same author tells us that a shrine was set up to her in the second century a.d. by a legatus at Lambaesis, the great camp established on the plateau to protect the Roman farmers from the attacks of the mountaineers at a point no more than twenty miles to the north-east of the holy mountain, the modern ceremonies upon the slopes of which may, perhaps, be regarded as a fragment of evidence of the survival of her worship.
In certain other customs of the Shawiya traces of an ancient cult are to be found which would appear to refer to the early worship of Tanit in one or other of her aspects. Tanit, as we have seen, was a goddess of fertility. Bouchier states that she was "practically the same as the moon-goddess Astarte." The very ancient shrine of Paphos is believed by Sir James Frazer[1] to have been the seat of worship of a combination of two deities, a very early goddess of fertility and of Astarte, who was brought thither by the Phoenicians and who may have closely resembled the original goddess. These two, he considers, may have been "both varieties of that great goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have been spread all over Western Asia from a very early time. The supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as by the licentious character of her rites; for both that shape and those rites were shared by her with other Asiatic deities. Her image was simply a white cone or pyramid. In like manner, a cone was the emblem of Astarte at Byblus," etc. Now a white cone figures to-day in one of the love philtres employed among the Shawiya by young men and girls, and also by married women who wish to retain the affections of their husbands.
In a community such as the Shawiya, a Moslem community in which divorce is so easily obtainable, a sterile wife can hope for no prolonged residence in her husband's home; the bearing of children, therefore, is her only safe-
- ↑ Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, i. 34.
