The Nuragic Civilization

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On a basalt rise in the center of Sardinia, a tower of dry-laid stone narrows as it climbs, course after corbelled course leaning inward until the chamber inside closes over itself in a false dome. No mortar binds it; gravity and the mason’s eye hold it up. Around such towers — and there are nearly seven thousand of them across the island — the people of Bronze and Iron Age Sardinia organized a world. The towers are called nuraghi, and from them the culture takes the only name it has: Nuragic. It left no readable script and no literature, so it speaks through stone, bronze, and the contents of its wells, and the reading of that record is the whole of what can be known of it.

The conventional span runs from roughly 1800 BCE to 238 BCE, the closing date fixed not by anything the islanders did but by the year Rome annexed Sardinia. Within that arc lie the deepest divisions of the European Bronze Age — the metal trade that bound the island to Cyprus and the Aegean, the long indigenous flowering, the arrival of the Phoenicians, the Carthaginian wars, and at last the Roman province. Through all of it the towers stood, were lived in, abandoned, reoccupied, and built around, so that the same site can hold a stratum of the second millennium and a Punic shrine in its courtyard.

The towers and their makers

The earliest phase belongs to the Bonnanaro culture of the early second millennium, dated in two stages — Corona Moltana (c. 1800–1650 BCE) and Sant’Iroxi (c. 1650–1600 BCE) — and treated by most scholars as the threshold of the Nuragic proper. Out of it came the protonuraghi, low and irregular masses of stone pierced by corridors and cells rather than crowned by a chamber, built across roughly the seventeenth to fifteenth centuries BCE. These are the precursors. The classic nuraghe that follows is a thing of geometry: a truncated cone of dressed basalt or granite enclosing a beehive-shaped tholos chamber, raised by the corbel technique in which each ring of blocks projects slightly over the one below until the space is roofed without an arch or a keystone. The largest towers stack two or three such chambers, joined by a stair wound into the thickness of the wall.

The numbers organize themselves into a hierarchy. Of the roughly seven thousand surviving structures, the great majority are single towers; perhaps two thousand are complex nuraghi with added towers bound by curtain walls into bastioned forms; and a small group of monumental sites — Su Nuraxi at Barumini, Santu Antine at Torralba, the five-towered Arrubiu — anchor extensive villages of circular stone huts. The function of all this masonry is genuinely debated and need not be single. The walls, the narrow entrances, the commanding sightlines, and the towers’ clustering along passes and plains argue defense and territorial control; the surrounding hut-villages argue residence; the sheer cost in labor and the way the grandest examples dominate their districts argue display and the standing of whoever could command their building. The likeliest answer absorbs all three: the nuraghe as stronghold, dwelling, and statement of power at once, a center around which a small community arranged its land, its herds, and its defense.

The word itself is unrecovered. Nuraghe survives in Sardinian but its root reaches back before any documented language of the island; a pre-Indo-European element nur, carrying some sense of heap, hollow, or pile of stone, is the usual guess, never more than that. The towers were named by the people who inherited them, not by those who raised them.

The first scientific account of a nuraghe as a settlement rather than a curiosity came from Giovanni Lilliu, the founder of Sardinian archaeology, who described Su Nuraxi at Barumini in 1938 and excavated it through the 1940s and 1950s — clearing not only the central tower and its bastion but the village that grew up around it, and recovering from a charred timber in the keep a radiocarbon date that pinned the chronology. Barumini became the type-site and, in 1997, the island’s sole entry on the UNESCO World Heritage list, inscribed as the most complete surviving example of the form. Lilliu also gave the field its most contested idea, the costante resistenziale sarda — a thesis of an unbroken Sardinian disposition to resist outside acculturation, identity held intact through wave after wave of foreign rule. As archaeological description it has worn poorly, and as a frame for the island’s heritage it shades easily into a nationalism that reads the nuraghe as proof of an essential, undefeated Sardinian-ness; the inland communities did persist under Carthage and Rome, but they also absorbed, traded, and changed, and the record resists being made into a banner.

The dead and the water

Set apart from the towers are the tombs. The tombe dei giganti, the “giants’ graves,” are long megalithic gallery tombs — collective ossuaries, not single burials — running up to thirty meters and built throughout the Bronze Age; some eight hundred are known. The body of the tomb is a roofed corridor of upright slabs; its front opens into a curved facade whose two arms sweep forward to enclose a semicircular forecourt, the exedra. At the center of that forecourt stands a tall carved stele, often arched and rising above four meters, pierced low down by a small portal into the chamber of the dead. Seen in plan the whole monument takes the shape of a bull’s head — the horned forecourt, the long muzzle of the corridor — and the resonance is hard to dismiss in a culture whose imagery returns again and again to the bull. The forecourt was a space for the living: a stage for the rites that attended the gathering of bones.

Water gathers the other half of the sacred architecture. Across the island stand some fifty pozzi sacri, sacred wells, together with open spring-sanctuaries, and in their masonry the Nuragic builders reached their finest work. The well-temple of Santa Cristina at Paulilatino, built around the eleventh century BCE, is the model: an elliptical precinct enclosing a keyhole opening, and within it a flight of perfectly cut steps — laid in isodomic ashlar, every block to a course — descending into a circular subterranean chamber roofed by a corbelled tholos, where a spring rises and holds, at the foot of the stair, a still surface of dark water. The geometry is exact enough that the descent and the chamber appear to have been set to the moon’s standstill, the light falling true down the shaft at the limit of its cycle. Alongside the wells stand the megaron temples, rectangular halls entered between projecting wall-ends in the manner of the Aegean megaron, raised likewise in dressed ashlar.

