The steles of Sant'Antioco

The Punic steles are finds relevant to those specific sacred spaces corresponding to the name of “tofet”, the places where it was long believed that bloody sacrifices of children were carried out, while today the conviction that they were places intended for the burial of children born dead or dead in the very first years of life is increasingly consolidated.
Among the steles returned from the Punic centers of Sardinia, of particular interest both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view is the group of those coming from the city of Sulci, today's Sant'Antioco. Archaeologists Sabatino Moscati and Piero Bartoloni, among the greatest scholars of this type of finds, have organized the Sulcitan corpus of steles into four major chronological groupings:

1) 550-450 BC. This group includes non-figurative steles, such as stones and bettiles, and those with male figures represented in a very simple way, usually in profile with raised arms; women are instead portrayed head-on, usually naked (with their hands on their breasts, a gesture symbolically linked to fecundity), more than Rado dress. In these steles, the first Egyptising frames appear.

2) 450-350 BC This second group includes steles in which the Egyptising framework is much more frequent and elaborated in detail. Protoeolic capitals appear on the columns; the lintel is often decorated with astral symbols, such as the solar disk or the sickle moon, frequently surmounted by a frieze of urean snakes. The human depictions propose cloaked female images, depicted in a frontal position and in various attitudes: with one arm bent at the chest and the other stretched on its side; or while holding a lotus flower and a disc, interpreted as an image of a tambourine supposedly used during ritual ceremonies.

3) 350-250 BC The group includes a large number of steles with a strong Greek connotation, determined in particular by the architectural framework, which takes on the shape of a real Greek temple with side columns, lintels and pediments. The solar disc and the sickle moon are frequently placed on the pediment. The human figure is placed inside the small temple: cloaked female images, as in the previous group, or sexually unconnoted images cloaked and holding the symbol of Tanit (a triangle surmounted by a circle).

4) 250-1st century BC To this period, the last as far as the life of the tophet is concerned, belong to steles that are smaller in size, carved mainly in greenish tuff or marble and then inserted into a large block of sandstone in order to give the whole a monumentality. The greyish types are still present, characterized by a greater articulation of the details: we see columns with grooves or pillars adorned with a rich decoration of relief rosettes. The human figures are still characterized by robes and stole, they bear the 'sign of Tanit' and, in some cases, they hold cups for libations.

Finally, these major groupings are associated with a last group of small steles with a curvilinear framing in which animals are always represented: sheep, rams and, in only two cases, oxen or bulls, seen in profile.
The depictions proposed by the steles are always related to the religious dimension. Stones and betyls can be interpreted as symbolic representations of divinity, just as divinity must have presumably also been some of the human figures, while for the rest we must think of depictions of priestly figures, as evidenced by the objects proposed in an iconographic association: tambourines, libation cups, the symbol of the goddess Tanit. The depictions of animals, in all probability, must have referred to the sacrificial victims offered to the deity on the occasion of the deposition of the urns containing the ashes of the deceased children.

Update

11/7/2025 - 09:12