Punic Carthage worshipped a pantheon inherited and adapted from its Phoenician founders, headed in the city's own religious life by the goddess Tanit, called "Face of Baal," alongside the older god Baal Hammon, her consort. Their principal sanctuary, excavated in the modern Salammbo district, is known to archaeology as the tophet, a walled precinct that yielded thousands of urns containing the cremated remains of infants and young animals, each often marked by a carved stele recording a vow to Tanit and Baal Hammon.
What those burials mean is genuinely disputed. Ancient Greek and Roman writers, including Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, describe Carthaginians sacrificing children to these gods in times of crisis, and some modern archaeologists, including Lawrence Stager and, more recently, Josephine Quinn, read the tophet's contents and inscriptions as consistent with ritual child sacrifice, of the sickly or in periods of danger to the city. Others, including Sabatino Moscati and M'hamed Hassine Fantar, argue the tophet was primarily a burial ground for infants who died of natural causes or stillbirth and were dedicated to the gods rather than killed for them. No consensus has settled the question, and this record states the disagreement rather than a side.