In keeping with the grandiose architecture of the nuraghi were the so-called  “giants’tombs", mausoleums for the burial of eminent families. It was in this period  that the funerary monuments called the tombs of the giants on account of their great size and capable of holding up to two hundred bodies were set up. S'Ena 'e Tomes is one the best preserved.

S'Ena 'e Thomes

They are  monumental structures with a regular  plan and apse, preceded by large open spaces  in the shape of a semicircle or circle of the funeral ceremonies.

 

Coddu Vecchiu giant's grave

Its entrance is in the form of an arched stele, an enormous slab of carefully tooled and decorade rock, whose lower part may present life on earth, whereas the upper part is thought to symbolise the sky and the divinities.The ground plan of the building is similar to that of an ox's head with horns consisting of a semicircular wall on either side of the entrance.
 

It suggests the image of the Bull God  that the nuragici continued to venerate along with the Mother Goddess.The divinities are also represented by conical stones known as baityloi set in the ground to war off evil. Stelae were later replaced by rows of stones.

The plan, however, remained much the same and the tombs themselves continued to be places of  worship and prayer.  

 

S'Ena 'e Thomes

Inside there are long cells with projecting walls. In the space of time between 1900/1800 and 1000 BC they acquired different features. The most  remote, roughly  made, are in the form of a tall curved stele.

The most recent (1300 to the end of the second millennium), in square-hewn stone, have a chamber with an ogival section covered with a boat-shaped  superstructure  which symbolised the passing of the dead to the afterlife.

They have a ritual astronomic  position, for they are all exposed  to the soud-east, some facing the points where the moon risers others facing other stars.