Dark Rituals of the Phoenicians
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00:003,000 years ago, in what is modern-day Lebanon,
00:07lived one of the most sophisticated people of the ancient world, the Phoenicians.
00:12At its height, the Phoenician Empire rivaled the great civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.
00:20But is there a dark side to this enigmatic people?
00:26Many archaeologists and historians believe they also sacrificed their own children in horrifying religious rituals.
00:38We have this massive, very dramatic rite taking place in the dark,
00:43involving the cutting of the throat and bloodletting, accompanied by musicians.
00:50The Phoenicians had a sacrificer, someone who was especially adept with the knife
00:56and could slit the throats very effectively.
01:00A blood sacrifice on the altar, accompanied by the actual cremation on a funeral pyre.
01:09Did these blood-curdling rituals actually take place?
01:13Other scholars dismiss the stories as an ancient smear campaign.
01:20In reality, child sacrifice never existed.
01:23It's a tale invented by the many detractors that the Phoenician civilization has had during the centuries,
01:30starting from the Greeks and the Romans, all the way up to the 20th century.
01:39Three months ago, a group of world-renowned scientists
01:42travelled to a small island off the coast of Sicily on a special mission.
01:476,000 funeral urns have been discovered here,
01:50containing the charred remains of cremated Phoenician children.
01:55Are these the bones of infants who were sacrificed,
01:59or are they merely the cremated remains of children who died of natural causes?
02:04By subjecting the remains to cutting-edge forensic analysis and DNA testing,
02:09it may finally be possible to discover the truth about this extraordinary people.
02:18The Canaanites
02:25Called the Canaanites in the Bible,
02:27the Phoenicians established a vast maritime empire,
02:30sailing all over the Mediterranean,
02:32trading gold and silver, olive oil and fine wine.
02:38Phoenician settlements have been discovered in Sicily, Spain and Cyprus.
02:48But Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia,
02:50was the jewel of the Phoenician commercial empire.
02:55The city boasted vast libraries, temples and law courts.
03:03Carthaginians lived in huge blocks of flats six storeys high.
03:11The ruins of this great city, which once rivaled ancient Rome,
03:15have been discovered on the Bursa Hill, outside Tunis.
03:24American historian Glenn Marko was commissioned by the British Museum
03:28to write the first major study on the Phoenicians for 30 years.
03:33The city was an extraordinary architectural wonder,
03:35and it would be amazing to be here at Carthage, two centuries before Christ,
03:41and to see this incredible residential complex of six-storey buildings
03:45looming up into the sky, being dwarfed by these structures
03:50as you walk up the streets of the city.
03:58We're at the basement level of one of these massive six-storey apartment complexes
04:02that the Carthaginians built on the Bursa Slope.
04:05We know this because of the extraordinary thickness
04:07of the exterior walls of this building
04:09and the sheer capacity of these massive underground cisterns,
04:12more than 20 cubic metres, that served an enormous number of people.
04:18These water cisterns served up to 60 people living in each apartment block.
04:22Remains show that each home had its own tiled kitchen and bathroom.
04:30But Carthage was to become a victim of its own success.
04:34Jealous of their commercial empire, first the Greeks,
04:36then the Romans waged war on the Phoenicians.
04:40In 264 BC, Rome launched the first of a series of military campaigns
04:44against the Carthaginians, known as the Punic Wars.
04:49For over a century, the Phoenicians resisted Rome,
04:52and the name of their leader is still associated with power and strength.
04:58The one Phoenician personality known to us today is Hannibal,
05:01the great general of the Second Punic War,
05:03that crossed the Alps with a troop of soldiers mounted on elephants
05:08and nearly brought the city of Rome to its knees.
05:11Had he done so, the whole history of the Western world as we know it today
05:16would have been rewritten by the Carthaginians rather than the Romans.
05:20But barely 40 years after Hannibal's death,
05:23Romans torched and destroyed Carthage.
05:26Contemporary accounts graphically illustrate
05:28the bloody and bitter final struggle.
05:31Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs of the buildings.
05:35All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts and every kind of agony.
05:40Old men, women and children had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses.
05:45Some of them were wounded, some more or less burned,
05:48all uttering horrible cries.
05:51Others, thrust out and falling from such a height with stones,
05:54timbers and fire, were torn asunder into all kinds of horrible shapes,
05:58crushed and mangled.
