From Finely Executed Dies
CARTHAGE. Circa 310-290 BC. EL Stater (19mm, 7.35 g, 12h). Wreathed head of Tanit left, wearing triple-pendant earring and necklace / Horse standing right; two pellets on groundline. Jenkins & Lewis Group V, 264 (same dies); MAA 12; Visona 5; SNG Copenhagen 137 var. (three pellets). EF, toned.
Ex Triton VIII (10 January 2005), lot 596.
The Punic goddess Tanit and the horse became the standard types of Carthaginian coinage for the balance of its existence. Tanit was the primary deity of Carthage. A celestial divinity with some fertility aspects, she was the North African equivalent of Astarte. She is always depicted on the coinage wearing a wreath of grain which may have been borrowed from Demeter and Persephone as the Carthaginians assimilated the Sicilian culture into their own during the various Punic excursions to the island. The use of the horse on the reverse is usually considered part of the foundation myth of Carthage. According to Virgil's Aeneid, the Phoenician colonists who founded Carthage were told by Juno (or Tanit) to establish the new colony at the place where they discovered a horse's head in the ground. Another theory postulates that the obverse head is actually Demeter or Persephone since in 396 BC, to make amends for the destruction of the goddesses' temples outside Syracuse by the Carthaginian army, their worship was introduced at Carthage.
