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Concept
Tanit
Summary
Tanit or Tinnit (Punic: 𐤕𐤍𐤕 Tīnīt) was a Punic goddess, and the chief deity of Ancient Carthage, alongside her consort Baal Hammon.
The name appears to have originated in Carthage (modern day Tunisia), though it does not appear in local theophorous names. She was equivalent to the war goddess Astarte, and later worshipped in Roman Carthage in her Romanized form as Dea Caelestis, Juno Caelestis, or simply Caelestis.
In modern-day Tunisian Arabic, 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. Similarly, Algerian, Tunisian and many other spoken forms of Arabic refer to "Baali farming" to refer to non-irrigated agriculture. Such usage is attested in Hebrew, a Canaanite language sister to Phoenician, already in the 2nd century CE Mishnah.
Until 1955, the name of the goddess was only known as Phoenician TNT (written without vowels). It was vocalized, quite arbitrarily, as "Tanit". In 1955, Punic inscriptions transliterated in Greek characters were found at El-Hofra (Constantine, Algeria) and published; in these transcriptions, TNT was vocalized as Θινιθ (Thinith) and Θεννειθ (Thenneith). This made clear that the name should be pronounced as Tinnīt. However, the spelling Tanit is still often encountered.
Tanit was worshiped in Punic contexts in the Western Mediterranean, in Sicily, Malta, North Africa, Gades and many other places into Hellenistic times.
Tanit's worship might have originated in relation to the Phoenician deity Astarte (Ishtar), whose own worship is first dated in the Phoenician sites of Sidon and Tyre. Her shrine excavated at Sarepta in southern Phoenicia revealed an inscription that has been speculated to identify her for the first time in her homeland and related her securely to the Phoenician goddess Astarte (Ishtar). Iconographic portrayals of both deities later become similar. The relation between both deities has been proposed to be hypostatic in nature, representing two aspects of the same goddess.
Official source
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