06:01The Romans didn't just defeat the Phoenicians in battle.
06:04They tried to obliterate all trace of their culture and traditions.
06:09The Roman destruction led to the destruction of the great library at Carthage itself.
06:13And as a result of that, we've lost all of the original documents
06:17written by the Phoenicians in their own language,
06:21describing what had actually transpired in the city
06:24in the years before the Roman destruction.
06:43Out of the ashes of the Phoenician defeat rose the mighty Roman Empire,
06:48which spread through North Africa and much of Europe.
06:53This monumental amphitheatre at El Djem, near Carthage,
06:56towers over the Saharan desert,
06:58just as Roman accounts dominate our view of antiquity.
07:04History is written by the victorious,
07:06and virtually everything we know about the Phoenicians comes from their enemies,
07:11first the Greeks, then the Romans.
07:13They wrote of fanatical and bloody religious practices.
07:19During the height of one orgiastic rite,
07:22Phoenician men sometimes castrated themselves
07:25in an attempt to emulate their goddess Astarte.
07:30Astarte was a goddess of fertility and famous across the ancient world.
07:37Perched high on a mountain, Erice in Sicily,
07:40was once the site of a shrine to Astarte.
07:44According to the Romans, behind these walls,
07:47the Phoenicians practised a ritual of sacred prostitution.
07:54This Norman castle was built on the site where, in Phoenician times,
07:58the vast temple to Astarte stood.
08:02Gaia Servaglio is the author of a book about the Phoenicians in Sicily.
08:08This is an extraordinarily mystical place.
08:12People flocked here from all over the Mediterranean.
08:15It was kind of lured.
08:17And this was a place where sacred prostitution took place.
08:23And the prostitutes were girls from what we would say good family,
08:27offering their virginity to the goddess Astarte.
08:32According to Roman and Greek historians,
08:35it was common practice among Phoenician aristocrats
08:38to bring their virgin daughters to the temple
08:41when they reached the age of puberty.
08:43The girls had to go to the temple of Astarte
08:45and stay there and be lain with strange men.
08:49The high priest would then force them to have sex with visiting foreigners
08:53who paid the temple handsomely for the privilege.
08:57The stranger was viewed as an emissary from the gods.
09:00After intercourse, the girl had made herself holy in the sight of Astarte
09:05and went away home.
09:08These very young girls were actual prisoners until they were defiled.
09:12So the pretty girl could get home quite quickly
09:17after giving up their virginity,
09:20while the ugly one had to wait to be picked up.
09:25According to Greek and Roman accounts,
09:27sacred prostitution took place in Cyprus, Tunisia and Sicily.
09:32They claim the Phoenicians exported their grotesque religious practices
09:36as they sailed across the Mediterranean and beyond.
09:39But the classical writers did praise the maritime prowess of this merchant race.
09:45The Phoenicians were the first to use the stars for navigation.
09:49The Phoenicians were the first to circumnavigate Africa.
09:52They sailed from Egypt and it was not until the third year that they returned.
09:59This Phoenician ship, the only one of its kind to be excavated,
10:03reveals their revolutionary shipbuilding technique.
10:07Three thousand years before Ikea,
10:09the Phoenicians produced prefabricated vessels
10:12which were transported in sections across their empire.
10:17Putting sections together was aided by another new invention, the alphabet.
10:24A matched A, B to B and so on.
10:31According to the Greeks and Romans,
10:33wherever they settled, the Phoenicians brought with them both new advances and dark practices.
10:40By far the most terrifying allegation was child sacrifice.
10:46In times of war, famine or pestilence,
10:48the Phoenicians sacrificed their own infant children.
10:53In crises of great danger,
10:55it was a custom of the Phoenicians to give freely their best loved children in sacrifice
11:00as a ransom to the avenging demons.
11:03Those given up were slaughtered in mystic rites.
11:09The Phoenicians, it was said, sacrificed their children to appease their bloodthirsty gods,
11:16Baal Hamon and his wife Tanit.
11:23Baal and Tanit took many forms.
11:27They could have an animal face or be human.
11:33Baal was often represented as a disc and a crescent,
11:37his wife Tanit as a triangle with outstretched arms.
11:44Some historians believe Baal was the root of the word Beelzebub,
11:48who today we associate with the devil.
11:58According to the Greek and Roman accounts,
12:00the ceremony of child sacrifice began with the parents handing over their baby to the high priest
12:05to be anointed with perfume and oils.
