The steles of Sant'Antioco

Phoenician-Punic stele, F. Barreca museum, Sant'Antioco. Photo by Luigi Pietro Olivari, from Catalogo BBCC RAS

The Punic steles are finds pertaining to those specific sacred spaces corresponding to the name of “tophet”, the places where it has long been believed that bloody child sacrifices took place, while today the conviction that these 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. The archaeologists Sabatino Moscati and Piero Bartoloni, among the leading scholars of this type of finds, have organized the Sulcitan corpus of steles into four large chronological groups:
1) 550-450 BC. This group includes non-figured steles, such as stones and betiles, and those with male figures depicted in a very simple way, usually in profile with raised arms; on the other hand, women are depicted head-on, usually naked (with their hands in their breasts, a gesture symbolically linked to fecundity), more You rarely dress. In these steles, the first Egyptist frames appear.
2) 450-350 BC This second group includes stelae in which the Egyptist framework is much more frequent and elaborated in detail. Proto-Eolic capitals appear on the columns; the lintel often appears decorated with astral symbols, such as the solar disk or the crescent moon, frequently surmounted by a frieze of Urean serpents. The human depictions depict cloaked female images, depicted in a frontal position and in various attitudes: with one arm bent at the chest and the other stretched on their side; or while holding a lotus flower and a disc, interpreted as an image of a tambourine presumably used during ritual ceremonies.
3) 350-250 BC The group includes a large number of steles with a strong Grecian connotation, determined in particular by the architectural framework, which assumes the shape of a real Greek temple with side columns, lintels and pediment. The solar disk and the crescent moon are often placed on the pediment. The human figure is placed inside the temple: cloaked female images, as in the previous group, or images not sexually 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 Tophet is concerned, belong steles that are smaller in size, mainly sculpted in greenish tuff or marble and then inserted into a large block of sandstone in order to give monumental character to the whole. The grecizing 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 a cloak and stole, they bear the 'sign of Tanit' and, in some cases, they hold cups for libations.
Finally, these larger groups should be associated with a final group of small steles with a curvilinear framing in which animals are always depicted: sheep, rams and, only in two cases, oxen or bulls, seen in profile.
The depictions proposed by the steles are always related to the religious dimension. Cippi and betiles 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 one must think of depictions of priestly figures, as evidenced by the objects proposed in an iconographic association: tambourines, cups for libation, the symbol of the goddess Tanit. The depictions of animals, in all likelihood, must have referred to the sacrificial victims offered to the divinity on the occasion of the deposition of the urns containing the ashes of the deceased children.

Update

17/4/2026 - 14:17