and two-year-olds. These double remains have been interpreted to mean that in the cases of stillborn babies, the parents would sacrifice their youngest child. A detailed breakdown of the age of the buried children includes pre-natal individuals – that is, still births. It is also argued that the age distribution of remains at this site is consistent with the burial of children who died of natural causes, shortly before or after birth. Sergio Ribichini has argued that the Tophet was "a child necropolis designed to receive the remains of infants who had died prematurely of sickness or other natural causes, and who for this reason were "offered" to specific deities and buried in a place different from the one reserved for the ordinary dead". He adds that this was probably part of "an effort to ensure the benevolent protection of the same deities for the survivors." However, this analysis is disputed; Patricia Smith and colleagues from the Hebrew University and Harvard University show from the teeth and skeletal analysis at the Carthage Tophet that infant ages at death (about two months) do not correlate with the expected ages of natural mortality (perinatal). Cultural references In Gustave Flaubert's historical novel Salammbô (1862), the title character is a priestess of Tanit. Mâtho, the chief male protagonist, a Libyan mercenary rebel at war with Carthage, breaks into the goddess's temple and steals her veil. In Kate Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy, a romanticised version of Tanit is one of many deities commonly worshiped in a polytheistic Europa. The narrator, Catherine, frequently appeals to "Blessed Tanit, Protector of Women", and the goddess occasionally appears to her. G. K. Chesterton refers to Tanit in his account of the Punic Wars, "War of the Gods and Demons" (a chapter of his book The Everlasting Man). Describing the cultural shock of foreign armies invading Italy when Hannibal crossed the Alps, Chesterton wrote: In Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin there is an epigraph on a Carthaginian funerary urn that reads: "I swam, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore. / Tanit was merciless, my prayers were answered. / O you who drown in love, remember me." In John Maddox Roberts's alternate history novel Hannibal's Children, in which the Carthaginians won the Second Punic War, one of the characters is Princess Zarabel, leader of the cult of Tanit. Isaac Asimov's 1956 science fiction short story "The Dead Past" tells of