12:11Meanwhile, the sacrificer and assistant priest made preparations for the baby's death.
12:31The baby is in the womb.
12:51The priest carried the baby at the head of a procession to the sacrificial altar
12:55in a sacred precinct known as a tofet.
12:59These grinning masks have been found in Phoenician sites.
13:03They were probably hung on walls to ward off evil spirits in the next world,
13:07but some experts believe they were worn by the parents to hide their grief.
13:15Even the Romans, not known for their humanity,
13:17claimed to be shocked at a religious ceremony where babies had their throats cut.
13:23They would bring to the altars children whose age evokes pity, even among enemies.
13:29To think that men were so barbarous, so savage,
13:32that they gave the name sacrifice to the slaughter of their own children.
13:43Some accounts imply the dead baby's face was covered with a grinning mask
13:48before it was thrown onto the funeral pyre.
13:51When the flames fall upon the body, the limbs contract,
13:54and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing.
13:57Thus it is that the grin is known as sardonic laughter.
14:04And the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums,
14:09so that the cries of the wailing should not reach the ears of the people.
14:15The blood of the child was collected and used to anoint the altar.
14:21They sometimes sprinkled children's blood upon the altars.
14:25They thus implored the favor of the gods through the blood of those sacrificed.
14:45The quantity and detail of the Greek and Roman accounts of child sacrifice
14:49meant that for hundreds of years they were generally accepted as fact.
14:54But in the 19th century, historians increasingly began to dismiss
14:58these ancient sources as biased and unreliable.
15:05It's a debate that has continued for centuries.
15:08Professor Piero Bartolone has spent years studying the excavations in Carthage.
15:14He is internationally recognized as a world authority on the Phoenician civilization.
15:25In reality, child sacrifice never existed.
15:29It was a ritual, a ritual of sacrifice.
15:33In reality, child sacrifice never existed.
15:37It's a tale invented by the many detractors that the Phoenician civilization has had during the centuries,
15:44starting from the Greeks, then the Romans, all the way up to the 20th century.
15:51While it's clear that Phoenicians were not well-loved among Greek and Roman peoples,
15:57it would be very difficult to just toss aside all of these citations
16:02and say they're completely tendentious and have no rooting in actual fact.
16:12The academic debate intensified when archaeologists excavating Carthage
16:16uncovered this tofet, a Phoenician sacred precinct.
16:22Underneath these standing stones, similar to gravestones,
16:25were thousands of urns containing charred remains of human infants.
16:30Many believe this could be the site where the ritual sacrifice of children actually happened.
16:38You might wonder why a sophisticated people,
16:41among the most sophisticated in the Mediterranean or even the world at that time,
16:46would have indulged in such a barbaric practice of child sacrifice.
16:52And I don't pretend to have all the answers,
16:56but I do think they did practice child sacrifice on an institutional level.
17:04Professor Larry Stager of Harvard University
17:06led the international team that fully excavated the Carthage tofet in the 1970s.
17:22The sheer scale of what they uncovered was extraordinary.
17:30We had maybe 20,000 over a 200-year period in ancient Carthage
17:36that we would estimate were sacrificed.
17:38That's about, oh, what is it, 100 per year at least.
17:42So what is this place?
17:44Did parents really bring their children here to be ritually slaughtered?
17:48Or is there a more benign explanation for the tofet?
17:55The tofet is simply a separate place,
17:57isolated from the adult cemetery where stillborn children were buried,
18:02or those who died soon after birth.
18:07It's important to remember that in ancient times,
18:09seven out of ten children died in infancy.
18:14Of the three who survived, only one would reach adulthood.
18:19So infant mortality was extremely high,
18:22and these dead children were buried in an honourable way to appease the gods
18:27and to help propitiate another birth.
18:33The tofet is at the heart of the debate
18:35about whether the Phoenicians did or did not sacrifice their children.
18:40Is it simply a cemetery for babies who died of natural causes,
18:44or is it evidence of something much more sinister?
18:48The archaeology doesn't prove one way or another
18:51whether it was actually child sacrifice
18:54and then being buried in these special burial grounds,
18:59or was it simply children dying of natural causes,
19:04being cremated, placed in jars and buried in these special precincts?
19:11It's an arguable question
19:14and hasn't been resolved to everyone's satisfaction,
19:18otherwise we wouldn't still be arguing about it.
