{"it":{"id":"EUR-010","kind":"site","sub":"Europe and the Mediterranean","name":"Nuraghe","place":"Italy","lat":40.812,"lon":8.33,"date":"The nuraghe, or nurhag, is the main type of ancient megalithic edifice found in…","mat":"earth","nfacts":7,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"More than 7,000 stone towers called nuraghi still stand across Sardinia, and there were probably over 10,000. Some rise about 20 m, and the tallest known, Nuraghe Arrubiu, reached about 25 to 30 m.","why":"They were built without mortar, often with corbelled domes. Whether they were forts, elite seats or shared community buildings is still debated.","src":[366,613],"nsrc":3,"yt":"Sardinia has thousands of Bronze Age towers. Forts, temples or homes?","rel":["EUR-011"],"hook":"Sardinia has roughly 7,000 Bronze Age stone towers. Nobody agrees what they were for."},"S":{"366":["Wikipedia: Nuraghe","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe"],"613":["UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Su Nuraxi di Barumini","https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/833"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-010","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Some nuraghes are about","a":"height","v":"20","u":"m","o":"Some nuraghes are about 20 m in height, the tallest one known, Nuraghe Arrubiu, reached a height of 25 - .","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1367446115 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1410"},{"f":"on two levels and reached a length of","a":"length","v":"27","u":"m","o":"In complex nuraghes, corridors were often present, sometimes corbelled, such as at Santu Antine, in which the corbelled arch corridors were superimposed on two levels, and reached a length of 27 m.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1367446115 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1411"},{"f":"The most common declinations revealed were of around","a":"angle (unspecified)","v":"43","u":"°","o":"REF12 The most common declinations revealed were of around −43° for the earlier nuraghes, shifting to just −45½° for the later.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1367446115 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1412"},{"f":"nuraghi","a":"era","v":"1900-730 BC","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3541"},{"f":"nuraghi","a":"typical height","v":"~20","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3542"},{"f":"Nuraghe Arrubiu","a":"height (est.)","v":"25-30","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3543"},{"f":"Santu Antine","a":"corridor length","v":"27","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Nuraghe","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3544"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The nuraghe, or nurhag, is the main type of ancient megalithic edifice found in Sardinia, Italy, developed during the Nuragic Age between 1900 and 730 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"40.81179","lon":"8.32953","src":"OSM Nominatim only","agree":"only source","b":"S","note":"OSM point; check feature match","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/370598962"},"src":[{"id":"S0357","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuraghe&oldid=1367446115"},{"id":"S0562","t":"Wikipedia: Nuraghe","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe"},{"id":"S2614","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Su Nuraxi di Barumini","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/833"},{"id":"VEUR-010-4","t":"SardegnaCultura - Orroli, Complesso Su Nuraxi Arrubiu","u":"https://www.sardegnacultura.it/articolo/orroli-complesso-su-nuraxi-arrubiu"},{"id":"VEUR-010-5","t":"American Journal of Archaeology 121.2 (April 2017): review, The Archaeology of Nuragic Sardinia","u":"https://ajaonline.org/book-review/3439/"},{"id":"VEUR-010-6","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Su Nuraxi di Barumini","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/833/"},{"id":null,"t":"Fondazione Barumini: Su Nuraxi","u":"https://www.fondazionebarumini.it/fr/su-nuraxi/"}],"sum":"In the middle of the floor of a stone chamber in central Sardinia, archaeologists found a round clay jar buried in the earth. It was crazed all over with fine cracks. Beside it lay a large hearth. The excavators think the cracks may not have been damage at all, but the point: a vessel made so that whatever was poured into it would seep slowly down into the ground, perhaps during a rite. Above that jar, the walls of the chamber curved inward and climbed toward a vault 11 metres overhead, and above that again the tower once rose to perhaps 25 or 30 metres. It is one of roughly seven thousand towers on a single island, and no one can say for certain what any of them was for.\n\nThe towers are called nuraghi, and the Bronze Age culture of Sardinia, in Italy, is named after them. More than 7,000 still stand or survive as ruins, and archaeologists believe there were once more than 10,000. UNESCO describes them as a type of structure \"for which no parallel exists anywhere else in the world.\" Even the word is a puzzle. Its origin is, in the Oxford English Dictionary's phrase, \"uncertain and disputed,\" perhaps linked to a Sardinian word meaning a heap of stones or a cavity in the earth.\n\nA nuraghe is a round tower shaped like a cone with its top cut off, built of stone without mortar. The wall has three layers. The outer face leans inward, made of stones that grow smaller as they rise, rough rubble near the ground and neatly dressed blocks higher up. The inner face, of smaller stones, curves in to form a dome shaped like a bullet, built by corbelling: each ring of stones overhangs the one below until the gap can be closed. Between the two faces lies a packing of small stones and soil. The whole thing stands only by the weight of its stones, some of which weigh several tonnes. A doorway leads into a corridor lined with niches, then into a round chamber. A spiral stair climbs inside the thickness of the wall, lit by narrow slits, to upper chambers, up to three stacked one on another, and to a terrace on top. Many reach about 20 metres, the height of a six-storey building.\n\nMost began as a single tower. UNESCO's summary is that they were probably first built by single families or clans, and that as society grew more complex and ranked, the lone towers drew extra walls, towers and huts around them. At the top of that development stand the polylobed nuraghi, which have been called royal palaces and megalithic castles: clusters of towers linked by high ramparts. Su Nuraxi at Barumini, a World Heritage Site since 1997, chosen to represent them all, had a central tower of three chambers linked by a spiral stair, once more than 18.5 metres high. Four lesser towers and a heavy curtain wall were later built around it, and a village of round huts grew outside. At Santu Antine near Torralba, corbelled corridors run on two levels for 27 metres.