Maligned sacrificers of children
Jasper Griffin
THE PHOENICIANS edited by Sabatino Moscati
BompianilJohn Murray, f60, pp. 766
Posterity has no mercy for the defeated. The Phoenicians, an energetic seafaring and trading people, had the bad taste to become enemies both of the Greeks and of the Hebrews, and to be conquered by the Romans; consequently they suffered not only the destruction of their cities but also a thoroughly bad press from the peoples who dictate our ideas about the past.
For the Hebrews they were lumped in with the rest of their ungodly neighbours, unless they were singled out for special denunciation, as *hen the prophet Ezekiel smacks his lips over the doom of the great city of Tyre:
And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps to be no more heard. And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be like a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more; for I the Lord have spoken it.
And so on, quite in the true prophetic vein.
The Greeks competed with them for trade and for colonies, and tended to represent them as tricky, unscrupulous and Levantine, although some Greek philosophers were sufficiently impressed by the true-blue aristocratic governments of Phoenician cities like Carthage to give them honourable mention as being, even by Greek standards, well run. The Romans found the Carthaginians the hardest of all their enemies to defeat, and explained it by describing them as uniquely treacherous. Also the Carthaginians were abnormally cruel: to their slaves, their enemies, and their own children, whom they burned alive as an offering to their gods. Above all, they left no identifiable nation or group in the modern world interested in defend- ing them.
In recent years the Phoenicians have attracted more attention, and Sabatino Moscati, author of a well known book on the subject, has now edited a sumptuous volume to accompany a large exhibition held in Venice, with important pieces from the museums and collectors of Italy, Spain, Tunisia, Cyprus, Malta and Lebanon — all countries in which Phoenician settlement was important — and also France, Bel- gium, and Great Britain (notably the in- comparable Nimrud ivories from the Brit- ish Museum). The museums of America and Germany are unrepresented, an un- mentioned omission. The book contains 47 chapters, from 'Commerce and Industry' to 'Ostrich Eggs', in addition to a catalogue of the exhibition, and they add up to an excellent introduction to a neglected strand of Mediterranean history.
The Phoenicians were a remarkable peo- ple. They discovered trade routes, im- proved the design of ships, founded great cities; Tyre and Sidon, Carthage and Paler- mo and Cadiz. They played the crucial role in standardising and transmitting to the Greeks the fateful invention of a simple and purely abstract alphabet, to which the Greeks in turn made a decisive addition by writing out the vowels as well as the consonants, and so creating the script which is the direct ancestor of that now used by most of the world. Their arts, as far as we can judge from what survives, were not of the first rank, and Egypt, Syria and Greece in turn exercised an influence which at times was overwhelming. Of literature they have really nothing to show: Pendants in sand-core glass from a necklace found in the necropolis of Fontant Noa, 4th-3rd century BC, Cagliari, (Museo Archeologico Nazionale). we do not even know how far it ever existed. The Romans, when they destroyed Carthage, are said to have given away 'the libraries' to the native chiefs of North Africa. The story is pathetic, but how great was the loss? Reports by travellers and geographers, if there was a Phoenician Herodotus or Marco Polo, could indeed have made fascinating reading, but nothing suggests that there was anything like that for the Romans to dissipate.
A people without descendants can still fihd defenders in the scholars who write about them. A number of the essays in this book have a defensive air. Thus Professor Ribichini, the author of the chapter on `Beliefs and Religious Life', is anxious to minimise the practice of child-burning. Many Phoenician cities reveal to the ex- cavator large areas, known as tophets, which contain urns with the burnt bones of children, often accompanied by those of lambs and birds. It has seemed natural to see in them confirmation of the stories in Greek and Roman writers of the sacrificing of children by fire; we read, indeed, that the sacrifice demanded was especially that of the children of the upper class, who in slack periods tried to evade it by passing off on the gods the children of slaves, or children adopted for the purpose. The Hebrews describe the practice of 'making children pAss through the fire to Moloch' as an abomination of their neighbours.
Professor Ribichini tries to deny child sacrifice: a tophet was 'a child necropolis, designed to receive the remains of infants who had died prematurely', while the biblical references may 'allude to initiation rites, so that "passing through the fire" could have the meaning of a purification with no sacrifice of life'. The latter sugges- tion is quite incompatible with Jeremiah 7.31, 'They have built the high places of Tophet, to burn their sons and daughters in the fire'. I fear that this nice SLD concep- tion of Punic religion is too good to be true, and it is nd surprise that most of the other cOntributors write serenely on the older, sterner view, that child sacrifice was common. Flaubert, in his sadistic novel Salarnmbo, imagines a truly blood-stained Carthage. No doubt he exaggerated, if only in the sense that a real community has more occupations and more things to think about than a 19th-century French literary man and rentier, and could not always be crucifying lions, flaying people alive, and so on; but probably he was nearer the truth than a view which denies such things altogether. I said the book was sumptuous. It has 766 large pages, weighs eight pounds, and is lavishly and beautifully illustrated. The minor arts, such as jewellery, glass, sta- tuettes and ivories, photograph ravishing- ly. Some of the objects look better in these photographs than when actually seen themselves. Sixty pounds for a book seems a lot of money, but at that price this one must be heavily subsidised — the Fiat company and the Agnelli family get dis- creet mention — and any purchaser can spend several enjoyable evenings browsing through it. Not such a bad bargain, when you think of the price of an evening at Covent Garden; and it will look very impressive on the coffee-table afterwards — provided, of course, you have a good sturdy one.
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