19:22Back in the 1970s, forensic archaeology was in its infancy.
19:28But now, new scientific techniques may finally be able
19:31to settle the argument once and for all.
19:36What we are able to do today
19:39is quite a bit more than we could have done 20 years ago
19:43when analysing what are probably the most important elements of this archaeology,
19:50namely the physical anthropology,
19:52the bones of the cremated or burnt children.
19:57In the last three months, scientists in Britain and Israel
20:00have been using cutting-edge forensic techniques
20:03to analyse the charred remains of the children buried in the tofet.
20:08The race is now on for a result.
20:14Mottia, a small island off the coast of Sicily,
20:17a hundred miles north of Carthage,
20:19is the site of another Phoenician tofet.
20:23It could hold the key to the question of whether or not
20:26child sacrifice was actually practised by the Phoenicians.
20:33The tofet is the largest and most important burial site in the world.
20:38And whether or not child sacrifice was actually practised by the Phoenicians.
20:45Earlier this summer, Glen Marco and a group of leading scientists
20:49headed off to Mottia to try and resolve the issue once and for all.
20:59In Phoenician times, Mottia was a city teeming with over 15,000 people.
21:04It was destroyed after an extended siege.
21:07The inhabitants were massacred and the buildings left to rot.
21:14This disaster is a huge benefit for the team.
21:17Mottia was never fully reoccupied,
21:19and so the site is not cluttered with the debris of subsequent civilisations.
21:25This site is significant, first of all,
21:28because in contrast to all of the other cities that the Phoenicians occupied,
21:32which were always in such amazing locations
21:35that they were built upon by the Romans and peoples after them.
21:40Because of the remarkable condition of the site,
21:43we have a number of complexes that are completely preserved.
21:48Like the Tophet in Carthage,
21:50archaeologists discovered a large walled precinct in Mottia.
21:54They excavated 6,000 clay urns, once again filled with charred bones.
22:00The thousands of urns discovered on the island
22:03are now in storerooms under lock and key.
22:06The hope is that by investigating their contents,
22:09they will be able to find a way out.
22:12Dr Charlotte Roberts is a biological anthropologist.
22:15She hopes to discover remains that are sufficiently well-preserved
22:18to indicate whether the children were healthy or diseased.
22:22If they're diseased, then it's likely the Tophets are ordinary cemeteries
22:26for children who died from natural causes.
22:29But if they're healthy, then perhaps they died from a disease
22:32that could have been caused by a disease-causing organism.
22:36Dr Roberts is a biologist,
22:39but if they're healthy, then perhaps they died in some unnatural way,
22:43possibly in a sacrificial rite.
22:46A normal skeleton would make her task relatively easy,
22:50but these remains were cremated 3,000 years ago.
22:54Here we've got...
22:58..one cremated individual, we assume.
23:02And if I just gradually tip this out on the...
23:08..table...
23:10..you can probably understand the problems I'm faced with
23:14when it comes to doing an analysis of this sort of material.
23:18The first thing is, it's really fragmented
23:21and there are lots and lots of fragments.
23:24Charlotte's first task is to confirm that the bones are indeed from infants.
23:29Here we've got what looks like a rib from a baby.
23:37And here I think we've got part of the mandible, the lower jaw.
23:42Here, yes, this looks like part of the skull.
23:46Something called the petrous part of the temporal bone.
23:50These are the ones that survived quite well in cremation.
23:55As Charlotte picks through the bones, she makes an unexpected discovery.
24:00Here's a bit of pelvis, which I think is from a sheep or a goat.
24:07Here's another animal bone, again probably from a sheep or goat.
24:12And this big chunk is also animal bone.
24:15And there are different ways of identifying human from non-human.
24:19The outer layer of the bone here, which is called the cortex,
24:24tends to be more dense and often thicker than a human bone.
24:31Many of the Carthage urns excavated back in the 1970s
24:35also contained a mixture of animal, bird and human bones.
24:40But why?
24:43The evidence can be interpreted in totally different ways.
24:47There's no dispute that the Phoenicians sacrificed animals in the Tophet.
24:51So one theory is that the animals and children were sacrificed at the same ceremonies.
25:00The result was that their cremated remains got mixed up on the funeral pyre
25:04and therefore in the urns.
