1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Thapsus

THAPSUS, a low peninsula, now known as Magnisi, joined by a narrow isthmus to the mainland of Sicily, about 7 m. N.N.W. of Syracuse. The founders of Megara Hyblaea settled here temporarily, according to Thucydides, in the winter of 729–728 B.C., but it seems to have remained almost if not entirely uninhabited until the Athenians used it as a naval station in their attack on Syracuse early in 414 B.C. A number of tombs were excavated in 1894, containing objects belonging to a transitional stage between the second and third Sicel period, attributable roughly to 1000–900 B.C., and with a certain proportion of Mycenean importations.

See Orsi in Monumenti dei Lincei (1897), vi. 89–150.