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Research Coins: The Coin Shop

 
475060. Sold For $2950

CARTHAGE. Circa 320-310 BC. EL Stater (19mm, 7.57 g, 12h). Carthage mint. Jenkins & Lewis Group IVa, 178 = Hunterian 51 (same rev. die); CNP 2.2; MAA 9; SNG Copenhagen –. VF, toned, die rust and minor flan flaw on obverse. Rare.


Ex WN Collection, purchased from Salamanca Rare Coins, Hobart, Tasmania, 9 September 2005.

By the fourth century BC, the Punic goddess Tanit and the horse had become the standard types of Carthaginian coinage and remained so for the balance of the city’s 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. An alternate theory is that the obverse head is actually Demeter or Persephone, whose worship was introduced to Carthage in 396 BC to make amends for the destruction of the goddesses' temples outside Syracuse by the Carthaginian army.