25:09Sometimes we get bits of the animal or bits of the human together in the same jar
25:15and it's unlikely that this is an intentional interment in the jar,
25:22but just an accident of scraping off the pyre.
25:26But for other academics it's no accident.
25:29They believe the Phoenicians deliberately sacrificed birds and animals
25:33when they cremated newborn babies who had died of natural causes.
25:41Inside the urns, mixed up with the children's bones,
25:44we also find the bones of small animals which were sacrificed during the cremation ceremony.
25:53The sacrifice of these small birds or lambs was meant to accompany the child to the other side,
25:59to the next life.
26:04This might explain the urns with mixed remains,
26:07but many of the Carthage urns only contained animal bones.
26:11In some of these jars, for example in this one,
26:17there wasn't a baby in there at all, only a lamb.
26:23So my question to those who claim that this is just an infant cemetery
26:33that is only for children who died of natural causes,
26:38why in the world then are they burying their pets?
26:42The archaeological debate goes on,
26:45but back in Motia there's been a breakthrough that may help solve the mystery.
26:50Charlotte Roberts has found human teeth, an important indicator of general health.
26:56If they show signs of disease,
26:58then the children could have died from natural causes and not in a sacrificial rite.
27:03The teeth survive very well during burial, much better than the bones,
27:08so we do get quite a lot of evidence for dental disease.
27:12What we term metabolic diseases, so disorders of normal metabolism,
27:16things like anemia, rickets, vitamin D deficiency, scurvy, vitamin C deficiency.
27:23Metabolic disorders could affect dental development,
27:26so Charlotte uses the microscope to look for defects in the enamel.
27:30After careful scrutiny, she's prepared to reach some conclusions.
27:34The basis of what I've seen is there's no dental defects in these teeth from these individuals,
27:40suggesting that they didn't suffer any disease or nutritional problems.
27:46In all, Charlotte looked at the remains of over 20 children.
27:50She found nothing to suggest they died of disease.
27:55And there's one piece of archaeological evidence which supports the theory
27:59that the children in the Tophet were healthy when they met their death.
28:03It's an engraving on one of the standing stones found above the urns.
28:08There's a very evocative image that actually shows a priest cradling a young infant in his arms.
28:14It's very clear that the child is alive, he's being held upright and cradled in the arm,
28:19and I think this is the process that happens before the immolation of the child,
28:24before the cutting of the throat and the actual sacrifice.
28:31Glenn Marko believes the Phoenician wall surrounding Mottier
28:34provides further important archaeological evidence of the special status of the Tophet.
28:41His argument is that in Phoenician times Mottier was connected to Sicily by a road.
28:47Although the road is underwater now, the lighter blue colour of the lagoon reveals its position.
28:54This road made Mottier vulnerable to attack from the mainland.
28:59In the 6th century BC, this defensive wall was hastily constructed around the island
29:04when the Greeks declared war.
29:09Now the wall itself, because it hugs the contour of the island,
29:15cut across the cemetery which lies to our west,
29:19and that wall literally bisects the cemetery itself.
29:28To save time, the wall's builders took the easiest route,
29:31even though it meant cutting across the cemetery.
29:34However, when they came to the Tophet, they took the trouble to build around it.
29:39Why?
29:40The implication of this, of course, is that this was a very sacred, hallowed ground.
29:45What we have is not a cemetery for children that died from natural causes,
29:51but a very sacred precinct of ritual child sacrifice.
29:57Glenn Marco may be right,
29:59but he admits that only unambiguous scientific evidence
30:03will prove conclusively his belief that ritual child sacrifice actually happened.
30:09I think the evidence that would really settle this debate over child sacrifice
30:13versus natural burial would be the evidence of the age of the children cremated.
30:21The age of the children when they died is critical,
30:24because Professor Bartolone maintains that the Tophet
30:26is simply a special cemetery for infants who died from natural causes.
30:35So, the Tophet, what is it?
30:37It's an open-air space where Phoenician children,
30:40either stillborn or who died soon after birth, were buried.
30:49So, how old are the children buried in the Tophet?
30:52Were most of them stillborn or newborns who died in the first critical weeks of life?
30:57The answers could lie in the teeth that Charlotte Roberts is examining.
31:02We know in modern populations how the teeth develop,
31:06when each teeth starts to develop,
31:09when it comes through the gums and shows in the mouth,
31:13and then we compare what we see in our archaeological teeth with the modern data.
