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Ancient Sardinia Forteana (Giant Tombs & Skeletons; The Real Atlantis?)

rynner2

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Prehistoric cybermen? Sardinia's lost warriors rise from the dust
David Keys Friday 17 February 2012

An elite force of prehistoric warriors – carved from solid rock in the western Mediterranean 2700 years ago – is rising from oblivion.
Archaeologists and conservation experts on the Italian island of Sardinia have succeeded in re-assembling literally thousands of fragments of smashed sculpture to recreate a small yet unique army of life-size stone warriors which were originally destroyed by enemy action in the middle of the first millennium BC.

It’s the only group of sculpted life-sized warriors ever found in Europe. Though consisting of a much smaller number of figures than China’s famous Terracotta Army, the Sardinia example is 500 years older and is made of stone rather than pottery.

After an eight year conservation and reconstruction program, 25 of the original 33 sculpted stone warriors – archers, shield-holding ‘boxers’ and probable swordsmen – have now been substantially re-assembled.

The warriors were originally sculpted and placed on guard over the graves of elite Iron Age Sardinians, buried in the 8 century BC. The stone guardians are thought to have represented the dead individuals or to have acted as their eternal body-guards and retainers.

However, within a few centuries, the Carthaginians (from what is now Tunisia) invaded Sardinia – and archaeologists suspect that it was they who smashed the stone warriors (and stone models of native fortress shrines) into five thousand fragments. It’s likely that the small sculpted army - and the graves they were guarding - were seen by the invaders as important symbols of indigenous power and status.

The site was abandoned and forgotten. Carthaginian control of Sardinia gave way to Roman, then Vandal, then Byzantine, Pisan, Aragonese, Spanish, Austrian, Savoyard and finally Italian rule.

The thousands of fragments were rediscovered only in the 1970s – and were excavated in the early 1980s by Italian archaeologist Carlo Troncheti. Two of the statues were then re-assembled – but the vast majority of the material was put into a local museum store where it stayed until 2004 when re-assembly work on the fragments was re-started by conservators in Sassari, northern Sardinia.

Sardinia’s newly recreated ‘stone army’ is set to focus attention on one of the world’s least known yet most impressive ancient civilizations – the so-called Nuragic culture which dominated the island from the 16 century BC to the late 6 century BC. Its Bronze Age heyday was in the mid second millennium BC - roughly from the 16 to the 13 century BC, when it constructed some of the most impressive architectural monuments ever produced in prehistory.

Even today, the remains of 7000 Nuragic fortresses (the oldest castles in Europe) still dominate the landscape of Sardinia. Several dozen have stood the test of time exceptionally well – and give an extraordinary impression of what Sardinian Bronze Age military architecture looked like.

The re-assembled stone army is expected to go on display from this summer at southern Sardinia’s Cagliari Museum, 70 miles south-east of the find site, Monte Prama in central Sardinia.

Many of the stone warriors are armed with bows or protected by shields – and wear protective carved stone armour over their chests and horned stone helmet over their heads. Some of the fighters – those believed to portray boxers – carry shields in their left hands, held aloft over their heads. These ‘boxers’ may well have represented or embodied shield-bearers serving the high-ranking members of the Sardinian Iron Age interred in the adjacent graves.

There were also a series of at least ten model Nuragic castles of different designs – some single-towered and others sporting more elaborate ‘multi-tower’ fortifications.
It’s likely that the models represent the actual monumental buildings (Bronze Age fortresses transformed into Iron Age ‘ancestral’ shrines) associated with each buried individual’s immediate family.

The ruling elite of this part of Sardinia may well have been a relatively tightly knit group of closely related individuals. For scientific work carried out on the skeletal material at a laboratory in Florence, suggests that most of the dead individuals were from just two generations of a single extended family.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 88952.html
 
About below story at FT on spirals on walls of a buried building in Sardinia...the same spiral seems to appear also in Alaska.

