at all only a lamb so my question to those who claim that this is just an infant Cemetery that is only for children who died of natural causes why in the world then are they burying their pets the archeological debate goes on but back in Mata there's been a breakthrough that may help solve the mystery charlotte Roberts has found human teeth an important indicator of general health if they show signs of disease then the children could have died from natural causes and not in a sacrificial Rite the teeth survive very well during burial much better than the bones so we do get quite a lot of evidence for dental disease what we turn metabolic diseases so disorders of normal metabolism things like anemia rickets vitamin D deficiency scurvy vitamin C deficiency metabolic disorders could affect dental development so Charlotte uses the microscope to look for defects in the enamel after careful scrutiny she's prepared to reach some conclusions the best of what I've seen there's there's no dental defects in these teeth from these individuals suggesting that they didn't suffer any disease or nutritional problems in all charlotte looked at the remains of over 20 children she found nothing to suggest they died of disease and there's one piece of archaeological evidence which supports the theory that the children in the tow FET were healthy when they met their death it's an engraving on one of the standing stones found above the urns there's a very evocative image that actually shows a priest cradling a young infant in his arms it's very clear that the child is alive he's being held upright and cradled in the arm and I think this is the process that happens before the emulation of the child before the cutting of the throat and the actual sacrifice glen marco believes the phoenicians wall surrounding la tía provides further important archaeological evidence of the special status of the turf at his argument is that in Phoenician times Moshe was connected to Sicily by a road although the road is under water now the lighter blue color of the lagoon reveals its position this road made more vulnerable to attack from the mainland in the 6th century BC this defensive wall was hastily constructed around the island when the Greeks declared war the wall itself because it hugs the contour of the island cut across the cemetery which lies to our West and that wall literally bisects the cemetery itself to save time the walls builders took the easiest route even though it meant cutting across the cemetery however when they came to the turf fete they took the trouble to build around it why the implication of this of course is that this was a very sacred hallowed ground we have is not a cemetery for children that died from natural causes but a very sacred precinct of ritual child sacrifice Glen Marco may be right but he admits that only unambiguous scientific evidence will prove conclusively his belief that ritual child sacrifice actually happened I think the evidence that we really settle this debate over child sacrifice versus natural burial would be the evidence of the age of the children cremated the age of the children when they died is critical because professor Bartle only maintains that the Tophet is simply a special cemetery for infants who died from natural causes stop it get cozy so the tuffet what is it it's an open-air space where Phoenician children either stillborn or who died soon after birth were buried so how old are the children buried in the turf at where most of them stillborn or newborns who died in the first critical weeks of life the answers could lie in the teeth that Charlotte Roberts is examining we know in modern populations how the teeth develop when each teeth starts to develop when it comes through the gums and shows in the mouth and then we compare what we see in our archeological teeth with the modern data even three thousand-year-old teeth can give evidence of the children's age at the time of death looking at these teeth down the microscope we've got two people here and on the basis of the teeth they're two to three months of age when they were cremated none of the 20 children examined by Charlotte were stillborn or newborn all the teeth were from infants aged between 2 or 3 months and even more compelling evidence about the age of the children has been found in Israel the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has a team analyzing the teeth found in Carthage once again the aim is to find out the age of the babies in the urns last month the preliminary results on 22 thumb holes known as tooth germs came through so far none of the babies were stillborn and here this is the germ it's the first baby molar the first deciduous molar and this is the crown only about half formed this suggests that this infant was aged 1 to 2 months when it died other children found at Carthage were much older and if I take out this tooth germ this is the tooth germ of a first permanent molar and here you can see that the crown is about 2/3 formed that indicates that this child was about 2 years old when he died or was sacrificed we have so far only looked at a small sample of the remains from Carthage but we have found some infants that were as old as five years none of the 40 children examined from both the Carthage and mojit ofits were stillborn their ages ranged from two or three months to two years and one was about five these results undermine professor but alone his theory that the two FET was a special cemetery for stillborns or babies who died shortly after birth it seems that the Phoenicians probably did sacrifice their children to appease their gods there's one further forensic test which could settle the debate once and for all DNA analysis but will it be possible DNA has never been successfully extracted from the cremated remains of children who died 3,000 years ago [Music] you [Music] what sex were the babies in the turf act according to some of the biblical and classical accounts it appears they were boys he supplicated the gods after the custom of his people by sacrificing a young boy to Baal they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this God the most noble of their sons but some scholars have questioned the accuracy of these translations sometimes it refer to boys but I think that's a generic term for children is as a whole but there's certainly no no references at all to young girls being involved in the sacrificial process if the babies died of natural causes there should be an approximately equal number of boys and girls in the tow Fiat but if the baby's in the urns turn out to be all boys the case for child sacrifice will be proved beyond doubt DNA tests could provide the answer now with the new DNA analyses we should be able to determine whether or not it is a male or a female that is being sacrificed and this will be of great interest especially since at least some of the biblical details and other classical references at times imply that it is firstborn males that are chosen to be sacrificed sequence analogy if these tests show us for sure that these children are the firstborn that they're exclusively boys I'll eat my words in motya Glen Marco talks to dr. Ron Dixon and dr. Kerry Brown they're both internationally renowned microbiologists and Glen is hoping they'll be able to extract DNA from the charred bones in the urns DNA may survive incremental burns as long as the cremation temperatures were not too high if you can get DNA out of these infant remains if you find sequences from the y chromosome you have a male infant if you just get DNA from the X chromosome you've got a female infant so I think this could be the way forward to finding out whether you've got boys or girls being sacrificed in the museum Storen ron dickson collects the samples he and Kerry will need to establish the sex of the cremated children through DNA analysis the human bones that have best survived the cremation process are the ones most likely to contain ancient DNA these are going to be taken back to Britain for analysis and we take these extraordinary precautions gloves and masks and so on and all the material you see is sterile because we want to protect the bones from our own DNA we produce DNA on our skin and we could well contaminate these and now this bag is sealed of