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Tophet and Moloch cult

In Phoenician sites throughout the Western Mediterranean, archaeology has revealed fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments. These fields are conventionally referred to as "tophets" by archaeologists, after the location in the Bible. When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms bt (house, temple or sanctuary) or qdš (shrine), not "tophet".Archaeology reveals two "generations" of Punic tophets: those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE; and those founded under Carthaginian influence (direct or indirect) in North Africa from the 4th century BCE onward.

The tophet and its location, Gehenna, later became associated with divine punishment in Jewish Apocalypticism.