Etrurian Uni, Hera, Astarte and Iuno
The Etruscans were a people of seafaring merchants who entertained strict (if often conflicting) contacts with the other likewise peoples of the Mediterranean, the Greeks, the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians.
Testimony of intense cultural exchanges with the Greeks have been found in 1969 at the sanctuary of the port of Gravisca near Tarquinia. Renard thinks the cult of Hera in great emporia such as Croton, Posidonia, Pyrgi might be a counter to Aphrodite's, linked to sacred prostitution in ports, as the sovereign of legitimate of marriage and family and of their sacrality. Hera's presence had already been attested at Caere in the sanctuary of Manganello. In the 18th century a dedication to Iuno Historia was discovered at Castrum Novum (Santa Marinella). The cult of Iuno and Hera is generally attested in Etruria.
The relationship between Uni and the Phoenician goddess Astarte has been brought to light by the discovery of the Pyrgi Tablets in 1964. At Pyrgi, one of the ports of Caere, excavations had since 1956 revealed the existence of a sacred area, intensely active from the last quarter of the VI century, yielding two documents of a cult of Uni. Scholars had long believed Etruscan goddess Uni was strongly influenced by the Argive Heras and had her Punic counterpart in Carthaginian goddess Tanit, identified by the Romans as Juno Caelestis. Nonetheless Augustin had already stated that Iuno was named Astarte in the Punic language, notion that the discovery of the Pyrgi lamellae has proved correct. It is debated whether such an identification was linked to a transient political stage corresponding with Tefarie Velianas's Carthagenian-backed tyranny on Caere as the sanctuary does not show any other trait proper to Phoenician ones. The mention of the goddess of the sanctuary as being named locally Eileitheia and Leucothea by different Greek authors narrating its destruction by the Syracusean fleet in 384 BC, made the picture even more complex. R. Bloch has proposed a two stage interpretation: the first thonym Eilethya corresponds to Juno Lucina, the second Leuchothea to Mater Matuta. However the local theonym is Uni and one would legitimately expect it to be translated as Hera. A fragmentary bronze lamella discovered on the same site and mentioning both theonym Uni and Thesan (i. e. Latin Juno and Aurora-Mater Matuta) would then allow the inference of the integration of the two deities at Pyrgi: the local Uni-Thesan matronal and auroral, would have become the Iuno Lucina and the Mater Matuta of Rome. The Greek assimilation would reflect this process as not direct but subsequent to a process of distinction. Renard rejects this hypothesis since he sees in Uni and Thesan two distinct deities, though associated in cult. However the entire picture should have been familiar in Italian and Roman religious lore as is shown by the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship of Juno with the Rome and Romans in Virgil's Aeneid, who has Latin, Greek and Punic traits, result of a plurisaecular process of amalgamation. Also remarkable in this sense is the Fanum Iunonis of Malta (of the Hellenistic period) which has yielded dedicatory inscriptions to Astarte and Tanit.
Read more about this topic: Juno (mythology)