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Three thousand years ago, on the island of Sardinia, flourished a remarkable society.

Right across the island, between about 1800 BC to 800 BC, they constructed around ten thousand astonishing stone structures called nuraghes. The ruins of around 7,000 of these structures can be seen today.

Evidence for the kind of society this was, is also seen in the unique bronze figurines and models that they left behind. Hundreds of these show armoured warriors bearing bows, swords and shields, along with the horned helmets they wore into battle.

This society reached its peak in the late bronze age when their influence spread beyond their home island. Sardinian material culture from this era is found as far away as Crete while at the same time Mycenaean pottery and Cypriot bronzes appear all over Sardinia.

So who were these people? Why did they build thousands of these enormous, complex structures? Were they really as warlike as their figurines suggest? And what happened to them?

This is the story of the Nuragic Civilisation.

Sardinia

Prehistory:

Sardinia is one of the most geologically ancient bodies of land in Europe. The island was populated in various waves of immigration from prehistory until recent times.

The first people to settle in Sardinia during the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic came from Continental Europe; Paleolithic inhabitation of the island is demonstrated by the evidences in Oliena's Corbeddu Cave;[38] during the Mesolithic era some populations, particularly from present-day Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, managed to move to northern Sardinia via Corsica.[38] The Neolithic Revolution was introduced in the 6th millennium BC by the Cardial culture coming from the Italian Peninsula. In the mid-Neolithic period, the Ozieri culture, probably of Aegean origin, flourished on the island spreading the hypogeum tombs known as domus de Janas, while the Arzachena culture of Gallura built the first megaliths: circular tombs. In the early 3rd millennium BC, the metallurgy of copper and silver began to develop.

During the late Chalcolithic the so-called Beaker culture, coming from various parts of Continental Europe, appeared in Sardinia. These new people predominantly settled on the west coast, where the majority of the sites attributed to them had been found.[39] The Beaker culture was followed in the early Bronze Age by the Bonnanaro culture which showed both reminiscences of the Beaker and influences by the Polada culture.

As time passed the different Sardinian populations appear to have become united in customs, yet remained politically divided into various small, tribal groupings, at times banding together against invading forces from the sea, and at others waging war against each other. Habitations consisted of round thatched stone huts.

Explore ancient Sardinia in September 2021 with Megalithomania (postponed from June 2020): http://www.megalithomania.co.uk/sardi....  Hugh Newman shares his research on one of the most mysterious islands in the Mediterranean. Sardinia has thousands of megalithic sites, giants graves and evidence of a giant race ruling the island in antiquity.

From about 1500 BC onwards, villages were built around a kind of round tower-fortress called nuraghe[40] (usually pluralized as nuraghes in English and as nuraghi in Italian). These towers were often reinforced and enlarged with battlements. Tribal boundaries were guarded by smaller lookout Nuraghes erected on strategic hills commanding a view of other territories.
Today, some 7,000 Nuraghes dot the Sardinian landscape. While initially these Nuraghes had a relatively simple structure, with time they became extremely complex and monumental (see for example the Nuraghe Santu Antine, Su Nuraxi, or Nuraghe Arrubiu). The scale, complexity and territorial spread of these buildings attest to the level of wealth accumulated by the Nuragic Sardinians, their advances in technology and the complexity of their society, which was able to coordinate large numbers of people with different roles for the purpose of building the monumental Nuraghes.

The Nuraghes are not the only Nuragic buildings that stand in place, as there are several sacred wells around Sardinia and other buildings with religious purposes such as the Giants' grave (monumental collective tombs) and collections of religious buildings that probably served as destinations for pilgrimage and mass religious rites (e.g. Su Romanzesu near Bitti).

At the time, Sardinia was at the centre of several commercial routes and it was an important provider of raw materials such as copper and lead, which were pivotal for the manufacture of the time. By controlling the extraction of these raw materials and by trading them with other countries, the ancient Sardinians were able to accumulate wealth and reach a level of sophistication that is not only reflected in the complexity of its surviving buildings, but also in its artworks (e.g. the votive bronze statuettes found across Sardinia or the statues of Mont'e Prama).

According to some scholars, the Nuragic people(s) are identifiable with the Sherden, a tribe of the Sea Peoples.[41][34]

The Nuragic civilization was linked with other contemporaneous megalithic civilization of the western Mediterranean, such as the Talaiotic culture of the Balearic Islands and the Torrean civilization of Southern Corsica. Evidence of trade with the other civilizations of the time is attested by several artefacts (e.g. pots), coming from as far as Cyprus, Crete, Mainland Greece, Spain and Italy, that have been found in Nuragic sites, bearing witness to the scope of commercial relations between the Nuragic people and other peoples in Europe and beyond.

One of the so-called Giants of Mont'e Prama