Tharros

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A finger of pale limestone runs south from the Sinis, out into the Gulf of Oristano, and the city was laid along it. The headland is narrow; on a clear day the water shows on three sides at once, and the wind off the gulf does not stop. Near the modern Cabras, on the western coast of Sardinia, at the southern tip of the Sinis peninsula and the cape they now call Capo San Marco, the ground has carried buildings for the better part of three thousand years. The Phoenicians who came to it found the height already worked: a Nuragic village stood on the hill the Sardinians call Su Muru Mannu, the big wall, its round stone huts going back to the Bronze Age. The newcomers built over them, and across the centuries that followed the headland became what it is now — a city emptied of its people, its streets and terraces and precincts strung along the rock above the sea.

The headland and its makers

Tharros was founded, by the reckoning the excavations support, in the eighth century before our era — the late eighth or early seventh, on a site already old — by Phoenician settlers come west along the sea-road from the Levant (Phoenicia the homeland of the founders). It was one of a string of such footholds the Phoenicians planted on the strong points of southern and western Sardinia, beside Sulci to the south, Nora and Bithia on the southern capes, and Caralis where Cagliari now stands. The choice of ground was the merchant’s choice: a defensible promontory, a sheltered anchorage on the lee side, a position central in the western sea — between Africa, Spain, the mouth of the Rhône, and the Etruscan coast. Sardinia sat in the middle of that traffic, and Tharros watched the gulf.

For something over two centuries the city was a Phoenician trading town. Then, about the middle of the sixth century, the power of Carthage — herself a Phoenician foundation on the African shore, grown into the head of the western Phoenician world — reached the island, and over the later sixth century the Carthaginians brought Sardinia into their orbit. For Carthage the island was no mere market. It was a granary and a forward base, one of the chief provinces of the western empire she was building: grain from the Sardinian plains, metal from the interior, and a stone deck thrown across the sea between Africa, Sicily, and Spain. Under Carthage Tharros was rebuilt and enlarged, walled, fitted with its sanctuaries — a Punic city now, in the full sense, its dead laid in chamber-tombs cut from the rock, its potters and goldsmiths and stone-carvers working in the western Punic manner.

The Punic centuries ended with the First Punic War. Rome took Sardinia from a weakened Carthage in 238 BCE, in the bitter aftermath of the first great war between them, and Tharros passed under Rome as the island did. It did not die there. The Romans kept the harbor, drove a paved street — the cardo and decumanus, the cross-streets of a Roman town — through the old fabric, raised baths and a temple of Demeter, and ran the city on for centuries more. Tharros outlasted the empire. It became a bishop’s seat in late antiquity, and in the early Middle Ages it was the chief place of the Sardinian region of Arborea. Its long abandonment came late: under pressure from the sea-raids of the period the people withdrew inland from the exposed headland, and about the eleventh century the seat of Arborea moved to Oristano, at the head of the gulf, which the Tharrans are remembered as founding. The old city on the cape was left to the wind, its stones quarried for the new town, and the sea closed over its memory until the diggers came.

The recovery of Tharros has two phases, and the first of them is a wound. Through the middle of the nineteenth century the rich cemeteries of the headland were opened not by archaeologists but by treasure-seekers. In 1851 an English traveler on the Italian tour, Lord Vernon, dug a number of the underground graves and carried the jewels he found home to England; word of the gold drew the country people of Cabras, who are said to have broken open some hundreds of tombs. The most systematic of the spoliations was official. Gaetano Cara, director of the museum at Cagliari in the 1850s, drew rich Punic and later material out of the necropolis and, working in part under false names, offered it to the museums of Europe; in the end he sold a great mass of it — by the count, some 1,771 pieces — to the British Museum in London for a thousand pounds, the body of objects known there since as the Great Sardinian Collection. Only after this hemorrhage did controlled excavation begin, in the later nineteenth century and again, in earnest and without interruption, from the middle of the twentieth, by which time much of what the headland had held in the ground was already scattered through the cabinets of the north.

The sacred apparatus of a Punic city

What the headland gathers, read along its length, is the sacred and funerary apparatus of a western Punic city, laid out as such cities laid it: the precinct of the burned offerings, the temples on the high terraces, the cities of the dead along the slopes that fall to the sea.

On Su Muru Mannu, over the buried Nuragic huts and behind a stretch of fortification wall, lies the tophet. The word is a modern one, borrowed by scholars from the Hebrew scriptures — from the Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem — and applied, by convention and not by any Punic usage, to a kind of open-air precinct found across the Phoenician and Punic west: at Carthage above all, and at Motya in Sicily, at Sulci and here at Tharros in Sardinia. Into such a precinct were set urns holding the cremated remains of the very young and of small animals, and over and among them were planted the carved stones, the stelae. The Tharros tophet was in use from about the seventh century, through the Punic age, until the coming of Rome. Its offerings were made to the two powers in whose names the whole western Punic religion turns: Baal Hammon, the elder lord, and Tanit, the great heavenly lady of Carthage, whose disc-and-crescent emblem set above a bar — the sign of Tanit — is cut on votive stones across the Punic world. The act commemorated on such stones was, in the worshipers’ own understanding, the molk (the mlk of the inscriptions): a vow fulfilled, an offering rendered to the god who had heard a prayer. The carved stelae of the tophet precincts, with their formulae of vow and their emblems, are the densest body of Punic religious epigraphy that survives — the Punic world here speaking, for once, in something near its own voice.

