Image Details

Lion-headed Tanit wearing a feather skirt. This terra cotta statue and four others of the Punic goddess were discovered in 1908 in a coastal village southeast of Carthage. All five date to the late first century B.C. Even after the Romans had conquered Carthage and outlawed human sacrifice, remnants of the Punic population who fled the city defiantly held firm to the bloody cult, as this lofty five-foot-tall Tanit demonstrates.