Phoenician religion is Canaanite religion continued into the first millennium BCE, with each city keeping its own divine pair. Tyre had Melqart, whose name means king of the city, and Astarte. Sidon had Eshmun, a healing god, and Astarte. Byblos had a goddess called simply the Lady of Byblos. Melqart's cult included an annual awakening, and Greek writers identified him with Herakles, which is how his temples appear in their accounts.
At Carthage the pairing became Baal Hammon and Tanit, whose emblem, a triangle with a disc and a bar above it, is the most reproduced Phoenician religious sign. The Carthaginian and other western sanctuaries known as tophets contain urns holding the cremated remains of infants and young animals beneath dedicatory stelae, and what they represent is one of the sharpest disputes in the field. Greek and Roman writers, and the Hebrew Bible, describe Phoenician child sacrifice. Some archaeologists read the deposits instead as a cemetery for infants who died naturally, and others hold that the ancient reports are broadly correct. The atlas records the dispute as live and does not settle it.
Almost no Phoenician literature survives. What is known comes from inscriptions, from archaeology and from hostile or distant outsiders, and that is a constraint on every statement above.