course the samples are in a in a sterile bag and they can ready for analysis people contain huge amounts of DNA in their bodies and if you could unravel the DNA from the billions of cells that we normally contain then that DNA would stretch to the Sun and back 129 times of course when we die this is rapidly degraded into very small fragments perhaps no larger than your thumbnail Ron is pessimistic about the possibility of extracting DNA from the bones but Kerry is more hopeful these bones are about 3,000 years old DNA has been isolated from bones as old as 30,000 years famous case being that of a Neanderthal from the Caucasian mountains so I think these bones are well within the time frame for DNA survival although degradation of DNA occurs very rapidly after death after a certain amount of time it seems to stabilize and remains pretty constant I think the problem with this material as you can see it's very fragmented its cremated and I think that that it really would be a long shot if we could get survivable DNA to do our sex tests on this material they're not insurmountable problems we do have techniques it would be time-consuming but given the time and the money it can't be done I think every cell in the body contains within it a 2-meter strand of DNA the genetic blueprint for producing a human being but shortly after death cells rapidly lose this genetic material the DNA strands become fragmented and difficult for scientists to analyze Bradford last month Ron Dixon and Kerry Brown have spent weeks struggling to extract DNA from the motion remains one place where tiny fragments of ancient DNA sometimes survived is in the teeth but these hopes were dashed early on the teeth were really it's so degraded that we were only left with the enamel shell and we we know really that we're unlikely to get DNA from that sort of material the bones are also in a much worse condition than they hoped these bones don't seem to be very well preserved at all they don't seem to have anything in the way of microstructure by microstructure I mean the little channels through the bone matrix which carry things like blood vessels and of course it's from these little blood vessels that the DNA comes from but they haven't given up yet they're off to supervise research assistants Alex one who's doing the analysis they enter the antechamber to the laboratory where they'll have to Don gloves masks and protective glasses so that they don't contaminate the ancient samples with their own DNA Alex is working alone in a sterile environment she's already cut off the exterior of each bone fragment this is to remove the DNA of anyone who has recently handled them she now adds a solution that will react with the bones and draw out DNA she also adds solution to an empty tube as a control it's very important while the extraction with the bone is carried out that there's also parallel extraction carried out in other words you go through the exactly the same procedure but with no bone present if that gives you a positive result then you know DNA contamination getting in somewhere for instance from the researcher or from another person once the solution has been added to the bone it's shaken up the mixture is put into a water bath with a temperature of 60 degrees centigrade this will help leach out any DNA a centrifuge now separates the bone fragments from the solution that may contain the ancient DNA [Music] another pipette is used to draw off this solution this whole process has taken 24 hours and alex is finally left with just this tiny amount of clear liquid to find out whether it contains any ancient DNA involves yet another lengthy process one of the characteristics of ancient DNA is that very little of it survives so we use what's called the polymerase chain reaction PCR to target a particular piece of DNA these samples are now ready for the PCR machine this is the revolutionary part of the process that makes the analysis of ancient DNA possible after death the DNA strands become fragmented and difficult to analyze the bonds linking the double helix are broken through the PCR process then the single strand is cloned up to a billion times making enough DNA for scientists to try and identify specific chromosomes PCR is basically the ability to amplify to magnify very very small specific sections or or strands of DNA hopefully the PCR machine would have cloned a tiny surviving fragment of ancient DNA to produce enough for genetic analysis to find out if this has happened the samples have to be stained in a special gel if there is ancient DNA the sex will be revealed we had a male we'd be looking for two bands one would be from the X chromosome one would be from the Y chromosome if it was a female we would see just one band because females have two X chromosomes so when we look at a gel under the ultraviolet irradiation hopefully we should see some bands with the ancient DNA which will tell us whether we're dealing with male or female infant remains alex runs an electrical current through the gel which will develop the ancient DNA if there is any so far she's tried 12 times unsuccessfully for Alex it has been a real struggle with the the extractions and the PCR running the gels to get results from these burns so if she has succeeded in getting any results from these burns it's I think that's a heroic effort on her part each attempt to extract ancient DNA takes three days after 12 failures Kerri and Ron are hoping attempt number thirteen will be lucky it isn't we can now know perhaps that we really can't find DNA that will survive a cremation within in this type of in this type of bone but Alex persuades Ron and Kerri to let her have another go while she repeats the process in Bradford in Jerusalem they have made a breakthrough Pat Smith has managed to extract tiny ancient DNA fragments from the Carthage babies they show two bends to Ben's boy one Bend equals a girl so it seems that at least the specimens we've looked at we have boys obviously we need to look at very much larger sample before we can see definitely that the probability of girls being buried there was extremely low if the baby's in the urns found in the mottier toph at all turn out to be boys then science will have finally proved beyond doubt but the tuffets were sites of ritual child sacrifice back in Bradford alex is about to find out whether she's finally found ancient DNA and what sex it is she summoned Ron and Kerri for the moment of truth [Music] oh yes along with the ancient DNA the gel also contains modern DNA from a man and a woman as a point of comparison yes you got the male two bands from modern DNA that's the female holding DNA one band and that's the ancient DNA and we see one band there so that's marvelous it's a girl it's a real result great well done but it's a very disappointing result for the advocates of the child sacrifice theory I don't want to make too much of that evidence until it's been further studied and we continue to do more work on these bones because we're learning much more even though it's now several decades since we did our excavations in Carthage the Israeli team are now embarking on a massive study over the next five years they hope to conduct DNA tests on hundreds of Carthage infants if they find a fairly even mix of both boys and girls professor but Aloni will be proved right and the Roman and Greek accounts of child sacrifice would be fiction but the advocates of the child sacrifice theory are pinning their hopes on finding a disproportionate number of either girls or boys if we have a great predominance of young girls this wood would fit in with the bias that we might have in the ancient world of young girls being undervalued by society so that it would be easier and less painful for the family to sacrifice a girl than a boy if the predominance are boys and this would fit in with a notion of the supreme sacrifice of the young firstborn male the absence of disease in the teeth and the age of the children analyzed so far suggested that child sacrifice did indeed occur but the discovery of the female child has thrown these findings into confusion it may take several more years for science to finally discover whether there was children's blood on the altar [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,563,126

