However this may be, the theory not only of the twofold design or use of the Nuraghe, but of either of them, is confessedly quite conjectural: it rests upon a narrow basis of facts. Though a great number of the Nuraghe have been carefully ransacked, in very few instances only have human bones been discovered, but neither urns, arms, nor ornaments usually inhumed with the dead; nor are many of them so constructed as to permit the supposition that they were designed for sepulchral purposes. Occasionally, also, some of the miniature idols, such as are preserved in the museum at Cagliari, have been found buried in Nuraghe, or their precincts. But this is not general; and there are neither altars nor any other indications in the structure of the buildings to indicate their appropriation to religious uses, except their pyramidal or conical form, which they share in common with most buildings of the earliest age. So far as these were designed for idolatrous uses—as many of them doubtless were—the argument from analogy may apply to the Nuraghe, but it can be carried no further.
Whatever were the purposes of the Nuraghe, almost all writers on Sardinia consider these ancient structures of Eastern origin. Father Bresciani attributes them to Canaanitish or Phœnician colonies, which migrated to the west in early times; and he takes great pains, but, I consider, without much success, to establish their identity, or, at least, their analogy, with the religious or sepulchral erections,—the altars, and “high places,” and tombs,—of which notices are found in the Old Testament. No doubt exists that extensive migrations, favoured by the enterprise of the earliest maritime people of whom we have any record, took place, perhaps both before and after the age of Moses, from the shores of Syria to the islands and shores of the West of Europe. There is reason to think that the island of Sardinia, if not the first seat, was, from its peculiar situation, the very centre, of a colonisation, embracing in its ramifications the coasts of Africa and Spain, with Malta, Sicily, and the Balearic islands. It appears singular that Corsica, the sister island to Sardinia, should not have shared in this movement of settlers from the East; perhaps from its lying out of the direct current, while, in its onward course, the wave flowing through the Straits of Hercules bore forward on the ocean the “merchants of many isles,” for commerce if not for settlement, as far as the Cassiterides, our own Scilly Isles.
Though there is little historical evidence of the Phœnician colonisation of Sardinia, and even that of the early Greek settlements in the island is obscure and conflicting, we have abundant traces of the former, more imperishable than written records, still lingering in the manners and customs of the modern Sardes, and in the great number of those extraordinary antiquities known as the Sarde idols. The greater part of these, as Mr. Tyndale undertakes to show, were symbols of Canaanitish worship, the miniature representations of the gods adored by the Syrian nations, especially of Moloch, Baal, Astarte or Astaroth, Adonis or Tammuz, the very objects of that idolatry so frequently and emphatically denounced in the Old Testament, to which we have already referred. Mr. Tyndale, however, justly observes, that “so distinct and peculiar is the character of these relics, that their counterparts are no more to be met with out of Sardinia than the Nuraghe themselves.” From this circumstance, in conjunction with the fact of the images being often found in and near those buildings, he infers that they may have been, directly or indirectly, connected with each other, in either a religious, sepulchral, or united character.
The inquiry would be incomplete unless it were extended to other Sarde remains, of equal or greater antiquity, for the purpose of discovering whether they have any affinity with, or can throw any light on, the mysterious origin of the Nuraghe. We propose devoting another chapter to this investigation.
CHAP. XXXV.
Sardinian Monoliths.—The Sepolture, or “Tombs of the Giants.”—Traditions regarding Giant Races.—The Anakim, &c., of Canaan.—Their supposed Migration to Sardinia.—Remarks on Aboriginal Races.—Antiquity of the Nuraghe and Sepolture.—Their Founders unknown.
We can hardly be mistaken in supposing that, among the relics of antiquity still existing in Sardinia, the monoliths, of somewhat similar character with the Celtic remains at Carnac, Avebury, and Stonehenge, and common also in other countries, belong to the earliest age. These Sarde monoliths are found in several parts of the island, being, as the name expresses, single stones, or obelisks, set upright in the ground. In Sardinia they are called Pietra- or Perda-fitta, and Perda-Lunga. We generally find them rounded by the hammer, but irregularly, in a conical form tapering to the top, but with a gradual swell in the middle; and their height varies from six to eighteen feet. They differ from the Celtic monuments, in being generally thus worked and shaped; in not being often congregated on one spot beyond three in number—a Perda-Lunga with two lesser stones; and in there not being any appearance of their ever having had, like the Trilithons of Stonehenge, any impost horizontal stone.
Father Bresciani finds the prototype of all these rude pillars scattered throughout the world, in the Beth-El of Jacob and other Bethylia, sepulchral or commemorative, mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. By Mr. Tyndale, the Sarde Perda-Lunga is considered a relic of the religion common to all the idolatrous Syro-Arabian nations, which, deifying the powers and laws of nature, considers the male sex to be the type of its active, generative, and destructive powers, while that passive power of nature, whose function is to conceive and bring forth, is embodied under the female form. And this worship, he conceives, was introduced into Sardinia, with the symbols just described, by the Phœnician or Canaanitish immigrants.
