Tanit

Tanit or Tinnit (Punic: 𐤕𐤍𐤕 Tīnnīt) was a chief deity of Ancient Carthage; she derives from a local Berber deity and the consort of Baal Hammon. As Ammon is a local Libyan deity, so is Tannit, which she represents the matriarchal aspect of Numidian society, whom the Egyptians identify as Neith and the Greeks identify as Athena. She was the goddess of Wisdom, civilization and the crafts; she is the defender of towns and homes where she is worshipped. Ancient North Africans used to put her sign on tombstones and homes to ask for protection, her main temples in Thinissut (Bir Bouregba, Tunisia), Cirta (Constantine, Algeria), Lambaesis (Batna, Algeria) and Theveste (Tebessa, Algeria).. She had a yearly festival in Antiquity which persists to this day in many parts of North Africa but was banned by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, who called it a pagan festival. The names themselves, Baal Hammon and Tanit, have Berber linguistic structure. Many feminine and masculine names end with "t" and "n" in the Berber languages. The variation of the name "Tanit" appears to may have originated in Carthage (modern-day Tunisia), though it does not appear in local theophorous names. Before 1955, the only attestations of the goddess's name were in Punic, which is written without vowels as "TNT" Tanit or "TNNT" as Tannit and was arbitrarily vocalized as "Tanit". In 1955, Punic inscriptions transliterated in Greek characters found at El-Hofra (near Constantine, Algeria) transliterated the name as ‹See Tfd›Greek: Θινιθ (Thinith) and ‹See Tfd›Greek: Θεννειθ (Thenneith). The inscriptions indicate that the name was likely pronounced as Tinnīt. Still, many scholars and writings continue to use "Tanit". She was 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.