31:21Even 3,000-year-old teeth can give evidence of the children's age at the time of death.
31:28Looking at these teeth down the microscope, we've got two people here,
31:33and on the basis of the teeth, their two to three months of age when they were cremated.
31:39None of the 20 children examined by Charlotte were stillborn or newborn.
31:44All the teeth were from infants aged between two or three months.
31:48And even more compelling evidence about the age of the children has been found in Israel.
31:54The Hebrew University in Jerusalem has a team analysing the teeth found in Carthage.
31:59Once again, the aim is to find out the age of the babies in the urns.
32:10Last month, the preliminary results on 20 tooth samples known as tooth germs came through.
32:18So far, none of the babies were stillborn.
32:22And here, this is the germ.
32:26It's the first baby molar, the first deciduous molar,
32:29and this is the crown, only about half formed.
32:34This suggests that this infant was aged one to two months when it died.
32:43Other children found at Carthage were much older.
32:46And if I take out this tooth germ, this is the tooth germ of a first permanent molar,
32:54and here you can see that the crown is about two thirds formed.
32:59That indicates that this child was about two years old when he died or was sacrificed.
33:08We have so far only looked at a small sample of the remains from Carthage,
33:15but we have found some infants that were as old as five years.
33:21None of the 40 children examined from both the Carthage and Motya Tophets were stillborn.
33:27Their ages ranged from two or three months to two years, and one was about five.
33:35These results undermine Professor Bartolone's theory
33:38that the Tophet was a special cemetery for stillborns or babies who died shortly after birth.
33:44It seems that the Phoenicians probably did sacrifice their children to appease their gods.
33:51There's one further forensic test which could settle the debate once and for all, DNA analysis.
33:57But will it be possible?
34:00DNA has never been successfully extracted from the cremated remains of children who died 3,000 years ago.
34:14What sex were the babies in the Tophet?
34:17According to some of the biblical and classical accounts, it appears they were boys.
34:23He supplicated the gods after the custom of his people by sacrificing a young boy to Baal.
34:29They had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the most noble of their sons.
34:35But some scholars have questioned the accuracy of these translations.
34:39Sometimes they refer to boys, but I think that's a generic term for children as a whole.
34:44But there's certainly no references at all to young girls being involved in the sacrificial process.
34:53If the babies died of natural causes,
34:55there should be an approximately equal number of boys and girls in the Tophet.
35:00But if the babies in the urns turn out to be all boys,
35:03the case for child sacrifice will be proved beyond doubt.
35:06DNA tests could provide the answer.
35:09Now with the new DNA analyses,
35:12we should be able to determine whether or not it is a male or a female that is being sacrificed.
35:21And this will be of great interest,
35:23especially since at least some of the biblical details
35:29and other classical references
35:32at times imply that it is firstborn males that are chosen to be sacrificed.
35:41If these tests show us for sure that these children are the firstborn,
35:45that they're exclusively boys, I'll eat my words.
35:48But I don't think they will.
35:53Glenn, come on, I'll give you some wine.
35:56In Motia, Glenn Marco talks to a young woman.
36:00In Motia, Glenn Marco talks to Dr. Ron Dixon and Dr. Kerry Brown.
36:05They're both internationally renowned microbiologists,
36:08and Glenn is hoping they'll be able to extract DNA from the charred bones in the urns.
36:14DNA may survive in cremated bones,
36:17as long as the cremation temperatures were not too high.
36:21If you can get DNA out of these infant remains,
36:24if you find sequences from the Y chromosome, you have a male infant.
36:28If you just get DNA from the X chromosome, you've got a female infant.
36:31So I think this could be the way forward to finding out
36:34whether you've got boys or girls being sacrificed, or not, as the case may be.
36:42In the museum's storeroom, Ron Dixon collects the samples he and Kerry will need
36:46to establish the sex of the cremated children through DNA analysis.
36:51The human bones that have best survived the cremation process
36:54are the ones most likely to contain ancient DNA.
36:57These are going to be taken back to Britain for analysis.
37:05We take these extraordinary precautions,
37:08gloves and masks and so on,
37:11and all the material you see is sterile,
37:15because we want to protect the bones from our own DNA.
37:19We produce DNA on our skin, and we could well contaminate these.
37:24And now this bag is sealed.
37:27Of course, the samples are in a sterile bag,
37:31and they're ready for analysis.
