Sardinia is studded with more than 7,000 stone towers left by a people without writing
From about 1800 BC the Bronze Age inhabitants of Sardinia raised cone-shaped stone towers called nuraghi, roughly one every three square kilometres. They left no texts of their own, yet their bronzes and pottery turn up from Crete to Egypt, and some scholars link them to the raiders Egyptian records call the Sherden.
The name Nuragic is a modern label taken from the towers, not a word these people used for themselves. Their origins are argued over. Giovanni Lilliu proposed in 1966 that incomers related to the Beaker culture arrived from the west and overturned the island's Copper Age societies, while other researchers think the culture grew up locally. Its start is placed in the 18th century BC, and its end anywhere from the Roman takeover in 238 BC to centuries later in the mountainous Barbagia.
A classic nuraghe is a truncated cone of huge stones containing at least one corbelled tholos chamber, sometimes three stacked on top of each other. Greek writers called such buildings daidaleia after Daedalus, imagining the legendary builder had come to Sardinia from Crete. Modern guesses have ranged from temples and observatories to furnaces and tombs, but the prevailing view is that they were fortified homesteads with barns and grain stores. The largest, such as Arrubiu at Orroli, rose some 25 to 30 metres with five main towers inside rings of walls. New towers stopped going up by the 12th to 11th century BC.
Metal made the island rich. Sardinia had copper and lead, and even earlier, in the 4th millennium BC, it had been one of the first places anywhere to extract silver. Nuragic smiths turned out swords, bracelets, statuettes and small votive boats, and traded with metal-poor partners such as Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus and Crete. Sardinian pottery of the 13th century has surfaced at Tiryns, Kommos and Hala Sultan Tekke, and similar wares at Marsa Matruh in Egypt.
Whether Sardinians sailed with the Sea Peoples is still contested. Giovanni Ugas identifies the Sherden with them, a view shared by scholars including Vere Gordon Childe, and ancient authors such as Plutarch mention Sardinian raids on Crete. From 900 BC, archaeologists speak of an age of aristocracies, when Lilliu saw villages governed by assemblies of leading men.
Source: Nuragic civilization