What was done in these places is reconstruction, not record. The wells held deposits — bronzes, ceramics, ornaments — and the reading that water was a cult focus, the descent a passage toward a power held underground, and the offerings a gift to it, is an inference drawn from where the objects lie and what the architecture stages, not a doctrine recovered from any text. It is a strong inference, and the monumental care lavished on a hole cut to reach a spring makes it nearly unavoidable; but it remains a model built outward from things, and the deity or deities to whom a well like Santa Cristina was given have no names that survive.

The bronze witnesses

The closest thing the Nuragic world has to a self-portrait is cast metal. The bronzetti — more than five hundred small bronze figures, made from the final Bronze Age into the early Iron Age by the lost-wax method — are the evidentiary spine of everything said about Nuragic dress, arms, rank, and rite, because they show the people doing the things the architecture only implies. More than half are warriors: figures in horned or crested helmets, carrying the round shield and the long sword, the bow, the dagger, some of them rendered with four arms and four eyes in a deliberate excess that lifts them out of the human into the order of heroes or gods. Around the warriors stands a whole society in miniature — chiefs wrapped in cloaks and leaning on staves, archers, wrestlers, shepherds with their animals, musicians, mothers, offerers holding out bowls and small beasts toward whatever received them.

Two recurring figures carry the weight of the religious reading. One is the seated woman holding a limp adult across her lap, the type long called the Nuragic pietà and folded into the broad scholarly construct of a Mother-Goddess — a reading inherited from the earlier island figurines of the Neolithic Ozieri culture and projected onto the bronzes, securely attested as an image, far less securely as a known cult. The other is the bull, whose protomes and horns run through the bronzetti, the tombs, and the architecture, paired in the standard interpretation with a solar disc to make a bull-and-sun complex of the kind familiar across the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Two further classes of cast object extend the picture: the navicelle, more than a hundred and fifty small bronze boats — votive lamps, most likely — with prows shaped into the heads of stags, oxen, and birds, and the miniature nuraghe models, towers in bronze, the culture portraying its own central monument.

In 1974 a plow near Mont’e Prama, by the village of Cabras on the Sinis peninsula, turned up the first fragments of something the bronzetti had not prepared anyone for: the same iconography at human scale and in stone. Over the excavations of 1975 to 1979 more than five thousand fragments came out of the ground, and from them conservators working since the early 2000s have reassembled some forty over-life-size figures in local sandstone, two and a half meters tall — boxers shielding their heads, archers, warriors — their faces reduced to a stark mask with eyes cut as two concentric discs. Carved in the early Iron Age and set above a necropolis of pit-graves, marked also by stone betyls and stone models of nuraghi, the figures of Mont’e Prama are the oldest large stone statuary of the western Mediterranean, raised on the island while mainland Italy was still in the urn-burial world of the Villanovan culture and a century or more before the Etruscans and the Greeks began to carve at that scale, and they translate the bronze warriors into colossi standing guard over the dead. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of the find sets out the case for their place at the head of Mediterranean monumental sculpture; the statues are now divided between the civic museum at Cabras and the national archaeological museum at Cagliari.

The bronze tells one more story before any foreigner appears: that of an island deep in the metal world. Sardinia’s own copper and the tin trade made it a node in the Late Bronze Age exchange that moved metal across the sea, and the evidence runs both ways. Cypriot oxhide ingots — the standardized hide-shaped copper bars of Mediterranean trade — turn up at more than forty Sardinian sites, thickest between about 1300 and 1100 BCE; Mycenaean and Aegean pottery reached the southern settlements; and Nuragic cooking ware has been identified at Cypriot sites such as Hala Sultan Tekke, the islanders’ own hand carried east. The scale and direction of that traffic remain a live scholarly question, weighed in a recent survey of the metal-trade debate, but its existence places the Nuragic world inside the connected Mediterranean of the late Bronze and early Iron Age rather than off its edge — the very centuries in which the bronzetti and the Mont’e Prama colossi were made.

The strangers and the end

From about the ninth century BCE a different kind of settlement appears on the Sardinian coast: the trading station of the Phoenicians, planted at Nora, Sulci, Tharros, Bithia, and Karalis. These were ports and emporia, not armies; their religion and gods are taken up under Phoenician religion, and along the shore Phoenician and Nuragic lived in a working contact, the inland communities trading metal and produce into the new harbor towns. The balance held for some two centuries.

It broke when the Phoenician west passed under the leadership of Carthage. A first Carthaginian attempt on the island, the expedition remembered under the general Malchus, failed in the mid-sixth century; but by 509 BCE Carthaginian forces under Hamilcar had taken the southern and central-western coast and turned the old trading stations into the bases of a territorial power. Punic Sardinia was a province of extraction — grain, metal, manpower — governed from the coast, while in the mountainous interior the Nuragic communities kept their own pottery, their own settlements, and a measure of independence the coast no longer had. The island had become two countries on one ground.

The last change came from outside the contest entirely. Carthage, beaten by the Roman Republic in the First Punic War and then convulsed by the revolt of its own mercenaries, was in no position to hold its overseas ground; in 238 BCE Rome took Sardinia, and the island, joined with Corsica, became one of the Republic’s earliest provinces and later a possession of the Empire. Even then the interior did not simply fall in line. Rome’s writers named the unsubdued highland peoples the Ilienses and the Balari and called their country Barbaria, and the legions campaigned in it for generations. By that point the towers were a thousand years old and more, no longer being built, but still standing on every horizon — used as shrines, as folds, as the cores of farmsteads, the durable furniture of a landscape whose makers had become its inhabitants’ deep and unnamed past. The masonry that closed the tholos over a spring or a chamber of the dead still closes today, and the figures plowed out of Mont’e Prama still hold their shields above the same stark, double-circled stare with which the island first looked back at whoever came to read it.

→ Related: Villanovan · Etruscans · Phoenician Religion · Iron Age · Roman Republic · Roman Empire