Tanit

Tannit was also a goddess of rain, in modern-day Tunisia, it is customary to invoke Omek Tannou or Oumouk Tangou ('Mother Tannou' or 'Mother Tangou', depending on the region), in years of drought to bring rain[12] Similarly, Algerians and Tunisians refer to "Baali farming" to mean non-irrigated agriculture.

A shrine excavated at Sarepta in southern Phoenicia revealed an inscription that has been speculated to have connection between the goddesses Tanit and Astarte (Ishtar).

Although Tanit did not appear at Carthage before the 5th century BC, this shows her clear origins locally from North Africa.

[2][9][10] Carthagenians spread the cult of Tanit-Astarte to the Iberian Peninsula with the foundation of Gadir (modern day Cádiz) and other colonies, where the goddess might have been also assimilated to native deities.

[23] Another motif assimilates her to Europa, portraying Tanit as a woman riding a bull that would represent another deity, possibly El.

A procession goes from Village to Village and from one saint's sanctuary to another carrying an effigy of a female, on the way the bride is splashed with water from Terraces and windows of houses, people give money gifts to the leader of the procession, the gathered money and food are used to prepare a big meal near a water spring or in a saint's sanctuary, usually on top of the hill.

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.

Paolo Xella of the National Research Council in Rome summarized the textual, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence for Carthaginian infant sacrifice.

Animal remains, mostly sheep and goats, found inside some of the Tophet urns, strongly suggest that this was not a burial ground for children who died prematurely.

[37] The area covered by the Tophet in Carthage was probably over an acre and a half by the fourth century BCE,[38] with nine different levels of burials.

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.

[37] 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".

Mâtho, the chief male protagonist, a Libyan mercenary rebel at war with Carthage, breaks into the goddess's temple and steals her veil.

[42] 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.

Describing the cultural shock of foreign armies invading Italy when Hannibal crossed the Alps, Chesterton wrote: It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is more horrible than hate.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.

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.

A Punic coin featuring Tanit, minted in Carthage between 330 and 300 BCE.
Tanit with a lion's head, from the Bardo Museum in Tunisia
Bust of a female figure that has been sometimes hypothesized to represent Tanit, or probably Demeter [ 28 ] found in the Carthaginian necropolis of Puig des Molins , dated 4th century BC, housed in the Museum of Puig des Molins in Ibiza, Spain
Stele with Tanit's symbol in Carthage 's Tophet, including a crescent moon over the figure
Stelae in the Tophet of Salammbó covered by a vault built in the Roman period
Adorned statue of the Punic goddess Tanit, 5th–3rd centuries BC, from the necropolis of Puig des Molins , Ibiza (Spain), now housed in the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia (Barcelona)