Bring on Vlad Tepes' Rehabilitation!
It's a good year for bad guys. We earlier featured a story about Mongolia's efforts to rehabilitate Genghis Kahn. Now Carthaginians (Tunisians) seek to rehabilitate Moloch's worshippers. Link. Excerpts:
Mr. Fantar is campaigning to clear his forefathers of a nasty stigma: a reputation for infanticide.
"We didn't do it," says the 69-year-old archaeologist, rejecting accusations that the ancient citizens of this North African land sacrificed babies to appease their gods.
Seeking to debunk Carthage's reputed homicidal tendencies, he has written articles, organized seminars and appeared on TV and radio. He is also grooming a new generation of local scholars, including his own son, who similarly deny that the practice of human sacrifices ever occurred. Guides in Carthage are now instructed by the tourism ministry to tell visitors that the sacrifices didn't happen.
Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He's now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn't expecting to win them over. "No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts," he says.
Gotta like this observation about birth control:
Human sacrifice was common in many ancient cultures. But Carthage was particularly notorious, branded as a serial killer of children for at least 600 years in a site now known as the Tophet, a Hebrew word meaning "roaster" or "place of burning." Most Western scholars believe the practice was organized around the worship of two deities. Mr. Stager says it may also have been a primitive mechanism of population control. Others suggest a more sporadic activity connected to spring fertility rights.
And we found this passage from the article especially humorous:
When Tunisia sent a collection of ancient artifacts to the U.S. in the late 1980s, officials were aghast to find that infanticide attracted the most attention. "Everyone was obsessed with this," says Aicha Ben Abed, director of research at Tunisia's National Heritage Institute. Carthage's enemies, she says, had lots of nasty habits, too, but these barely ever get mentioned: "Let's talk about pedophilia among the Romans and Greeks."
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
