(Please read from the start)
“The sewer system we found beneath the bathhouse was more suggestive. The sewer was high enough for an adult to stand up inside it. The whole system had been clogged and had gone out of use by the sixth century A.D. The sewer was filled with rubbish of all kinds, including potsherds, coins and animal bones.
In addition, the shallow gutter that ran below and along the line of the sewer was filled with the skeletons of about a hundred babies. Analysis of these remains by physical anthropologists Patricia Smith and Gila Kahila indicated that the infants were newborns, discarded within a day of birth. Analysis of teeth that had not yet erupted revealed bloodstains, indicating that the infants were either strangled or drowned. Because the infant remains were found in the gutter of the sewer, it seems likely that they were intentionally drowned.”
>> Amazing how Smith accepts the analysis of the teeth of these “murdered” children, but refuses that of the buried children in Carthage. Poor kids, thrown like that in the sewer. The mothers didn’t care about them one zit to throw them in that dirty, filthy, bacteria infested place. Here, if we compare how the dead infants were treated after death = tossed into the sewer; and how the Carthaginians treated their dead infants = cremated, buried in urns thena stele was placed on top with a vow = inscription on it while the priest prayed and a religious burial ritual was performed by him. All of the things done to bury the dead infants and children in Carthage are costly anons and in the same time they project the care given by the parents to their dead child. While here, in the bath house, it’s the easiest, nastiest and cheapest way to get rid of an unwanted infant and it projects the lack of care the mother had towards this child since it lived for an extremely short amount of time. The signs of death here are clear = it was premeditated murder to get rid of the infant. In Carthage, there are no such signs on the remains which could have helped us find out the cause of death of the children.
“For centuries, infanticide was an accepted practice for disposing of unwanted female babies—and, less often, male babies. This was especially true in ancient Roman society. In a letter (dated to June 17 of the year 1 B.C. by our calendar), a certain Hilarion writes to his wife Alis: “I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son … If you are delivered of child [before I get home,] if it is a boy keep it; if a girl, discard it.”
>> Look at the beauty of this sentence and how it’s redirecting your thoughts towards the Romans to keep you away from associating this finding to the Jews, since Ashkelon , where this macabre discovery was made, is in Israel after all. They magically forgot to mention the Tophet of Jerusalem condemned by so many prophets and how king Josiah tried to shut it down and stop the practice of child sacrifice taking place there. In other words, it’s “look here not there” trick being played on your mind here anons.
“Knowing that the Ashkelon bathhouse was an unlikely institution for either the city’s Jews or Christians, both of whom were overwhelmingly “pro-natal,” we assumed the bathhouse/bordello made sense in a Roman context. There should, according to conventional wisdom and calculations, be more female than male babies discarded in the sewers of Ashkelon. This determination could not be made by the analysis usually used by physical anthropologists. It is impossible to determine the sex of prepubescent humans from skeletal observations alone: Such diagnostic features as the pelvis have not yet reached a significant developmental stage.”
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