Rating: 4.7057538 out of 5

Keywords: sacrifice, History, 2017 documentary, documentary history, Documentary, Full Documentary, BBC documentary, history documentary, real, TV Shows - Topic, human sacrifice, Full length Documentaries, Documentaries, stories, ancient history, Channel 4 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic

Id: lZsSB9riza8

Length: 49min 16sec (2956 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ghanoujbuba]

To determine if child sacrifices did occur, DNA tests need to be run to see if there were an equal number of boys and girls buried in the cemetery. According to biblical claims, only male babies were sacrificed by the canaanitess. The PCR test proved that female babies were also buried in the urns, throwing that theory up in the air.

[u/Manyake_Culture]

I don't believe the notion that Phoenicians sacrificed their children to be true for multiple reasons, chief among them the universal biological imperative of parents protecting and caring for their children in the human species (don't bring up the 0.1 % exceptions, some parents may be mentally ill nowadays but it is far from reasonable to think that all parents in the Phoenician community were mentally ill enough to make child sacrifice a communal ritual).

It is more likely to be israelite propaganda against the Canaanites, among them the Phoenicians.

The biblical story of God asking for Isaac as a sacrifice and then sparing him, contrasted with the claim that Canaanites sacrificed their children could have been a propaganda effort for the hebrews to convince themselves that their god is better and more merciful than those of their neighbors plus the obvious intent of demonizing their neighbors and solidifying as enemies in a moral crusade.

Remember that judaism was originally henotheistic, which means they considered that other gods beside their own existed but only worshiped their own. A sort of "bayye a2wa men bayyak".

[u/Sisyphus_Redeemed]

Yep, I remember that it is argued that the actual place of Gehenna in Jerusalem was a place where child sacrifices were made to a Canaanite God.

[u/xpert_reds]

Phoenicians were pagans?

[u/KingAzul]

Leave Baal alone!