#phoenician miscellanea

[yamayuandadu]

I don't know how well versed in Canaanite or Phoenician stuff, but if so, what's the deal with Tanit? Did she originate in Ashtart, or was a separate goddess? I keep finding a lot of conflicting information on her, and the fact that she's associated with supposed child-sacrifice means a lot of the stuff I find on her has an air of sensationalism

I won’t claim it’s a major interest (recall that the only strictly Canaanite deity whose wiki page I wrote is Baalat Gebal) but I think I can help. However, bear in mind there might be significant gaps in my knowledge esp. regarding the various colonies across the Ibernian peninsula, Sardinia etc.

Saying anything firm about Tanit is not exactly easy since virtually all attestations of her are brief dedicatory inscriptions, theophoric names, toponyms (ex. Aqtanit, Aitanit, Kfar Tanit) and symbolic representations. No hymns, no myths, no theological speculation, not even much in the way of sources hinting at how her cult was organized. Such a body of evidence doesn’t let one do much beyond concluding she certainly was an actively worshiped deity.

There are multiple proposals regarding her name but as far as I am aware most if not all come from authors whose methods leave a lot to be desired, so I’ll leave that out. It’s really not possible to say much beyond the fact she was clearly regarded as the tutelary goddess of Carthage. There is also evidence for some degree of worship in Sidon from the sixth century BCE onward, Kition from the fifth (references to a group of devotees, theophoric names) and in the Mount Lebanon range (a single Carthaginian inscription mentions “Tanit in Lebanon”; see Spencer L. Allen, The Splintered Divine, p. 243-244 and 302). The only connection between Tanit and another deity we can be sure about is that with Baal Hammon, presumably her spouse. It’s best reflected in her epithet “Face of Baal”, found almost exclusively in sources from Carthage, the main exception being two attestations from Constantine in Algeria. What exactly this title entails is difficult to tell, though (The Splintered Divine, p. 242-243). An interesting Neo-Punic inscription pairs Tanit with Kronos, which would indicate the author was familiar with the interpretatio graeca of Baal Hammon, which goes back at least to Sophocles’ times (The Splintered Divine, p. 57).

Out of necessity the rest of the response will largely focus on explaining who Tanit certainly wasn’t. 

For starters, she definitely was not Ashtart in any shape or form. Aren M. Wilson-Wright in Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age (the book isn’t open access, but you can find the dissertation it was based on here) points out that authors seeking to prove they’re related treat data from different locations and time periods as fully interchangeable, without taking into account deities change across time (p. 7). 

Ultimately the only real argument comes from a text discovered during the excavations in Sarepta dated to the sixth century BCE. It contains the compound name “Tanit-Astarte” (The Splintered Divine, p. 241). The problem is that the two were clearly viewed as distinct in Carthage, as evidenced by roughly contemporary sources. (The Splintered Divine, p. 244). 

Allen notes we might be dealing with a situation like Tanit being worshiped alongside Astarte and the double name designating her as an “associate” of sorts, or that similarly as in the case of Neo-Assyrian compound theonyms the double name indicates a form of Tanit with Astarte’s attributes, like how “Ashur-Enlil” was a designation of Ashur as the king of the gods and not an indication he was merged with Enlil (The Splintered Divine, p. 241).

Even with Ashtart out of the picture, the dreadful specter of interchangeability of goddesses refuses to leave the room, though. There’s an even more nonsensical proposal, namely that Tanit is, somehow, Asherah. We have Frank Moore Cross of Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic to blame for this one. As outlined by Steve A. Wiggins in A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess (p. 131), subsequent publications making the same claim just rely on Cross, with no new material added. The equation is utterly baseless since it depends on assigning symbols to “Asherah” (really to Ugaritic Athirat) based on the pure vibes school of scholarship. Alleged leonine connections rest entirely on the deeply puzzling equation with the sparsely attested Qudshu (or however we’re romanizing her name this week), conclusively proven to be an Egyptian invention (see Christiane Zivie Coche, Foreign Deities in Egypt, pages 4-5) and thus irrelevant to this discussion.

It’s worth noting the only reason why forced attempts are made every now and then is that since Q. appears once - on a now lost stela, lol - with Anat and Ashtart - she CLEARLY must be a northern goddess of equal standing which somehow means Athirat (hardly attested outside Ugarit, and even then, Shapash, Nikkal, Pidray, the collective Kotharat are all equally if not better attested…). So, in other words: the Tanit link here was built on multiple levels of unsound foundations.

[viscontedivalmont]

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