The Coinage of Carthage

CNG 100, Lot: 17. Estimate $500. Sold for $2200. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

CARTHAGE. Circa 350-320 BC. AV Quarter Stater (11mm, 2.34 g, 12h). Head of Tanit left, wearing wreath of grain ears and single-pendant earring / Palm tree with two date-clusters. Jenkins & Lewis Group III, 116.1 (this coin); MAA 6; SNG Copenhagen 130. VF, a few marks on reverse and edge. Very rare.

From the collection of Dr. Lawrence A. Adams. Ex George & Robert Stevenson Collection (Classical Numismatic Group XXVI, 11 June 1993), lot 44; Birkler & Waddell I (7 December 1979), lot 184; R. B. Lewis Collection.

By the third 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. Another 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.