\n\nThe chamber with the buried jar belongs to the strangest of them, Nuraghe Arrubiu near Orroli, in the south-centre of the island. Its name means \"red,\" for the red basalt it is built from. It is the only five-lobed nuraghe known. Its central keep survives to 14 metres and is thought to have stood 25 to 30, the tallest of all. Around the keep runs a bastion of five towers, and around that an outer wall of seven more. The keep had no stair of its own; its upper floors were reached from the bastion's ramparts. The central courtyard held a cistern and channels, and several towers are pierced by many narrow slits. A small Mycenaean jar, of a Greek type, has been studied from the site. People lived here from the end of the Middle Bronze Age to the Final Bronze Age, and then, at the start of the Iron Age, life stopped suddenly. No one has explained why. Many centuries later, between the second century BC and the fifth century AD, people built wine presses and vats over its collapsed courtyards and made wine in the ruins.\n\nWhen was all this built? By one common reckoning the Nuragic Age ran from 1900 to 730 BC. UNESCO places the main tower-building phase between about 1600 and 1200 BC. A 2017 review in the American Journal of Archaeology credits Gary Webster's book The Archaeology of Nuragic Sardinia with using radiocarbon dates to rethink when the first towers, and the earlier, stockier \"proto-nuraghi,\" were raised, across a span from the twenty-third to the eighth centuries BC. The spans do not conflict: the wider one covers the whole culture, the narrower its great age of building. The Italian archaeologist Massimo Pallottino judged Nuragic architecture the most advanced in the western Mediterranean of its time, ahead even of the Greek cities of southern Italy. And of seven thousand towers, only a few have been scientifically excavated.\n\nOn their purpose, the reviewer wrote, archaeologists \"are surprisingly divided.\" One camp sees defences raised by rising elites, families climbing the social ladder and fortifying their gains. Another sees shared compounds that expressed a new island identity. Webster reads them as answering both needs at once, security and status, a combination that itself encouraged more building. That is the logic of rivalry behind seven thousand towers: once a neighbour has a tower, you need one too, and once he adds a bastion, so must you. Many stand on hills from which important routes could be controlled, which suits the defensive view, and some scholars describe them as something between a status symbol and a passive defence meant to deter. UNESCO calls them defensive complexes.\n\nYet finds point another way. There is the buried jar at Arrubiu. Small models of nuraghi have been dug up at religious sites, such as the maze temple at Su Romanzesu near Bitti, as if the tower itself had become a sacred emblem. And in 2002 Juan Belmonte and Mauro Zedda measured the direction of the entrances of 272 single-tower nuraghi and the central towers of 180 complex ones. The results showed clear peaks: doors facing the winter-solstice sunrise and the point where the Moon rises at its farthest south. The pattern held across the whole history of the towers, with the most common declination, a sky angle, shifting from about minus 43 degrees in earlier nuraghi to minus 45 and a half in later ones. Zedda has gone further and suggested the target may have been a star, quite possibly Alpha Centauri. That remains his proposal, not a consensus.\n\nThe nuraghi have cousins, but few. The torri of southern Corsica and the talaiots of Menorca and Mallorca are widely accepted as related. A proposed link to a site at El-Ahwat in Israel has been contested. Otherwise the towers stand alone, a building tradition that rose on one island, filled it, and ended.\n\nPicture the island at its height: thousands of towers on the hills, many of their doors turned toward the same quarter of the winter sky, and at the heart of the greatest of them a cracked jar in the floor, waiting for something to be poured into the earth.","qs":["Sardinia has thousands of Bronze Age towers. Forts, temples or homes?","If nuraghi were defensive, who were all these towers defending against?","Why might a building type found on one island and nowhere else have appeared there at all?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/-_Palmavera.JPG/1280px--_Palmavera.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-_Palmavera.JPG","title":"- Palmavera.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"This illustration was made by (User:Royonx) and released under the license(s) st","cap":"Nuraghe in Alghero-Palmavera"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_%2810%29.JPG/1280px-Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_%2810%29.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_(10).JPG","title":"Bortigali - Nuraghe Orolo (10).JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Gianni Careddu","cap":"Nuraghe Orolo"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_%2833%29.JPG/1280px-Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_%2833%29.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bortigali_-_Nuraghe_Orolo_(33).JPG","title":"Bortigali - Nuraghe Orolo (33).JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Gianni Careddu","cap":"Nuraghe Orolo"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Buddus%C3%B2_-_Nuraghe_Loelle_%2808%29.JPG/1280px-Buddus%C3%B2_-_Nuraghe_Loelle_%2808%29.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddus%C3%B2_-_Nuraghe_Loelle_(08).JPG","title":"Buddusò - Nuraghe Loelle (08).JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Gianni Careddu","cap":"Buddusò - Nuraghe Loelle"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Central_tower_of_the_Nuraghe_at_Saint_Antine_of_Torralba.jpg/1280px-Central_tower_of_the_Nuraghe_at_Saint_Antine_of_Torralba.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Central_tower_of_the_Nuraghe_at_Saint_Antine_of_Torralba.jpg","title":"Central tower of the Nuraghe at Saint Antine of Torralba.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Fawcett5. Compressed by |EPO|.","cap":"Central tower of the Nuraghe at Saint Antine of Torralba on the island of Sardinia."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"25–30","u":"m","h":"Height of Nuraghe Arrubiu, the tallest known","s":[111]},{"v":"1900 BC","h":"The Nuragic Age in Sardinia began c. 1900 BC and ran to 730 BC","s":[111]},{"v":"Earth","h":"Made of","s":[111]}],"hs":{"111":["Wikipedia: Nuraghe (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuraghe"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-010.webp","w":1280,"h":452,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/-_Palmavera.JPG/1280px--_Palmavera.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}