Location
Modern Tunis, Tunisia: a perfect natural harbor on the north-African coast, halfway between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Levant. By 500 BCE it controlled the entire central Mediterranean trade routes and had turned the western sea into a Carthaginian lake.
Duration of power
Founded c. 814 BCE (traditional date) by Phoenician settlers from Tyre.
Independent superpower: c. 650–300 BCE
Peak empire: 400–250 BCE (colonies in Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Balearics, half of North Africa).
Destroyed by Rome: 149–146 BCE (Third Punic War).
Population & wealth
At its height: 300,000–500,000 people in the city proper (bigger than Rome until the 2nd century BCE).
Silver mines in Spain, grain from North Africa, purple dye monopoly, trade with sub-Saharan Africa for gold and ivory.
Carthage was richer per capita than almost any ancient city except possibly Alexandria.
Government
Aristocratic merchant republic.
Two annually elected “judges” (shofetim – same word as Hebrew shophet), a powerful senate of 300 lifelong members, and a citizen assembly.
Real power lay with a small circle of intermarried families (the Magonids, Hannos, Barcids – think Rockefeller + Kennedy dynasties).
Military
No citizen army.
Professional mercenary forces + the finest navy in the world (quinqueremes, ramming tactics, naval bases every 30 km along the coast).
Hannibal’s invasion of Italy (218–201 BCE) is still studied in military academies.
The Tophet: How “crazy” they really were
They were not “crazy” in the sense of irrational. They were ruthlessly systematic. The Tophet was a state-owned, state-regulated precinct right next to the commercial harbor. It ran for almost 600 years (c. 700–146 BCE).
Archaeologists have excavated nine distinct layers of urns – meaning the practice intensified over time, not diminished.
Inscriptions show competition: wealthy families tried to outdo each other with more expensive stelae and larger animals sacrificed alongside the child.
Estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000+ individual child urns (some periods averaged one child every single day).
The victims were overwhelmingly infants and toddlers (0–4 years), many clearly healthy and well-fed before death – these were not unwanted babies; they were deliberate votive offerings from the elite.
Why they did it
Carthage lived under permanent existential threat:
Greek colonies pressing from the east (Sicily), Numidian tribes raiding the hinterland, and finally Rome rising in the north. In that environment the old Phoenician logic hardened into policy: “If the city is to survive, the gods must be paid the highest price imaginable.”
A living child became the ultimate insurance policy against annihilation.
The end
When Scipio Aemilianus finally breached the walls in 146 BCE, the last defenders fought street by street for six days. Legend says 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery and the city burned for seventeen days.
The Tophet was deliberately razed and buried under rubble. Roman engineers later built a new city on the exact spot, but the precinct was never reopened.
Carthage was the only pre-modern society that turned child sacrifice into a civic institution on an almost industrial scale, sustained it for six centuries, and exported the model to every colony it founded.
Rome’s response was not moral outrage; it was total eradication. They understood that a civilization willing to burn its own children to win wars was a civilization that would never surrender while it still had children left to burn.
That is how terrifying, how rich, and how disciplined Carthage really was. And that is why Rome made sure the furnaces never cooled again.
Article was conceived by Mack McColl, written by Grok by xAI and edited produced for McColl Magazine Daily
