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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
In Sardinia, where, as already observed, the manners, the superstitions,
and the traditions of the earliest ages, are more faithfully preserved
than in any other European country, we find, among the most ancient
existing structures, some which, to this day, are pointed out by the
natives as “the Tombs of the Giants.” And who were the “giants,” of whom
we read much, both in sacred and profane history? The very term is
significant. It is formed from two Greek words—γῆ and γένω, and
signifies earth-born, sons of the earth.[81] The word αὐτόχθνονες
(autochthones) has a cognate meaning; Liddell and Scott render it, “of
the land itself; Latin, _terrigenæ, aborigines, indigenæ_, of the
original race, _not settlers_.” The mythical account of the origin of
the “giants” concurs with this etymology. It paints them as the sons of
Cœlus and Terra—Heaven and Earth. In the poetry of Hesiod, they spring
from the earth imbued with the blood of the gods. Traces and traditions
of this aboriginal race are found in all parts of the world, and in
sacred as well as profane history. We are told that there were giants in
the days before the flood[82]; and Josephus considers them the offspring
of the union, mysteriously described by the sacred writer, of “the sons
of God with the daughters of men;” for, as might be supposed, there were
females also of the race of the earth-born. So the poets sang. Such was
Cybele, daughter of Heaven and Earth, pictured as crowned with a diadem
of towers, as the patroness of builders. We read of the giants, in the
Old Testament, under the names of Rephaim, Emim, Zamzummim, and Anakim.
In the time of Abraham, these tribes dwelt in the country beyond Jordan,
in about Astaroth-Karnaim[83], and it is now the received opinion of
biblical archæologists, that they were the most ancient, or aboriginal,
inhabitants of Palestine; prior to the Canaanites, by whom they were
gradually dispossessed of the region west of the Jordan, and driven
beyond that river. Some of the race, however, remained in Palestine
Proper so late as the invasion of the land by the Hebrews, and are
repeatedly mentioned as “the sons of Anak,” and “the remnant of the
Rephaim;”[84] and a few families existed as late as the time of
David.[85]
In the most ancient legends we find the giant race located in all parts
of the then known world. In Thessaly, under the name of Titans, poetic
fiction records their deeds of prowess in piling mountain on mountain,
and hurling immense rocks in their battles with the gods. Writers of
credit have transmitted to us accounts of the discovery of their remains
on the coast of Africa, from Bona to Tangier, in Sicily, and in Crete.
The earliest navigators who touched on the shores and islands of the
Mediterranean, brought back romantic tales, receiving their colouring
from the terrors of the narrators, of the barbarity and the stature of
the races they found on those then inhospitable shores. They were
robbers, and even cannibals; enemies of the gods and men. Such tales are
not without their parallels in the annals of modern maritime discovery.
Before the fall of Troy, Sicily was peopled by a giant or aboriginal
people, called Cyclopes; that insular race being said to be descended
from Neptune and Amphitrite, just as the giant Antæus, the founder of
Tangier on the African coast, was called the son of Neptune and Terra.
If we take Polyphemus, the chief of a tribe of the Cyclops, for a type
of this cognate race, what do we find in his story, divested of the
fiction with which it was clothed by tradition, transmuted into the
poetry of the Odyssey and the Æneid? The Grecian and Trojan heroes,
successively land on the eastern coast of Sicily, near the base of Mount
Ætna, whose throes and thunders lend horror to the scene. There dwelt
this Cyclop chief, in a cavern of the rocks. The race were Troglodytes,
as were the aboriginal Sardes, Baleares, Maltese, Libyans, &c. In
Sardinia, their caverns are still to be seen in an island of the
territory of Sulcis. Caves were probably the first habitations of
primitive man, before emerging from a condition hardly superior to that
of the savage beasts, his competitors for such rude shelter.
Irrespective of climate, in these we find his home, whether among the
Celts of the frozen regions of the North, or the Arabs of the stony
wastes bordering on the Erythrean Sea, in the Libyan deserts, or in the
sandstone rocks of Southern Africa. There one still sees the pygmy
Bushmen, perhaps the last existing Troglodyte race, the very reverse of
the Cyclops in stature, but, like them, their hand against every man's,
unchanged by ages in the midst of African tribes of considerable
civilisation, neither sowing nor pasturing, but living on roots,
berries, and grubs, like other aboriginal races, which sprang into
existence with the forests through which they roam, and the various
brutes which shared with them the possession of the soil:
“Cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris,
Mutum et turpe pecus.” HOR. _Sat._ i. 3.
