Religion

Phoenician and Punic Religion

Polytheistic (Historical)

The religion of the Phoenician city states and their Mediterranean diaspora, from the early first millennium BCE Levantine coast through the Punic colonies of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia, most prominently Carthage. Worship centred on city tutelary gods carried into each new colony, temple cult, votive stelae, and, in the Punic west, the debated tophet practice attested by thousands of inscribed urns at Carthage, Motya and other sites. The religion left almost no surviving native literature and is known mainly through epigraphy, archaeology and outside testimony from Greek and Roman writers, which is not neutral and requires careful handling.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Period

from 1200 BCE 1

Phoenician religion continues older Canaanite cult with no clean break, so no single founding point exists; historians conventionally date the start of the distinct Phoenician era, as opposed to the broader Canaanite Bronze Age culture that preceded it, to around 1200 BCE after the Bronze Age collapse. That date marks a historiographic convention for when the label Phoenician becomes standard, not a founding event.

Connections