CARTHAGO DELENDA EST:

After decades of scholarship denying that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children, new research has found 'overwhelming' evidence that this ancient civilisation really did carry out the practice.

A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods.

The paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the 'tophets' - ancient infant burial grounds - simply as child cemeteries are misguided.

And the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.

The research pulls together literary, epigraphical, archaeological and historical evidence and confirms the Greek and Roman account of events that held sway until the 1970s, when scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda.

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