Carthage

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.

Rome razed Carthage in 146 BCE at the end of the Third Punic War, enslaving or dispersing its surviving population, and the site lay largely unbuilt for roughly a century until Julius Caesar and then Augustus refounded it as a Roman colony. It grew rapidly into the second city of the Latin-speaking western empire and, by the second century CE, its leading center of Christian thought. Tertullian, writing there around 200 CE, was among the first major Christian authors in Latin; Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was martyred in 258 CE during the persecution under the emperor Valerian and left an influential body of writing on church unity.

The young Augustine of Hippo studied rhetoric in Carthage before his conversion, and the city later hosted the councils that shaped North African Christianity's response to the Donatist controversy, a dispute over whether clergy who had handed over scriptures during Diocletian's persecution could validly administer the sacraments afterward. A Council of Carthage in 397 CE also affirmed a list of New Testament books matching the twenty seven eventually recognized across the wider church, an early and influential step toward a settled canon, even as the city's own political fortunes passed from Rome to Vandal and then Byzantine rule before the seventh century Muslim conquest ended its life as a major urban center.