Nuragic art at the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari, Sardinia

Nuragic art at the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari, Sardinia.

This museum houses findings from the pre-Nuragic and Nuragic age through the Byzantine age. These include a large collection of prehistoric bronze statuettes from the Nuragic age, some earlier stone statuettes of female divinities, reconstruction of a Phoenician settlement, the Nora Stone, Carthaginian goldsmith examples, Roman and Italic ceramics and Byzantine jewels. Nuragic civilization lasted on the island of Sardinia from the 18th century BCE to 238 BCE when the Romans colonized the island.
The term "Nuragic" is derived from the island's most characteristic monument, the nuraghe, a tower-fortress type of construction the ancient Sardinians built in large numbers. Even today more than 7,000 nuraghes dot the Sardinian landscape. These warrior people have been associated with the Sherden tribe of the late Bronze Age Sea Peoples. Simonides of Ceos and Plutarch spoke of raids by Sardinians against the island of Crete, in the same period in which the Sea People invaded Egypt. Many of the distinctive Nuragic bronze figurines depict such warriors.




Image: bronze figurines of a Nuragic warriors at the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari. Image courtesy of the museum and Wikimedia Commons contributor Shardan.

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