Two articles in recent issues of Antiquity have taken opposing views of the infant burials in the 'Tophet', the precinct at Carthage, sacred to the goddess Tanit, that contained funerary urns of thousands of cremated infants. The first (Smith et al. 2011) held that these must be evidence of the infant sacrifice that was so loudly condemned by Greek and Roman writers, since the infants were not perinatal, although most were under two months old at the time of death. In a rejoinder, Schwartz et al. (2012) argued that the Carthage Tophet was the place of burial for the very young regardless of the cause of death. They estimated age at death between prenatal and six months, consistent with the recorded incidence of perinatal mortality in certain societies in recent periods.Here we close the debate with two related papers. In the first of these, Patricia Smith and her co-authors return to argue that infant sacrifice is still (in their view) the most likely interpretation of the data, based on the age distribution of the deceased. In the second, Paolo Xella and colleagues, too, are convinced that infant sacrifice took place. They step aside from the details of the cremated remains, however, to emphasise a range of other social and archaeological aspects of the Tophets in Carthage and elsewhere that are critical for understanding these sanctuaries and their rituals.

The corpus of Phoenician-Punic inscriptions comprises about 12,000 documents, spread over a very wide area and span of time (all the countries of the Mediterranean region, from the end of the 2 nd millennium BCE to the first centuries of the 1 st millennium CE). The quantity and nature of the documents have caused considerable difficulties in the knowledge and scientific use of these sources. The project CIP (Corpus Inscriptionum Phoenicarum necnon Poenicarum, also known as the PhDB or Phoenician Data Base) came into being to tackle these problems by producing a collection and a critical edition of all the epigraphic documents in the form of a data bank.

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