But the traditions of Polypheme and his Cyclops represent them as
advanced beyond this first rude stage of society, though they still
adhered to their ancestral caves. They were robbers, no doubt; at least,
they plundered and made captive unfortunate mariners thrown on their
shores. Perhaps they feasted on their captives, as American Indians and
South-Sea islanders are reported to have done. This may be doubted; but
at least the cannibal feasts of the Sicilian aborigines were but _bonnes
bouches_ occasionally thrown in their way. They had better means of
subsistence. Polypheme was a shepherd, and so were all his clan. Picture
him, as described by Virgil[86], descending from the mountains,
probably at eventide, leaning on his staff, with his shepherd's pipe
hanging on his bosom, surrounded by his flocks, and leading them to the
shelter of some cavern on the shore; and we have a pleasant scene of
pastoral life. Such were all his tribe, a pretty numerous one,
comprising one hundred males, with their families, each having a flock
as large as their chiefs. They led a nomad life, “_errantes_” between
the mountain pastures and the plains on the coast[87].
Now, if we may be allowed to separate these facts, which seem genuine,
from the fictions with which they are blended, we find the aborigines of
Sicily, though barbarous, in a somewhat advanced stage of social life
beyond that when we are told they roamed in the woods and fed on acorns.
Such we may justly presume, divested of poetical fiction, was the
condition of the aborigines of the neighbouring island of Sardinia, the
largest in the Mediterranean except Sicily, when the first foreign
colonists landed on its coast. And such, after the lapse of more than
thirty centuries, are the Sarde shepherds of the present day, generally
lawless, sometimes robbers, making the caves of the rocks their shelter,
and their flocks and herds providing them with food and clothing.
Tenacious, above all other European races, of the traditions and customs
of their forefathers, when they point to structures of the highest
antiquity scattered on their native soil, and call them “_Sepolture de
is Gigantes_”—as we now have some idea what these giants were,—may we
not find reason to accept their tradition, and consider these monuments
as the tombs of the chiefs and first founders of their aboriginal race.
Still, it may be objected that the ancient legends relating to giants
are too fabulous to admit of any sound theories being built on them; and
some have even gone so far as to reject all the received accounts of
families or tribes of men of gigantic stature, as worthy only of the
belief of credulous ages. It may indeed be difficult to imagine whole
districts and countries peopled with gigantic races so formidable that
we can hardly conceive any other people subsisting in contact with them.
But that individuals, and even families, of extraordinary stature and
strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those
who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the
fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact,
occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by
discoveries related by authors of good repute.[88]
A solution of the difficulty may, perhaps, be found in the
consideration, that, as even now we find families and races exceeding in
stature and strength the average of mankind, there is still more reason
to believe in the existence of such phenomena in the youth of the
generations of man, when a simple mode of life, abundance of nutritious
food, and a salubrious atmosphere, gave to all organic beings huge and
sinewy forms. Such might be the special privilege of the Rephaim, and
other tribes of which we read. But while the rank and file, as we may
call them, of the nation, though tall and robust, might not much exceed
the average height of the human species, the chiefs and heroes who took
their posts in the van of battle may have attained the extraordinary
dimensions recorded of them; and, their numbers being magnified by
terror and tradition, the attributes of the class were extended to the
whole tribe. Thus the poets gave the name of Cyclops to all the
aboriginal inhabitants of Sicily, though the Cyclops, properly so
called, are represented by them as a single family, sons, as before
mentioned, of Neptune and Amphitrite.
That the _Sepolture de is Gigantes_ may be considered the tombs of the
chiefs or heroes of the aboriginal inhabitants of Sardinia seems to be
generally allowed; and the opinion receives some confirmation from a
passage in Aristotle's “Physics,” where, treating of the immutability of
time, notwithstanding our perception or unconsciousness of what occurs,
he incidentally illustrates his argument by the expression:—“So with
those who are fabulously said to sleep with the heroes in Sardinia, when
they shall rise up.”[89]
The best authorities being thus led to the conclusion that the Sarde
aborigines were a giant race, the question remains whether the Nuraghe
had the same origin as the Sepolture; and, passing by some trivial
objections to this hypothesis, we are disposed to adopt Mr. Tyndale's
conclusion, that—“the coincidence of two such peculiar monuments in the
same island, their non-existence elsewhere, and their being both
indicative of some abstract principle of grandeur and power, practically
carried out in their construction, are strong reasons for the
presumption that they may have had some mutual reference to each
other,—as burying places, temples, and altars, and consequently were
works of the same times and the same people.”
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]