Tophet de Salammbô, La Marsa

The tophet of Carthage, also called the tophet of Salammbô, is an ancient sacred area dedicated to the Phoenician deities Tanit and Baal located in the Carthaginian district of Salammbô, in Tunisia, near the Punic ports. This tophet, "a hybrid of sanctuary and necropolis", contains a large number of children's tombs which, according to the interpretations, would have been sacrificed or buried in this place after their premature death. The perimeter is attached to the archaeological site of Carthage classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The question of the fate of these children is strongly linked to Phoenician and Punic religion, but above all to the way in which religious rites - and beyond that, Phoenician and Punic civilization - were perceived by the Jews in the case of the Phoenicians, or by the Romans on the occasion of the conflicts which opposed them to the Punics. Indeed, the term "tophet" originally designated a place near Jerusalem, synonymous with hell: this name, which comes from biblical sources, induces a macabre interpretation of the rites that were supposed to take place there, and corroborates an assumption shared by those who provided sources on the Phoenicians in general and the Punics in particular: the religion in Carthage was "infernal". More recently, the collective imagination has been fed by Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô, which gave its name to the district where the sanctuary was discovered. The comic strip Le Spectre de Carthage, part of the adventures of Alix written by Jacques Martin, takes up this interpretation.

The major difficulty in determining the cause of the burials lies in the fact that the only written sources reporting the rite of child sacrifice are all foreign to the city of Carthage. The archaeological sources - stelae and cippes - are subject to multiple interpretations. The debate has therefore been lively for a long time and has not yet been completely settled among the various historians who have studied the subject. The greatest caution is therefore required, as the historian of Antiquity is faced with written and archaeological sources that are, if not divergent, at least subject to interpretation.