Sardinia is one of the most geologically ancient lands in Europe, inhabited during the Upper Paleolithic era, home to a Nuragic civilization that left nothing behind by way of writing. Folklore paints these people as seafarers, perhaps mercenaries (Srdn- was recorded in 16th century BC Egyptian texts) who may have originated from Asia-Minor.
Then there is Sardinian language. Many words, dialects, names of mountains and rivers have no basis in Greek, Latin or Punic, nor Semitic or pre-Indo European. They do, however, show analogies with Basque and North Libyan languages and dialects along the Danube. Given that Sardinians’ physiognomy is also the most dolichocephalic, with a high incidence of long heads, and the DNA of its population from 10,000 BC surviving in the present population — a unique genetic heritage — suggests their language may be a remnant of a former, and now lost, civilization.
Towers and Tombs of the Giants
Even more mysterious are the thousands of towers and tombs of the giants, the former named nuraghe, except no published source informs of how these unusual structures, many of which are based on megalithic stonework, came to be associated with tall people. As to their age, historians and archaeologists place them anywhere between 3500-1500 BC and yet no carbon dating has been performed to validate this range. Like nearby Malta, the sites have been arbitrarily allocated a period that best fits the academic consensus, one that relies on pottery shards or animal bones among the dirt inside these structures. Realistically, the people who built such impressive temples would also have kept them clean, free of debris, thus what archaeologists are dating is the period long after the sites fell out of use, a period of decline when they accumulated debris, and began to be used for purposes that may have differed from their original intent. By this logic, if the lowest habitation layer is dated to 3500 BC, the site itself may be decades or hundreds, even thousands of years older.
It seems that to solve the mystery of the places of the giants one must turn to etymology, local tradition, even archaeo-astronomy, the relationship between a temple and its mirrored stellar object in the sky.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ancient Origins UNLEASHED to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.