37:36People contain huge amounts of DNA in their bodies,
37:39and if you could unravel the DNA,
37:42from the billions of cells that we normally contain,
37:45then that DNA would stretch to the sun and back 129 times.
37:50Of course, when we die, this is rapidly degraded into very small fragments,
37:55perhaps no larger than your thumbnail.
37:59Ron is pessimistic about the possibility of extracting DNA from the bones,
38:03but Kerry is more hopeful.
38:06These bones are going to be taken back to Britain for analysis.
38:11These bones are about 3,000 years old.
38:14DNA has been isolated from bones as old as 30,000 years,
38:18a famous case being that of a Neanderthal from the Caucasian mountains.
38:22So I think these bones are well within the time frame for DNA survival.
38:26Although degradation of DNA occurs very rapidly after death,
38:30after a certain amount of time it seems to stabilise and remains pretty constant.
38:35I think the problem with this material, as you can see,
38:38it's very fragmented, it's cremated,
38:41and I think that it really would be a long shot
38:45if we could get survivable DNA to do our sex tests on this material.
38:51They're not insurmountable problems.
38:53We do have techniques.
38:55It would be time-consuming,
38:57but given the time and the money, it can be done, I think.
39:02Every cell in the body contains within it a two-metre strand of DNA,
39:07the genetic blueprint for producing a human being.
39:12But shortly after death, cells rapidly lose this genetic material.
39:17The DNA strands become fragmented and difficult for scientists to analyse.
39:27Bradford, last month.
39:30Ron Dixon and Kerry Brown have spent weeks
39:33struggling to extract DNA from the Mottian remains.
39:38One place where tiny fragments of ancient DNA sometimes survive
39:42is in the teeth.
39:44But these hopes were dashed early on.
39:47The teeth were really so degraded
39:51that we were only left with the enamel shell,
39:54and we know really that we're unlikely to get DNA from that sort of material.
40:01The bones are also in a much worse condition than they hoped.
40:06These bones don't seem to be very well preserved at all.
40:09They don't seem to have anything in the way of microstructure.
40:12By microstructure, I mean the little channels through the bone matrix
40:16which carry things like blood vessels,
40:18and of course it's from these little blood vessels that the DNA comes from.
40:24But they haven't given up yet.
40:26They're off to supervise research assistant Alex Wan, who's doing the analysis.
40:33Well, those are good ideas, but of course we've got to design the primers first.
40:38They enter the antechamber to the laboratory,
40:40where they'll have to don gloves, masks and protective glasses
40:43so that they don't contaminate the ancient samples with their own DNA.
40:49Alex is working alone in a sterile environment.
40:52She's already cut off the exterior of each bone fragment.
40:55This is to remove the DNA of anyone who has recently handled them.
41:02She now adds a solution that will react with the bones and draw out DNA.
41:07She also adds solution to an empty tube as a control.
41:14Hi Alex, how's it going?
41:16It's very important while the extraction with the bone is carried out
41:19that there's also a parallel extraction carried out.
41:22In other words, you go through exactly the same procedure, but with no bone present.
41:27If that gives you a positive result,
41:29then you know there's DNA contamination getting in somewhere.
41:32For instance, from the researcher or from another person.
41:35I think we shall remove ourselves.
41:37See you later.
41:39Once the solution has been added to the bone, it's shaken up.
41:43The mixture is put into a water bath with a temperature of 60 degrees centigrade.
41:47This will help leach out any DNA.
41:55A centrifuge now separates the bone fragments from the solution
41:58that may contain the ancient DNA.
42:14Another pipette is used to draw off this solution.
42:22This whole process has taken 24 hours,
42:25and Alex is finally left with just this tiny amount of clear liquid.
42:30To find out whether it contains any ancient DNA
42:33involves yet another lengthy process.
42:36One of the characteristics of ancient DNA is that very small amount of liquid.
42:40One of the characteristics of ancient DNA is that very little of it survives.
42:44So we use what's called a polymerase chain reaction, PCR,
42:48to target a particular piece of DNA.
42:53These samples are now ready for the PCR machine.
42:56This is the revolutionary part of the process
42:59that makes the analysis of ancient DNA possible.
43:02After death, the DNA strands become fragmented and difficult to analyse.
43:08The bonds linking the double helix are broken through the PCR process.
43:15Then the single strand is cloned up to a billion times,
43:19making enough DNA for scientists to try and identify specific chromosomes.
