SEPOLTURA DE IS GIGANTES.
The Sepolture de is Gigantes, the tombs of the giants, as they are called, form another class of Sarde antiquities of the earliest age. The structures to which the popular traditions ascribe this name, may be described as a series of large stones placed together without any cement, inclosing a foss or hollow from fifteen to thirty-six feet long, from three to six wide, and the same in depth, with immense flat stones resting on them as a covering. Though the latter are not always found, it is evident, by a comparison with the more perfect Sepolture, that they have once existed, and have been destroyed or removed.[79]
The foss runs invariably from north-west to south-east; and at the latter point there is a large upright headstone, averaging from ten to fifteen feet high, varying in its form, from the square, elliptical, and conical, to that of three-fourths of an egg; and having in many instances an aperture about eighteen inches square at its base.
SEPOLTURA DE IS GIGANTES.
On each side of this stele, or headstone, commences a series of separate stones, irregular in size and shape, but forming an arc, the chord of which varies from twenty to twenty-six feet; so that the whole figure somewhat resembles the bow and shank of a spur.
“The shape of the foss and headstone,” observes Mr. Tyndale, “of these remains, fairly admits of the probability that they were graves, as some of the earliest forms of sepulchres on record are the upright stones with superincumbent slabs, such as the Druidical cistvaens and some tombs in Greece. Still, like the ‘Sarde Idols’ and the Nuraghe, the Sepolture are peculiar to the island, being entirely different in point of size and character from any other sepulchral remains. Judging from the many remains of those partially destroyed, their numbers must have been considerable. The Sardes believe them to be veritable tombs of giants; and that there may be legends of their existence in the island is undeniable, as a similar belief is found in almost all countries.” Mr. Tyndale, in speaking of the supposed connexion between the Nuraghe and the Sepolture, observes that, “if a Canaanitish race migrated here, nothing is more probable than that the tradition and worship of the giants would be also imported; and that it is even possible that some of the actual gigantic races of the Rephaim, Anakim, and others mentioned in Scripture, might have actually arrived in Sardinia.” Father Bresciani goes further: he fixes the era of this migration, points out the event which caused it[80], and traces its route by the Isthmus of Suez, through Egypt, and along the coast of Africa, which they are also said to have colonised; and whence he considers they could easily navigate to Sardinia and other islands in that part of the Mediterranean.
This immigration, however, of the Canaanitish giants rests upon very slender evidence; and it may be questioned whether the oldest Sardinian monuments do not belong to an age far anterior to that of any Phœnician or Canaanitish colonisation of the island whatever. That such there was, undoubted proofs have already been gathered; but the statuettes of Phœnician idols, forming part of those proofs, with the arts and skill required for the maritime enterprise it required, betray the civilisation of a period more advanced than that to which we should be disposed to attribute such rude structures as the Nuraghe and the Sepolture. In this uncertainty, it may be worth an inquiry, whether these ancient monuments did not exist before the colonists landed on the shores of Sardinia,—in short, whether they were not the works of an aboriginal race. The question is raised by M. Tyndale: “We may reduce the inquiry,” he says, “to the simple question, Were the Nuraghe built by the autochthones of the island, of whom we have no knowledge, or by the earliest colonists, of whom we have but little information?” On the former alternative the author is silent; nor is the question even raised by any other writer on Sardinian antiquities within our knowledge.
Yet surely, independently of its bearing on the origin of the Nuraghe and the early population of Sardinia, the subject of indigenous races is interesting in a general point of view. And it is worthy of notice, that the accounts handed down to us of the earliest colonists of the ancient world, speak of an aboriginal population existing in the countries to which they migrated, just as the European adventurers and circumnavigators of the last three centuries found indigenous races on the continents and islands they discovered, except on some few islands of the Pacific Ocean, recently emerged from the state of coral reefs. The parallel may be carried further. The ancient, as well as the modern, colonists carried the arts of a superior civilisation in their train; but the indigenous races of the New World were destined to gradual decay and extinction, leaving some ancient monuments as the records of their existence, just as the primitive children of the soil in the West of Europe, whose relics we endeavour to decipher, disappeared and were lost; so uniform is the order of events in the designs of Providence.
Poetical legends, generally founded on, and blended with, traditionary facts, help us to form some idea of the character and habits of the aboriginal races; but history, and even tradition, seldom carry us further back in the review of past ages than the arrival of colonists, generally of Eastern origin, to form settlements on the shores and the islands washed by the Mediterranean. Did they find these shores and islands uninhabited? To say nothing of countries more remote and less accessible, many considerations would induce us to imagine that these fair regions were not all deserts; that, even at this early period, they were already peopled.