The Tophet in Sulky is a very old sacred area, perhaps the oldest in Sardinia, and is a very special place, over which the legend of the sacrifice of children hovers.

The sacred area is located in a rocky place, fortified independently from the city centre around the first half of the fourth century B.C. by Carthage, which, in 375 B.C., decided to fortify some Sardinian cities including Sulky. The heart of the sanctuary was then closed by a huge fortified quadrilateral structure made of large blocks of stone, still visible today (figs. 1-2).

Fig. 1 - Tophet of Sulky, reconstruction of the placement of the urns (photo by Unicity S.p.A.).

Fig. 2 - Detail of large ashlar trachytic boulders, which enclosed the heart of the Tophet (photo by Unicity S.p.A.).

Not far from the fort, in the bedrock, there are cavities where legend narrates of a place of sacrifice (fig. 3): this is an area which has some traces of burning, but of which not much is really known, and especially it is not certain that it was used during the Phoenician and Punic Eras. However, it has been suggested that the place where the Tophet was built was already considered sacred by the Pre-Nuraghic and Nuraghic populations who previously occupied the land.

Fig. 3 - Plan of the Tophet of Sulky: the fortification which encloses the heart of the sanctuary is very evident (from BARTOLONI 2007, p. 51, fig. 32).

From the sanctuary area come a series of testimonials which lead back to the early days of the Phoenician colonisation: among them, we can mention some household containers used as funerary urns: pots belonging to the Nuraghic tradition and a few single-spouted oil lamps, the latter perhaps arrived from the Phoenician motherland and brought directly by the first settlers who arrived in Sant'Antioco (fig. 4).

Fig. 4 - Nuraghic traditional pottery and single-spouted lamp from the Tophet in Sulky, dating from the eighth century B.C. (Photo by C. Olianas).

The vascular forms of Nuraghic tradition used within the Tophet suggest a mixed population, where Phoenicians mingled with local people, living in peace.

Inside the urns there were the ashes of the children who, according to tradition, were sacrificed to an alleged god Moloch. In fact the term MLK, probably misunderstood by the Bible, which transcribes it as the name of a deity, has the meaning of "gift, offering," and therefore MLK is nothing more than a ritual linked to the death of children (fig. 5). Some doubts began to be dispelled from the eighties of the last century, when it was decided to analyse the skeletal remains of the Tophet of Carthage and of other sanctuaries.

Fig. 5 - Urns from the Tophet in Sulky at the time of the discovery (from BARTOLONI 2007, p. 55, fig. 34).

The tests showed that the bones belonged to foetuses or to new-born babies or those who had died within the first two years of life. The bones of older children have rarely been found. The remains of the children were often accompanied by those of small animals such as birds and/or lambs. All this shows that the Tophet was nothing more than a graveyard sanctuary. The high infant mortality rate in such ancient times would have indeed made it absurd to carry out a systematic elimination of children.

On the other hand, it is likely that both the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, as did many ancient populations, practiced human sacrifice in case of particular and extremely serious events; they were therefore a rarity, not a habit, and certainly it is not safe to say that these were child sacrifices.

Next to the urns were placed the stelae, sculptures with which the parents of a child buried in the Tophet thanked the gods for the joy of a new birth. Stelae appear in Carthage from the late seventh century B.C. and offer a wide range of styles and iconography. The earliest signs of this type of materials are given by simple rough stones, sometimes just roughly hewn. These objects were thereafter used by other centres of the Mediterranean, Sardinia and Sicily, where they appear not before the sixth century B.C. (figs. 6-7).

Figs. 6-7 - Stelae from the Tophet in Sulky. Municipal Archaeological Museum "F. Barreca" (photo by C. Olianas).

What are Tophets then? From what has been said, it appears that they are not places of bloody sacrifice, but special cemeteries and at the same time open-air sanctuaries, as the divine presence had to be constant; they were dedicated to Baal Hammon and Tanit and were kept quite distinct from the actual necropolis because these very young children, who had not even been born in most cases, had a different status from that of adults. They did not belong to the community, as they died before they could join it through some initiation rite, such as baptism for Christians or circumcision for Muslims and Jews.

Once the choice of the place where the shrine would be built was made, it was no longer moved, as was the case with adult necropolises. Tophets were respected and reused in Roman times as well, as happened in Carthage, placing Saturn instead of the traditional Baal Hammon, an aspect which implies the particular attention paid to this place.