What that vow was, and what was rendered, is the one great contested question that hangs over every tophet, this one included, and it is right to hold it open rather than to close it either way. The hostile Greek and Roman authors — Diodorus on the Carthaginians and their Kronos at the crisis of 310 BCE, and others after him — describe the burning of children to the god, and the modern reading that follows them, argued from the osteology of the urns by Lawrence Stager and others, takes the tophet for a place of infant sacrifice. Against it stands a reading, advanced by scholars including Sabatino Moscati’s circle and by Tunisian historians of the Punic past, that sees in the urns a cemetery for infants dead of natural causes, the high mortality of the very young in the ancient world, consecrated to the gods. The bones, the ages at death, the animal substitutes, the very formula of the vow are each read both ways. The honest position is that the matter is not settled, that the chief witnesses against the Carthaginians are also their enemies and their conquerors, and that the rite is best described — a vow-offering laid in a sacred precinct under the sign of the heavenly lady and the name of the elder lord — and not pronounced upon.

Above the precinct of the burned offerings stood the temples. The headland carries the cut and built foundations of several: a small monolithic shrine carved partly from the living rock, in the old Semitic manner of a chamber hewn from stone; the foundations of what is called the temple of the Doric half-columns, a Punic-age sanctuary raised before the Roman conquest, its podium climbed by a stepped ramp and its face once dressed with half-columns and pilasters in a Greek-derived order — the western Punic taste for Hellenic form laid over a thoroughly Punic plan; and, from the Roman centuries, a temple of Demeter on the same height where a Punic sanctuary very likely stood before it, for the grain-goddess and her like were long honored on this island that fed the powers who held it. Of one of these the two tall stone columns that travelers photograph against the sea still stand — though those particular shafts are a modern re-erection, set up to show the visitor where a temple was, and not an undisturbed survival; the antiquity beneath them genuine, the silhouette above it a reconstruction.

Along the slopes that fall from the temples to the water lie the cities of the dead, the reason the name of Tharros traveled so far before the place itself was known. There are two great burial grounds — the southern necropolis out toward the cape of San Marco, and the northern — and in the Phoenician and Punic graves cut into them were laid the things for which collectors learned the name: gold-work of fine craft, diadems and earrings and the small cylindrical amulet-cases the Phoenicians wore, carved scarabs of Egyptian green jasper and other stones, engraved gems, glass, the painted clay masks the Punic dead sometimes carried. It is this material — light, precious, portable — that the nineteenth-century diggers carried off by the hundredweight, and that today is to be found less in the ground at Tharros than in the cases of the British Museum, the archaeological museums of Cagliari and Cabras, and the Antiquarium Arborense at Oristano. The headland, stripped of its golds, kept its stones and its streets.

What the dispersal left, and what the digging recovered

The afterlife of Tharros runs along the fault its recovery opened — between the objects scattered early into the museums of the north, and the site slowly read back into sense by the excavators of the modern age.

The dispersal made the name. Long before the systematic study of Punic Sardinia, the gold and the scarabs of Tharros were among the better-known Phoenician antiquities of Europe, precisely because so many of them were in London and not in Sardinia. The Great Sardinian Collection of the British Museum, the bulk of it Cara’s sale, became a standard reference body for Phoenician and Punic jewelry and glyptic, cataloged at length in the scholarly literature — R. D. Barnett and C. Mendleson’s Tharros: A Catalogue of Material in the British Museum gathering the dispersed objects back into a single description. The cost of that fame is plain enough now, and the recovery has begun to run the other way: in 2025 an agreement was reached for the return to Sardinia, to the civic museum at Cabras, of a body of one hundred and thirty-two Tharros objects long held in Britain — a small reversal of the nineteenth-century outflow, and a sign of how the question of the dispersed material has shifted (the restitution agreement).

The digging recovered the city the looting could not carry away. From the later nineteenth century, and continuously since the mid-twentieth, controlled excavation has read out the things that do not fit in a cabinet: the tophet in its stratigraphy, the temple terraces, the line of the walls, the Punic and Roman street-grid, the harbor works, the baths. The tophet stelae in particular — left in the ground or housed nearby rather than sold abroad — are studied now as the religious epigraphy they are, the vows to Baal Hammon and Tanit read against the like material from Carthage and Motya and the rest. This is the disciplined counterweight to the early plunder: the place understood as a city and a cult-landscape, not mined as a source of curios.

What Tharros holds, finally, is a place in the recovery of Punic Sardinia — the island world that fed and guarded the Carthaginian west. It stands among the principal Phoenician and Punic sites of the island, beside Nora and Sulci and the inland citadel of Monte Sirai, each a different angle on the same world: the merchant footholds become Punic towns, the granary-island Carthage prized and Rome took from her. Of the island’s deities and the rites of its precincts, much remains genuinely uncertain — the weight to give the hostile authors, the meaning of the urns under the stelae, the relation of the heavenly lady of these stones to the older Astarte of the Levantine homeland — and the prudent reader of Tharros learns to mark which of its facts rest on the spade, which on the inscriptions, and which on the testimony of Carthage’s enemies. The headland keeps the three apart, and the gulf wind keeps the place. The gold is in the north; the stones are on the rock; and between them the Punic city on its peninsula is read, carefully, back into the world it belonged to.

A sandstone stele from the tophet of Tharros, showing a betyl — a sacred standing-stone — set within an aedicule; now in the Antiquarium Arborense, Oristano. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The site of Tharros seen from the southern necropolis, the temple terraces and streets strung along the limestone headland above the Gulf of Oristano. Sacrabarissa, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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