In the middle of the 12th century BC, during a period contemporaneous with the fall of Troy, the Nuragic civilization reached its peak in Sardinia. The proto-nuraghi or corridor nuraghi dating back to the “early Bronze Age” (1800/1650 BC) had been supplanted by “monotower” structures and then by complex nuraghi, articulated in multiple towers and surrounded by powerful bastions. Inside the perimeter wall of the central “tholos,” which sometimes exceeded 25 meters in height, there was generally a stone staircase leading to the upper floor or floors. Today, there are about seven thousand of these monuments, expressions of a unique civilization at a global level, built with enormous stone blocks, although it is estimated that originally their number exceeded ten thousand.
It is intuitive to imagine what the visual impact was for those arriving on our island, perhaps coming from other Mediterranean regions where the predominant building size was comparable to that of a hut, when confronted with these giants of stone that must have appeared like proto-skyscrapers rising from the heights and rocky cliffs near the coast or emerging from the dense vegetation that once characterized the landscape of Sardinia. These extraordinary monuments, evident identity icons of our island, are discussed in one of the volumes of the “Sardegna Archeologica” series (guide no. 57 edited by Emerenziana Usai and Raimondo Zucca – Carlo Delfino editore, 2015), from which the following excerpts are taken:
“Giovanni Lilliu defined the ‘beautiful age of the nuraghi’ as the most relevant and productive period of the Nuragic civilization, attributable to the Recent and Final Bronze Age (14th-10th centuries), its phase III which today is assigned to the chronological span between the Middle Bronze, Recent and the beginnings of the Final Bronze (15th-12th centuries), during which this extraordinary constructive experience of the Sardinians unfolded, lasting three to four hundred years, structuring the entire regional territory through the construction of about 7000 nuraghi and 800 giant tombs. The ‘people of the nuraghi’ developed forms of control over the Sardinian territory, according to models already partially tested in the Copper Age and in the Early Bronze Age, but were innovative in the development of a standard architecture – the nuraghe – which, moving through experiments and failed attempts, as seen with the unfinished nuraghi, managed to elaborate, in forms not always evolutionary, the ‘corridor’ nuraghi and the ‘tholos’ nuraghi of the single tower type and multiple towers both in the ‘tancato’ form with two towers connected by walls to the original tower, and in the form of ‘polilobati’ nuraghi with a central tower rising within a triangular bastion with three towers, quadrangular with four towers, polygonal with five or more towers. The nuraghi could also be enclosed by a turrited ‘antemurale’ with six, seven, eight or more towers, forming hierarchical structures. The nuraghi marked the territory of a community, in function of a ‘colonization’ or anthropization of plowed or improved areas for crops, pastures, and other economic activities. They strongly characterized the territory in which they were inserted, as points of control, systems of visual communication, delimitation, habitation, and fortress. They were and are the most characteristic element of the Nuragic civilization, a significant mark that becomes a symbol. The villages of the ‘beautiful age of the nuraghi’ are not very well known, although forms of settlement in circular or elliptical huts, with a stone base and elevated in unbaked bricks or equally in stone, with thatched roofs are documented.” (omitted) “The ‘beautiful age of the nuraghi’ evolves at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC into a protosardinian culture that, enriched by interaction with the Mediterranean cultures it relates to, looks back to the architectural past of the nuraghi and the giant tombs, preserving their signs in the transition, sometimes reusing both, sometimes abandoning them. Villages arise in the shadow of the nuraghe or in areas of new settlement lacking nuraghi. The catalyzing element is now the sanctuary (the well temple, the ‘megaron’ temple, the ’round’ one), whose construction dates back in several cases to the turn of the 2nd millennium BC. The ‘buildings constructed (in Sardinia) in the archaic manner of the Greeks,’ according to the phrase from the writing attributed to Aristotle ‘On Wonderful Things,’ are the nuraghi and other Nuragic architectures of the Bronze Age, which did not have a bard like Homer who narrated in verse the epic of the Achaean heroes in the Trojan War or along the perilous routes back to their mainland or island kingdoms. But the narrative of the ‘beautiful age of the nuraghi’ is perhaps recognizable in Sinis, in the place of Mont’e Prama, where in 1974, at the dawn of the birth of the province of Oristano, fragments of nuraghe models and statues in limestone began to be discovered, telling stories whose decipherment has engaged archaeologists for four decades.”
Attached: the protonuraghe Seneghe di Suni (ph. Gianni Sirigu); the nuraghi Is Paras di Isili, Piscu di Suelli, Ponte di Dualchi, Arrubiu di Orroli, Palmavera di Alghero, and Serbissi di Osini, respectively in the photos by Romano Stangherlin, Cinzia Olias, Pino Fiore, Diversamente Sardi, Lucia Corda, and Bibi Pinna. The model of the Nuraghe from Monte ‘e Prama to Cabras is captured in a shot by Nicola Castangia.
