Nuraghe

May 17, 2014

NURAGHE

A nuraghe (plural: Nuraghi) is a monumental tower made of huge stones roughly worked. A nuraghe might stand as a single tower, or several nuraghi might be joined together as a complex of many towers with connecting structures and walls. Either form might show remnants of a village in the immediate vicinity.

The name "nuraghe" derives from the word "nur" meaning "hollow heap." The earliest form of nuraghi were corridor nuraghi, and from the outside resembled a pile of rock, but the insides had been removed to make a habitation area.

Many tower nuraghi have several floors. In this case, there is usually a staircase running around the interior, and each floor is topped with a corbeled dome (a rounded dome made by stacking rocks in circular courses, each course becoming smaller as it inches inward, until it all comes together at the top).

A nuraghe may have many niches in its walls, and there are secret rooms in some, usually near the entrance, giving rise to the idea that they were being used for passive defense. But there's hardly anything written to let us know just what they were used for exactly, except a single paragraph by the Romans referring to how difficult it was to win a battle with people who had managed to get inside a nuraghe and were ready to defend it.

Nuraghe Losa

The Nuraghe Losa is a nuraghe near Abbasanta, in Sardinia, Italy. One of the largest and best preserved nuraghe in the island, it dates to the 15th-13th centuries BC. The bastion and the line of walls date instead to the late 13th-early 12th centuries BC. The nuraghe was used for funerary rites until the 7th century AD.