The Nuragic Decline 0 Comments

The Nuragic Decline

How did the Nuragic decline happen and why did it happen? The Gabbiano Azzurro Hotel & Suites blog tries to formulate some plausible hypothesis, grounding them on available studies.

Around 1200 BC, the golden age of the Nuragic civilization, the civilizations in the Mediterranean area collapsed due to a huge drought: the cities perished or were abandoned, and populations migrated elsewhere. Scholars call it collapse. The world of that time disappeared and the history of the Mediterranean people underwent a deep transformation. We don't know what happened in Sardinia, but geographically this drought affected the western Mediterranean too and could not have exempted Sardinia, even though historical documents confirming it are not available. 

But there is another hypothesis of collapse, or rather of perfect storm, as prof Eric H. Cline, archaeologist active in the field since 1980 with 30 terms of excavations and investigations experience, calls it. In an interview with Ancient History Encyclopedia, he talked about the circumstances that led, according to his studies, to the decline of the civilizations of the Late Bronze Age shortly after 1200 BC. without specifying the Nuragic civilization but the Mediterranean area as a whole, to which belongs Sardinia.

According to him, it was not only a great drought, but a "perfect storm" occurred, i.e., a series of disastrous events that marked a turning point: drought unquestionably, but also climate change, famine, earthquakes, invasions and internal riots, all dating just about that length of time. Direct and specific tests would confirm this. While man had repeatedly survived catastrophes taken individually, such as periods of drought or post-earthquake reconstruction, man could never have survived these calamities if all, or most of them, had occurred at the same time, as it seems to have happened between 1225 B.C. and 1177 BC.

The civilizations of the late Bronze Age - which corresponds to the golden age of the Nuragic Civilization – collapsed, as they couldn't cope with the perfect storm because, disaster after disaster, the whole system collapsed. That was the end of empires and kingdoms that had thrived for hundreds of years. It took about a century for everything to go into crisis, and 1177 BC. is the reference point of the studies of prof. Eric H. Cline.

Who knows if Sergio Frau, mentioned in Atlantis, the Center of the World and ... Sardinia!, theorist of the hypothesis that Sardinia was Atlantis, is referring to the "perfect storm" when he assumes that Nuragic Sardinia may have been submerged by a huge Tsunami, s'Unda Manna, which buried many coastal settlements in Sardinia, pushing the population inland, on the mountains, thus giving rise to a Sardinian population that replaced the warriors and navigators with the shepherds and farmers? 

The fact is that, leaving an immense archaeological heritage, these wonderful people become extinct. Approx.  7,000 nuraghes are said to be on the island, but no one knows for sure, because many sites could be there, buried and not excavated yet, (perhaps because they were submerged by s'Unda Manna?).  But knowing the precise number is not as important as realizing the exceptionality of the Nuraghi built in the Bronze Age, evaluating their architectural complexity, beauty, harmony, which has no equal. Not to mention the rest of the heritage: Tombs of the Giants, the Holy Wells, the Giants Of Mont'e Prama, being still today after more than 3.500 years the symbol and pride of Sardinia.


“The plausible is the brush used by the archaeologist to fill in the gaps between one aeon and another”. (Fabrizio Caramagna)

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Written by Daniela Toti
Photo by Wikipedia

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