Phoenicians thread

>mass produce color purple dye as major export
>great naval power with ports throughout world
>involved in tin trade with Britain
>"sea peoples" conquered Egypt
>Circumnavigated Africa
>Rumored to have reached Americas
>Romans tried to wipe them out in Carthage
>Romans wars turn towards Eastern Mediterranean.

Early Christian scribes such as Sancuniathon defend roman civilization as a means to rid the world of needless child and human sacrifice, however these practices continued to the present day.

Even pagan Romans found child sacrifice gruesome, it had nothing to do with Christianity.
>>Rumored to have reached Americas
source?

>source?
Me, I started a rumor

I thought sea people were southern Italians and sardinians

I didn't know how big the Phoenicians were into child sacrifice, it explains the stories of Carthaginians throwing 100 infants into the fire.

Like Saddamned threw hundreds of babies from their incubators onto the floor during the Kuwait invasion?

They produced so much purple dye that their name comes from the Greek word for purple. Phoenicia means 'purple land'. They called themselves Kn'n (Canaan).

Pretty cool and underrated civ desu

But weren't the sea people's a mixture of Greeks, Phoenecians and Egyptians forming a giant mobile pirate state?

Sea peoples were Not phoenicians, They were listed many Times and had different names from The well known Phoenician populations, They came from The north west and invaded Canaan

Also that statue of yours is a modern invention, phoenicians didnt have any similar depiction

>"sea peoples" conquered Egypt
Phoenicians weren't the Sea People, retard. And the Sea People didn't conquer Egypt.

Well They did obtain some territories belonging to Egypt

There's a rock in Brazil with an engraving which is said to be Phoenician

>They did obtain some territories belonging to Egypt
That is not what "conquer" means.

They found human sacrifice in general gruesome. It was only ever done in Rome as the sort of last resort to save their civilisation, ie. against Hannibal

NOS ERAMOS FENICIOS E MERDA

>Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year's harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea.

Herodotus describes a Phoenicians crew's voyage around the continent of Africa

A reconstruction of an Ancient Phoenician.

Probably not historically accurate but an artowork depicting Phoenicians leading slaves to be sacrificed.

Yeah, both The structures and phoenicians sacrificing Prisoners are completely Made up

Do you have any art depicting Phoenician society? I only have Babylonian/ Assyrian.

They had a very good run. I can't stand it when I think of all the fallen civilizations, all the writings and art that were forever lost. I wouldn't have the stomach to be a historian or archeologist. It takes a lot of emotional endurance.

Maybe you should teach kindergarten.

You guys should read "Carthage must be destroyed" by Richard Miles.

>Delenda est

>Yeah, both The structures and phoenicians sacrificing Prisoners are completely Made up
Actually, most historians and archaeologists agree that, at least the Carthagineans, practiced human sacrifice by fire. Look up the Tophets.

they were qts

That's a Minoan
1)I know very well what the tophets are since I'm Sardinian and the highest concentration of them is in my island, and many of them contained bones of stillborn babies, at least in most cases.
They're cemeteries for young children and unborn children, not some kind of gigantic hellish cartoonish structure, they're usually urns and stelae with some motifs sculpted on them such as tanits or human figures.
2)Structures such as that massive bullhead were never discovered in any Phoenician town

3)the fact that the children were cremated doesn't mean they were burned alive, cremation=/=being burned alive

>But weren't the sea people's a mixture of Greeks, Phoenecians and Egyptians forming a giant mobile pirate state?
We don't have nearly enough information to do anything but speculate

Do you have any good books or articles for this? The recent books and podcasts I've been going through, such as Patrick Hunt's, point to that they have not found any children who had died from disease in these tophets and that they seemed to all be a few years old past the point of being breast fed.

I keep wanting to believe they weren't sacrificing children, but I haven't found evidence disproving that.

I'm not saying that they didn't sacrifice children.

I'm saying that there's no mention of them sacrificing prisoners like the Aztects did.

They might have or might have not sacrificed children, but the tophets themselves aren't proof of any kind of sacrifice, considering that stillborn children are found in some of the urns, and those certainly couldn't have been sacrificed.

So the topehts wasn't an area reserved for sacrificed people, but a typical type of cemetery widespread in the Central Mediterranean Punic world, usually situated on the acropolis of the city.

Not that the name tophet comes from a place in the bible, we don't really know what they called that type of cemetery, it's a connection that has been made later by archaeologists in a time where Biblical archaeology was more popular.

There is not enough evidence for saying whether they sacrificed children or not, some of the ones buried in the topehts might have been sacrificed, certainly not all of them, infant mortality was really high back then.

But certainly the whole Carthaginian iconography of priests burning children or even adults alive inside of some weird ass giant brazen bull statues is a modern invention created by early 20th century films and by some paintings.

>There is not enough evidence for saying whether they sacrificed children or not
Well, there is indication that they did. We have ancient sources that say exactly, that they did.
>Diodorus (c.90-60 BCE) states: In former times they (the Carthaginians) had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice.[6]
>The hands of the statue extended over a brazier into which the child fell once the flames. Philo specified that the sacrificed child was best-loved.[9]
Now, those records may not be entirely accurate or completely fabricated. The point is, we have indications for one thing, findings that could support the point, and simply no way to be sure it 100% happened. That's hardly a case for them not doing the sacrifices.

The issue is the only sources we have on these claims are Sicilians, Romans, and Israelites who all had propagandistic reasons to paint the Phoenicians and Carthaginians as child killers.

...

So did the Phoenicians sacrifice babies or not, it's all I wanna know. I should probably do the research myself bc Veeky Forums doesn't seem like a reliable source but— I don't feel like it.

Were the women dressed as lewd as pic related?

We have archaeological evidence of burnt bones of children in Carthage though.

not so fast

>Do you have any good books or articles for this?
see last section of pic related.

Good point! there is a lot of propaganda involved in war as justification for destroying the other

Yes, They were cremated

>Sicilians, Romans, and Israelites
thats the thing though, the same accusation of child sacrifice from multiple sources and from different eras is pretty damning.

I don't know how accurate that helmet is

>There is not enough evidence for saying whether they sacrificed children or not, some of the ones buried in the topehts might have been sacrificed, certainly not all of them, infant mortality was really high back then.
Diodos Siculus wrote over almost 100 years after the fall of Carthage

Either way most sources say the children were killed by their throat being cut and then burned, not that they were thrown alive into the fire

Not when they appeared only when they started being aggressively looking for war. Rome had a pretty solid relationship with Carthage for centuries with no mention of this type of thing.

>with no mention for this type of thing

Well, to be far we don't have many Latin documents predating the Punic wars, and Rome wasn't a threat to Carthage a "few centuries before" because it was an average town

You're right, but I don't see anything mentioned by Greeks on the topic either. And too bad there isn't much Etruscan documents left, they were rather close with the Carthaginians