The nuraghi of Sardinia

The story

Stone towers on an island

If you cross Sardinia by car or train, among hills and pastures, every now and then you see on top of a rise a dark stone tower shaped like a cone with the top cut off. It is a nuraghe. More than seven thousand are left, about one for every three square kilometres, and this is why Sardinia is called “the island of the nuraghi”. There are no buildings like them anywhere else in the world.

The people who built them are called Nuragic. Scholars think the first nuraghi appeared in the 18th century BC (around 1800-1700 BC), or a little later, and that Nuragic civilisation lasted, depending on how you count, until the Iron Age, until the Roman conquest in 238 BC or, in some inland areas, even longer. The dates are debated and depend on the site.

How to build a nuraghe

Nuraghi are built of large blocks of stone, set one on top of another without mortar, that is, without anything to stick them together. They stand up because of their weight and the precision with which they were laid. The tower has the shape of a truncated cone, wider at the base than at the top. Inside there is a room with a false-dome ceiling, called a “tholos”: the blocks are laid in ever smaller circles, until the gap is closed by a single stone. In the biggest nuraghi up to three chambers were built one above another, joined by a staircase inside the thickness of the wall.

What they were used for is still a matter of debate. Some think of fortresses or watchtowers, others of chiefs' residences, grain stores, meeting places or places of worship. They probably served several purposes, and not all nuraghi were the same. The Nuragic people left no writing: their language is unknown, and we know about them what the stones, the bronzes and Greek and Roman authors tell us.

The complex at Barumini

The most famous nuraghe is Su Nuraxi, at Barumini, in the south of the island. It was recognised in 1950 and brought to light up to 1957 by the Sardinian archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu. In the centre is the oldest tower, the keep, more than fourteen metres high with three chambers one above another, built, according to the current dating, between the 17th and 13th centuries BC. Later, in the late Bronze Age, four corner towers were added to it, joined by a curtain wall, with an inner courtyard and a well. In the Iron Age the whole complex was surrounded by another ring of walls with towers.

Around the fortress there was a village of about fifty round huts, built of dry stone and covered by cone-shaped roofs: scholars estimate their number and that of the inhabitants differently. Around the 6th century BC there was destruction, then the area was occupied by the Carthaginians and later by the Romans. The excavations say that the place was inhabited until the 1st century BC, then abandoned. Since 1997 Su Nuraxi has been a World Heritage Site.

Tombs, wells and statuettes

The Nuragic people did not build only towers. They buried their dead in “giants' tombs”, long collective tombs with an entrance shaped like a bull's head and great upright stones in front. They also built sacred wells, dedicated to water: the well of Santa Cristina, at Paulilatino, has a monumental staircase and a domed chamber, and is laid out so that moonlight reaches it through a trapezium-shaped opening about every eighteen and a half years.

The bronze figurines are an art all their own: small bronze statues, cast by the lost-wax technique and up to thirty-nine centimetres tall. They show scenes of everyday life, people of different social classes, animals, gods and ships. They say a great deal about how those people lived. And in 1974, near Cabras, the “giants of Mont'e Prama” were discovered: stone statues of human figures up to 2.5 metres tall. There are about thirty-two or forty of them, and their date, between the 11th and 8th centuries BC, is debated; if it were confirmed, they would be among the oldest human-figure sculptures in the Mediterranean.

A seafaring people

The sea was part of their world. Among the bronzes there are models of ships, and along the coasts anchors weighing up to a hundred kilograms have been found, which suggest ships about fifteen metres long. From around 900 BC the Phoenicians began to land regularly; later came the Carthaginians, in expeditions in 540 and 509 BC, and finally Rome, in 238 BC. The Greek historian Strabo writes that in the imperial age the peoples of the interior still lived very much like their ancestors.