I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Carthage Tariff
▶ Listen · narrated
Temple rules carved in stone, not kept in a ledger. This Punic inscription from Carthage fixed the price of offerings and the priests’ share — routine administration that outlived the city.
At a glance
- Material
- Limestone
- Found
- 1856, archaeological site of Carthage
- Language
- Punic
- Form
- Inscription on stela fragments
- Collection
- British Museum (BM 125303)
- Catalogue
- KAI 74; CIS I 167
Look closer
A tariff, not a tombstone
Most of the Carthaginian inscriptions recovered in the same campaign were ordinary tombstones. This piece was not. Its eleven lines set out payments for ritual sacrifices: what was due, and how the animal was to be divided between the priests and the person who brought the offering. The text reads as regulation, not commemoration.
Portions, not piety alone
The plaque is concerned with shares. It specifies which parts of a sacrificed animal went to the priesthood and which remained with the offerer. That level of detail turns a religious act into an accountable transaction, visible to anyone who could read the stone on the wall.
Stone as noticeboard
The inscription is thought to have been fixed on a temple wall so that worshippers and staff could consult the same rules. Limestone is a practical medium for that job: durable enough for public display, soft enough to take a clear cut script. What survives is administrative furniture as much as sacred text.
The story
The Carthage Tariff is a Punic inscription cut on fragments of a limestone stela and found at the archaeological site of Carthage in Tunisia. It dates to the third century BCE. Its eleven lines do not praise a god or name a dead citizen. They list the payments attached to ritual sacrifice and the division of the offering between priest and offerer.
It was found in 1856 and first published by Nathan Davis. Among the inscriptions he recovered, only three were not traditional Carthaginian tombstones. This was one of them; the others were a marble base and a tower model. That small group already hints at how heavily funerary stone dominates the surviving epigraphic record from the city, and how unusual a working temple notice is by comparison.
The text is catalogued as KAI 74 and as CIS I 167, and it sits in the British Museum under the number BM 125303. It is often discussed alongside the Marseille Tariff, found about two decades earlier. The two are thought to be related: both preserve the same kind of sacrificial price-list in the Punic language, and both look like public rules rather than private devotion. Whether they stem from a shared template, a common temple practice, or simply a widespread administrative habit is harder to settle from the stones alone.
What the Carthage piece does make plain is the machinery of offering. A sacrifice was not only a gift; it was a regulated exchange in which the priesthood took a defined cut and the worshipper kept another. Setting those terms in stone reduced argument at the altar and made the temple’s income legible. The audience was mixed: priests who performed the rites, clerks or attendants who handled the animals and the fees, and lay people who needed to know what they owed and what they would take home.
The original setting is not certain. The fragments were recovered from the site of Carthage, but the temple wall on which the plaque is thought to have hung has not been identified with the inscription itself. Like many ancient texts that reached modern collections through nineteenth-century excavation and collecting, the stone’s find-spot is clearer than its first architectural home.
As an archaeological artefact it is modest: limestone, broken, eleven lines. As evidence it is denser. It shows Carthage managing sacred economy in writing, in the local language, for readers who stood in front of a wall and needed a price. The same habits that produced tombstones by the hundred also produced, at least once, a public tariff clear enough to survive the city that posted it.
Why it mattered then
In its own moment the tariff mattered because sacrifice was both worship and logistics. Animals had to be received, killed, portioned and paid for under rules that priests and offerers could both accept. A wall text removed the need to renegotiate those shares at every visit. It also protected the temple’s income by fixing what the priesthood was due. For a Punic city whose religious life was public and repeated, a limestone notice was a practical instrument of order: cheaper than constant supervision, harder to dispute than a spoken custom, and available to anyone literate enough to read the lines.
Why it matters now
The stone still matters because it preserves ordinary temple administration rather than royal propaganda or funerary formula. Much of what survives from Carthage in inscription form is commemorative; this piece is operational. It lets modern readers see how a sanctuary priced ritual and divided meat, and it links Carthage to a wider Punic habit of posting sacrificial tariffs, including the related text from Marseille. For historians of religion and of ancient economies, that is rare direct evidence of sacred accounting. For anyone interested in how institutions make themselves trusted, it is a reminder that clarity on a wall can be as important as belief at an altar.
The surprising detail
Nathan Davis recovered many inscriptions at Carthage; almost all were conventional tombstones. Only three were not. The Carthage Tariff was one of that handful, standing beside a marble base and a tower model. A document about priests’ portions survived in the same net as the city’s mass of funerary stone — which is part of why it still draws attention out of proportion to its size.
What is disputed
The inscription is thought to have been mounted on a temple wall, but the original building has not been identified from the find. Its relationship to the Marseille Tariff is widely noted and remains a matter of interpretation rather than proof of a single shared original. Contemporary accounts place the discovery in the mid-1850s at Carthage; the verified date is 1856, while some descriptions extend the find period to 1858.
How it got here
The fragments were found at the archaeological site of Carthage and first published by Nathan Davis. They entered the British Museum, where they are held as BM 125303 and recorded in the major corpora of Semitic inscriptions (KAI 74; CIS I 167). No separate contested-ownership claim is supplied in the facts given here; the object is presented as part of the Museum’s collection of Punic epigraphy from nineteenth-century work at Carthage.
Remember this
Eleven Punic lines on limestone fixed the cost of sacrifice and the split between priest and offerer — temple bookkeeping meant to be read on a wall.
Test yourself
Why does it matter that this inscription lists portions for priests and offerers, rather than only naming gods or donors?
Because the detail turns the stone into evidence of procedure. A dedication tells you who gave; a tariff tells you how the transaction was supposed to run — who was paid, who kept which cut, and what a worshipper could expect. That is administrative history, not only religious sentiment, and it is why the piece is compared with the Marseille Tariff as a working rule-set rather than a pious memorial.
Go deeper
Image: C J Ball, Public domain. Licence: Public domain. Source.