43:26PCR is basically the ability to amplify, to magnify,
43:33very, very small specific sections or strands of DNA.
43:40Hopefully, the PCR machine will have cloned a tiny surviving fragment of ancient DNA
43:45to produce enough for genetic analysis.
43:48To find out if this has happened, the samples have to be stained in a special gel.
43:53If there is ancient DNA, the sex will be revealed.
43:58If we had a male, we'd be looking for two bands.
44:02One would be from the X chromosome, one would be from the Y chromosome.
44:06If it was a female, we would see just one band because females have two X chromosomes.
44:12So when we look at a gel under the ultraviolet irradiation,
44:16hopefully we should see some bands with the ancient DNA
44:20which will tell us whether we're dealing with male or female infant remains.
44:25Alex runs an electrical current through the gel,
44:28which will develop the ancient DNA, if there is any.
44:32So far, she's tried 12 times, unsuccessfully.
44:37For Alex, it has been a real struggle with the extractions and the PCR,
44:42running the gels to get results from these bones.
44:45So if she has succeeded in getting any results from these bones,
44:49I think that's a heroic effort on her part.
44:53Each attempt to extract ancient DNA takes three days.
44:56After 12 failures, Kerry and Ron are hoping attempt number 13 will be lucky.
45:01It isn't.
45:03We can now know, perhaps, that we really can't find DNA
45:08that will survive a cremation in this type of bone.
45:15But Alex persuades Ron and Kerry to let her have another go.
45:19While she repeats the process in Bradford,
45:22in Jerusalem they have made a breakthrough.
45:25Pat Smith has managed to extract tiny ancient DNA fragments from the carthaged babies.
45:32We do have some preliminary results.
45:35They show two bands.
45:37Two bands equals a boy, one band equals a girl.
45:41So it seems that, at least for the specimens we've looked at, we have boys.
45:47Obviously, we need to look at a very much larger sample
45:50before we can say definitely that the probability of girls being buried there was extremely low.
45:59If the babies in the urns found in the Motia Tophet all turn out to be boys,
46:04then science will have finally proved beyond doubt
46:07that the Tophets were sites of ritual child sacrifice.
46:12Back in Bradford, Alex is about to find out whether she's finally found ancient DNA
46:18and what sex it is.
46:20She's summoned Ron and Kerry for the moment of truth.
46:23Hi. I think you should come and look at this.
46:26You've got something?
46:27Well, have a look and see.
46:28All right.
46:30Oh, yes.
46:31Oh, yes.
46:33Along with the ancient DNA, the gel also contains modern DNA from a man and a woman.
46:39Yes, you've got the male, two bands from modern DNA.
46:44That's the female, modern DNA, one band.
46:47And that's the ancient DNA, and we see one band there, so...
46:50That's marvellous, and it's a girl!
46:53That's great.
46:55All the blanks have been blank here.
46:57It's a real result. Great. Well done.
47:00But it's a very disappointing result for the advocates of the child sacrifice.
47:05I don't want to make too much of that evidence until it's been further studied.
47:12And we continue to do more work on these bones,
47:16because we're learning much more,
47:18even though it's now several decades since we did our excavations in Carthage.
47:27The Israeli team are now embarking on a mission to find out
47:32The Israeli team are now embarking on a massive study.
47:36Over the next five years, they hope to conduct DNA tests on hundreds of Carthage infants.
47:42If they find a fairly even mix of both boys and girls,
47:45Professor Bartolone will be proved right
47:48and the Roman and Greek accounts of child sacrifice would be fiction.
47:52But the advocates of the child sacrifice theory are pinning their hopes
47:56on finding a disproportionate number of either girls or boys.
48:01If we have a great predominance of young girls,
48:05this would fit in with the bias that we might have in the ancient world
48:10of young girls being undervalued by society,
48:14so that it would be easier and less painful for the family to sacrifice a girl than a boy.
48:19If the predominance are boys,
48:21then this would fit in with the notion of the supreme sacrifice
48:26of the young, first-born male.
48:32The absence of disease in the teeth and the age of the children analysed so far
48:37suggested that child sacrifice did indeed occur.
48:40But the discovery of a female child has thrown these findings into confusion.
48:45It may take several more years for science to finally discover
48:49whether there was children's blood on the altar.
49:25Transcription by ESO. Translation by —