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.
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.
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 it80, 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 flood82; 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-Karnaim83, 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 Virgil86, 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 coast87.
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
“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 shown93, 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.”