Il fregio egittizzante del santuario di Tas-Silġ

The excavations that took place in the Ashtart- Hera sanctuary in Tas-Silġ during the 1960s also brought to light, apart from several fragments of architectural materials in limestone, some fragments of a frieze in white marble decorated with an Egyptianizing subject. From the analysis of the surviving fragments it is possible to assert that on the frieze were represented a uraeus and a winged subject. Moreover, the comparison with a marble slab (in a private collection) published by Anthony Bonanno in 1998 made it possible to reconstruct the distribution of the figurative elements within the original frieze to which they belonged and to hypothesize that the slab also comes from Tas- Silġ. A series of stylistic considerations leads to the proposal of a chronology that places the fragments in the early Augustan age.