文档介绍：FROM INFANT SACRIFICE TO THE ABC’S:
ANCIENT PHOENICIANS AND MODERN IDENTITIES
Brien K. Garnand
PLEASE DO NOT CITE ANY CONTEXT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR
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Brien Garnand, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World,
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637
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I was shocked to learn that Phoenicians were possibly sacrificing young
children at the Carthage Tophet. The idea is horrifying. I always thought that the
Phoenicians were a civilized race.
. Roberts (2001) Forum, Archaeology Odyssey 4(3):10-11
FROM INFANT SACRIFICE TO THE ABC’S1
The Phoenicians showed extraordinary acumen merce munications,
colonizing the Western Mediterranean ahead of the Greeks and disseminating their most important
invention — alphabetic script. At the same time, they earned a reputation for piracy and deceit,
and showed extraordinary depravity in practicing infant sacrifice and ritual prostitution, according
to the Classical and Biblical sources. Depraved civilizer, or civilized depraver — the Phoenician
presented something of a paradox. During the eenth century, and through much of the
twentieth, European artists, writers, and scholars solved this paradox by erasing the civilizer,
downplaying the significance of the Phoenician development of the alphabet, and leaving only the
depraved and exotic Oriental. Formed in an environment of racism, imperialism, and nationalism,
the influence of such interpretations of the Phoenicians has now faded, to be superseded by ‘post’
interpretations — post-modern, post-colonial, post-structural. But recently certain scholars have
abandoned the conventional infant sacrifice paradigm in favor of a narrative that emphasizes the
Phoenicians’ contributions to civilization while expunging their rites of infant sacrifice.
The year 1987 was a defining moment for both professional and popular acceptance of
this revised narrative. This was the year in which Martin Bernal, a well-read self-proclaimed
outsider to Classical