Carthage's chief goddess and consort of Baal Hammon, her sign still scratched on Punic stelae long after Rome razed her city in 146 BCE.
Born
500 BCE
Died
200 CE
Lived
700 years
Dead for
1,826 yrs
Cause of death
Assimilation · Forgotten
Replaced by
Roman religion, then Christianity
The Obituary
Tanit was the chief goddess of Carthage, consort of Baal Hammon and patron of the city’s fertility, war, and the heavens, honored with child sacrifices at her tofet precinct west of the city. Her distinctive emblem, a triangle crowned by a disc and crescent, was carved on countless votive stelae across the Punic world. After Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE and refounded it, she was assimilated to the Roman Dea Caelestis and worshipped for centuries more, until Christianity supplanted the old Punic cult across North Africa.
Worth remembering
Her emblem, a stylized figure of a disc above a triangle with raised arms, appears on thousands of Punic stelae.
Under Rome she was reborn as Dea Caelestis, the Heavenly Goddess, with a temple at Carthage.
Gallery
Punic stele carved with a palm and the sign of Tanit, Musée des Beaux-Arts de LyonRama · CC BY-SA 2.0 frCarthaginian stele decorated with the sign of Tanit, Louvre Near Eastern antiquitiesCC0
Sources
Tanit was the chief deity of Carthage alongside Baal Hammon Wikipedia
The sign of Tanit is a trapezoid topped by a circle and crescent Wikipedia
Tanit was the chief deity of Carthage and was worshipped alongside Baal Hammon; children, probably firstborn, were sacrificed at the precinct of Tanit (a tofet) west of Carthage. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Tanit was the patron deity of Carthage and appears on Carthaginian coins, stelae, and mosaics; her symbol — a triangle with a crossbar and circle — was ubiquitous across the Punic world. World History Encyclopedia
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.
Buried nearby — by shared fate or a neighbouring lifespan.
