Did Tanit have wings?

On a stela from Carthage, a winged woman appears alongside a dedication to Tanit and Baal Hammon. It’s a different image from the sign most often associated with Tanit: a circle above a horizontal line and a triangle.

A winged Tanit

The stela is catalogued as CIS I 183. Its winged figure has long been interpreted as Tanit, with the dedication on the same stone helping to support that reading. [1]

In her 2023 University of Malta dissertation, Charmaine Petersen Montebello compares fourteen objects showing winged female figures. She asks which might represent the goddess. The Carthaginian stela is among the stronger candidates; several other identifications remain uncertain. [1]

The wings are only part of the evidence. The inscription and the circumstances in which an object was used matter too.

Another way of picturing her

If you know Tanit through her geometric sign, this figure gives you something else to look at: a woman’s body with wings.

That doesn’t mean Tanit began as a bird. The image on the stela is a winged woman, and its identification as Tanit is an interpretation supported by the dedication. There’s room to be interested in the image without claiming more than it tells us.

And Parthenope?

Wings also appear in the history of siren imagery. In Greek art, sirens often have human faces and birds’ bodies. A terracotta in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, made around 550–500 BCE, is one example. The museum identifies it as a siren, without naming it Parthenope. [2]

Seen together, these figures invite a comparison: the winged woman associated with Tanit and the bird-bodied siren. Their wings don’t establish a shared origin or a connection between their cults.

For Sirendipity, they add another detail to the stories we began with. Our Parthenope is a two-tailed siren. Her meeting with Tanit during an eclipse belongs to the tale we’ve imagined for the project.

In Sirendipity’s two-tailed siren jewellery, Tanit is part of this original design. The tale of Parthenope and Tanit tells the story of their imagined meeting.