Tanit
Encyclopedia
Tanit was a Phoenicia
Phoenicia
Phoenicia , was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550...

n lunar goddess
Goddess
A goddess is a female deity. In some cultures goddesses are associated with Earth, motherhood, love, and the household. In other cultures, goddesses also rule over war, death, and destruction as well as healing....

, worshipped as the patron goddess at Carthage
Carthage
Carthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...

.

Tanit was worshiped in Punic contexts in the Western Mediterranean, from Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...

 to Gades into Hellenistic times. From the fifth century BCE onwards Tanit is associated with that of Baal Hammon
Baal
Baʿal is a Northwest Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord" that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the Levant and Asia Minor, cognate to Akkadian Bēlu...

. She is given the epithet pene baal ("face of Baal") and the title rabat, the female form of rab (chief) (Markoe 2000:130). In North Africa, where the inscriptions and material remains are more plentiful, she was, as well as a consort of Baal Hammon, a heavenly goddess of war, a virginal (not married) mother goddess and nurse, and, less specifically, a symbol of fertility, as are most female forms. Several of the major Greek goddesses were identified with Tanit by the syncretic interpretatio graeca
Interpretatio graeca
Interpretatio graeca is a Latin term for the common tendency of ancient Greek writers to equate foreign divinities to members of their own pantheon. Herodotus, for example, refers to the ancient Egyptian gods Amon, Osiris and Ptah as "Zeus", "Dionysus" and "Hephaestus", respectively.-Roman...

, which recognized as Greek deities in foreign guise the gods of most of the surrounding non-Hellene cultures.

Her shrine excavated at Sarepta
Sarepta
Sarepta was a Phoenician city on the Mediterranean coast between Sidon and Tyre. Most of the objects by which we characterise Phoenician culture are those that have been recovered scattered among Phoenician colonies and trading posts; such carefully excavated colonial sites are in Spain, Sicily,...

 in southern Phoenicia revealed an inscription that identified her for the first time in her homeland and related her securely to the Phoenicia
Phoenicia
Phoenicia , was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550...

n goddess Astarte
Astarte
Astarte is the Greek name of a goddess known throughout the Eastern Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to Classical times...

 (Ishtar). One site where Tanit is uncovered is at Kerkouan, in the Cap Bon peninsula in Tunisia.

The origins of Tanit are to be found in the pantheon of Ugarit
Ugarit
Ugarit was an ancient port city in the eastern Mediterranean at the Ras Shamra headland near Latakia, Syria. It is located near Minet el-Beida in northern Syria. It is some seven miles north of Laodicea ad Mare and approximately fifty miles east of Cyprus...

, especially in the Ugaritic goddess Anat
Anat
Anat, also ‘Anat is a major northwest Semitic goddess.-‘Anat in Ugarit:In the Ugaritic Ba‘al/Hadad cycle ‘Anat is a violent war-goddess, a virgin in Ugarit though the sister and lover of the great Ba‘al known as Hadad elsewhere. Ba‘al is usually called the son of Dagon and sometimes the son of El....

 (Hvidberg-Hansen 1982), a consumer of blood and flesh. There is significant, albeit disputed, evidence, both archaeological and within ancient written sources, pointing towards child sacrifice forming part of the worship of Tanit and Baal Hammon.

Tanit is also a goddess among the ancient Berber people
Berber people
Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are continuously distributed from the Atlantic to the Siwa oasis, in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger River. Historically they spoke the Berber language or varieties of it, which together form a branch...

.

Her symbol, found on many ancient stone carvings, appears as a trapezoid
Trapezoid
In Euclidean geometry, a convex quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides is referred to as a trapezoid in American English and as a trapezium in English outside North America. A trapezoid with vertices ABCD is denoted...

/trapezium
Trapezium
The word trapezium has several meanings:* - a quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides ....

 closed by a horizontal line at the top and surmounted in the middle by a circle: the horizontal arm is often terminated either by two short upright lines at right angles to it or by hooks. Later, the trapezoid/trapezium is frequently replaced by an isosceles triangle
Triangle
A triangle is one of the basic shapes of geometry: a polygon with three corners or vertices and three sides or edges which are line segments. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted ....

. The symbol is interpreted by Hvidberg-Hansen as a woman raising her hands.

In Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...

, her name means Land of Neith, Neith
Neith
In Egyptian mythology, Neith was an early goddess in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the patron deity of Sais, where her cult was centered in the Western Nile Delta of Egypt and attested as early as the First Dynasty...

 being a war goddess.

Long after the fall of Carthage, Tanit is still venerated in North Africa under the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 name of Juno Caelestis, for her identification with the Roman goddess Juno
Juno (mythology)
Juno is an ancient Roman goddess, the protector and special counselor of the state. She is a daughter of Saturn and sister of the chief god Jupiter and the mother of Mars and Vulcan. Juno also looked after the women of Rome. Her Greek equivalent is Hera...

.

Hvidberg-Hansen (Danish professor of Semitic philology), notes that Tanit is sometimes depicted with a lion's head, showing her warrior quality.

In modern times the name, with the spelling "Tanith
Tanith
- Ancient deities :* Tanith, alternative spelling of Tanit, a Carthaginian lunar goddess of the Phoenician pantheon- People :* Tanith , stage name of Thomas Andrezak, German DJ and producer of electronic dance music...

", has been used as a female given name, both for real people and, more frequently, in occult fiction.

External links

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