Perhaps it may be objected, with some show of reason, that a people so rude and so primitive as the aborigines, could not have possessed the skill required for the construction of such buildings as the Nuraghe; so that they must be assigned to a later age. But we are informed in Genesis that, among some families of mankind, not only useful, but ornamental, arts were taught before Noah's flood![90] and, without instituting an inquiry how soon the inventive and mechanical faculties of mankind were more or less developed in various countries, we may venture to assume that, before the historical period, before navigation had conveyed the higher arts of civilisation to distant shores, the aboriginal races, generally, were not incapable of erecting the massive structures attributed to them by universal tradition, and which, defying the ravages of time, still remain the sole monuments of lost races, on which the puzzled antiquary can hope to decipher the records of their existence and condition.
To rear the lofty perpendicular monolith, to set up the tall stele as the headstone of a grave, to lift and poise the ponderous rocking-stone, to raise and fix the massive impost of the trilithon, or the slab covering a sepoltura, a cromlech, or a cistvaen; (for the remark applies to Celtic as well as Mediterranean antiquities), to heap up, not Pelion on Ossa, but untold loads of earth and stone to form the conical tumulus over the chambers of the dead, to build “Cyclopean” walls, and construct the cone of rude but solid masonry, with its cavernous recesses,—all these are the works we should just expect from races of mankind when emerging from primitive barbarism, in the youth of the species, and possessed of enormous strength of limb.[91] Those who reared these works are supposed to have been in possession of some knowledge of the pulley, the lever, and the incline; but, after all, giant strength must have been the main fulcrum for such operations. Had there been ornament, sculpture, or inscriptions on these primeval monuments, our thoughts might have been carried forward to a later age, when colonisation from the East brought in its train the arts which there first undoubtedly flourished.
That the Sardinian antiquities of the earliest age are unique, that this is the case in other parts of the world, every primitive people having, with certain resemblances, a peculiar style in its ancient monuments, that none such as these are found in the countries from whence the first colonists migrated, nor are described in their records, are facts strengthening the argument for their being of indigenous origin. That the forms of these structures scattered over the world are generally pyramidal, often rounded, and sometimes spiral, tells nothing to the contrary. The cone, as Father Bresciani observes, was more graceful to the eye, more easy of construction, more durable, and, perhaps, connected with some mysterious ideas of Eternity, or the circling course of the heavenly bodies. Such was the form of the first great building on record, the Tower of Babel, as we have it represented; the type in many respects of the Sarde Nuraghe. Nor is it an unreasonable conjecture that the alien people, mysteriously alluded to in Genesis, as mixing with the children of God, having seduced the most froward of the chosen race, were the instigators and planners of the profane enterprise. “Go to ——,” said a man to his neighbour, as the marginal translation renders the passage,—“let us make bricks, let us build a tower whose top may reach to heaven.”[92]
“There were giants in those days,”—men not only of gigantic forms, but imbued with grand ideas. The structures included among the number of their monuments are, as just observed, “indicative of some abstract principle of grandeur and power, practically carried out in their construction.” In the strength of their might, the Titanic race bade defiance to the deities of Olympus, with whom they are poetically represented as combating; but that does not preclude our supposing that, in common with all the generations of man, however barbarous, the giant races had their religious instincts, their altars, their rites. Reverence, also, for the memories of their departed heroes, of their progenitors, was a common feeling, most powerful in the earliest times. In these two principles we trace the ideas to which the mysterious monuments of the ancient Sardes owe their origin, and thence we arrive at a reasonable conclusion respecting their object and uses.
Researches the most extended and the most profound, have failed to penetrate the obscurity in which the mists of ages have enveloped the origin of the primeval monuments of all nations, and of the people who founded them. Something may have been contributed towards the solution of the difficulties surrounding the subject, if we have been able to connect existing monuments with a rude race of extraordinary strength, the supposed giant-builders of those ancient structures. Such buildings we discover in various parts of the world, varying in their details, but similar as respects their simple but massive and durable forms. Gigantic stature and strength of limb we consider to have been the essential requisites, in the infancy of art, for transporting and raising the ponderous materials; and these properties were characteristics of the races of which, and of their Herculean labours, we find everywhere corresponding traditions.
In the absence of a satisfactory reply to the inquiry, whence, when, or how the giant race reached Sardinia, we are willing to accept the alternative, as regards the founders of the Nuraghe and its other ancient monuments, that these structures were the work of the autocthonoi, the aboriginal inhabitants. But we embrace the theory in a different sense from that in which it is proposed; suggesting that the so-called giants themselves may have been the autocthonoi, and not immigrants; and the remark is generally applicable. The etymology of the words used by the Greeks and Romans, to designate the aboriginal races, supports the conjecture of their identity; for, as already shown[93], the term “giant” (γίγας) is not descriptive of extraordinary strength, but, equally with the phrases autocthonoi, terrigenæ, and aborigines, signifies “the earth-born,” the natives of the soil.
Further than this we cannot here pursue the inquiry. In a work of this description, it would be idle to speculate on the means by which aboriginal races, as well as a peculiar fauna and flora, were planted in distant lands, whether islands or remote continents, on which they have been found established by colonists and navigators, from the earliest to the latest times. Ethnologists have laboured to solve the difficulties surrounding the subject; with what success, those who have studied their works must decide for themselves.
The Sardinian Nuraghe are probably among the oldest structures in the world, and may therefore be reasonably considered the works of an aboriginal race; but their origin, and that of the founders, are equally involved in impenetrable mystery. Their rude, but massive and shapely, cones have survived the ruin of the sumptuous edifices of Babylon and Nineveh, of Ecbatana and Susa, of Tyre and the Egyptian Thebes. Like the pyramids of Egypt, they have witnessed, from their hoary tops, the current of untold centuries rolling onwards, wave after wave, in its turbid course. They have marked the rise and the fall of empires, the vicissitudes of fortune, the illusory hopes, the vain fears, and the insatiable desires of successive generations of men, whose brief span of existence has been that of a moment compared with the centuries that have looked down from their summits. But unlike the Pyramids, whose mysteries are partially unveiled, they give no note by which their age or their history may be discovered. Mute on their solitary mounds, they give no answer to the inquiries of the traveller or the learned, when questioned,—what people of Herculean strength and undaunted will reared their massive walls, wrought the dark cells under the cover of their domes, and raised the ponderous slab which crowns the cone? No image of man, no form of beast, neither symbol nor inscription, are sculptured or graven on the solid blocks, within or without, to tell their tale. Well, then, may the thoughtful traveller, contemplating with silent wonder these mysterious cones, soliloquise in some such sort as this:—“Surely these structures must have been raised before men had learned the arts of writing and engraving, for how many thousands of the Nuraghe were built, in successive periods, without their founders having acquired the faculty of inscribing on them the name of a god or a hero, for a memorial to future generations.”