Story showing a spiral symbol in Alaska:
http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/storie ... 3635.shtml

---------------------------------------

The FT Article:
forteantimes.com/strangedays ... round.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:


https://web.archive.org/web/2014120...ays/archaeology/3748/spirals_underground.html

Spirals Underground
Sardinia's chequered tomb, and the attempts by those in authority to keep it a secret
By Paul Devereux
June 2010

STORY TEXT:
Diego and Paola Meozzi, the Italian archæology journalists who produce the admirable Stone Pages website, have alerted the outside world to an amazing discovery on the Italian island of Sardinia. It involves a Neolithic site now referred to as tomba della scacchiera (“the chequered tomb”), near Bonorva. Diego and Paola met a local man, Antonello Porcu, who told them about the site. In 2007, the Bonorva municipality initiated an archæological survey of the area, where there is a known prehistoric necropolis. This led to an excavation programme in 2008. Despite the lead archæologist saying that they hadn’t yet found anything of interest, Porcu noticed that for several consecutive days workers coming down from the excavation area were covered by rock powder. He queried them in Sardinian (not the same as Italian) and they hinted that something remarkable had been uncovered up in the hills. Their curiosity tweaked, Porcu and his brother went up there. They were staggered by what they found.

Peering beneath a groundsheet placed there by the excavators, the Porcu brothers discovered an entrance passage with a rock-cut façade leading into a large tomb with three side cells. The tomb interior has huge bull horns carved on the long side of the main chamber, whose stone roof is carved in a way reminiscent of timber planks and is painted in dark blue and white. But most striking of all is a series of seven bright red ochre spirals, each up to 70cm across, painted on a side cell; they were executed with skillful bravura. On the roof of a side cell there is also a geometric figure very rarely found in a Sardinian tomb – a black and white chequered motif. The best guess so far is that the monument dates to the so-called Ozieri culture (3800 to 2900 BC).

Stirred by this find, Antonello Porcu informed the mayor of Bonorva. The man was astonished, saying he had not been informed about it by anyone connected with the survey. Fortunately for us, Porcu had the presence of mind to take photographs of the tomb’s interior, because a few months later official representatives of the Soprintendenza Archeological for Nuoro and Sassari (the local branch of the Italian Ministry for Heritage) put a massive block of rock in front of the only entrance of the tomb, filling everything with concrete and covering the whole area with a thick layer of soil, sealing the tomb once again. This was done in order “to protect the tomb against looters”.

The local Sardinian archæological authorities are driven by the desire to protect the site and do not want word spread about it, but Diego and Paola Meozzi disagree. “Our heritage is a national treasure and must be shared: protection is one thing, but hiding an ancient site indefinitely – even if motivated by preservation principles – is something else,” Diego comments. “We wonder just how many remarkable monuments have been found, studied and sealed once again over the years by the archæologists in Sardinia with only a few authorized persons aware of them.” He asks that people around the world send messages to the Soprintendente Archeologico for Sassari and Nuoro (Dr. Bruno Massabò – e-mail address: [email protected]), urging a re-think of the closure policy. So go to it, dear readers. Stone Pages, 21 April 2010.

A concluding observation (remember you read it here first): if we look at the picture here of one panel of the tomb’s paintings, showing spirals either side of a thick vertical line, it calls to mind the arrangement of motifs on the entrance stone to the Neolithic passage grave of Newgrange in Ireland – see the picture of that here also and compare. (Indeed, the motif of spirals either side of a vertical line recur on other nearby Boyne Valley monuments too.) One archæological researcher has already noted that the tomba della scacchiera spirals are more reminiscent of rock art motifs in Atlantic coastal Europe than, say, the painted spirals inside the Hal Saflieni hypogeum on Malta. This could all have implications as to who came from where in prehistory –what more might Sardinia’s other hidden secrets be able to tell us? (Archæologist George Nash, one of this columnist’s editorial colleagues at Time and Mind, is becoming actively engaged in trying to encourage a different heritage approach by Sardinian archæological authorities. See Time and Mind for updates in due course.)
 
My housemate is Sardinian and told me that a friend of his knows a farmer who recently (in the last few years) discovered a mass grave of giant human skeletons. He says 4-5 metres in length. The farmer simply covered it up and carried on ploughing his field, he did not report it to the authorities as he does not want a load of archaeologists ruining his field.

My housemate's friend is a close one and he believes him, I don't believe in human skeletons that size but I dare say he found something unusual. I can also understand that he wouldn't report a site of archaeological significance due to the inconvenience of the digging.

My housemate also has gone on at great length about the evidence for Sardinia being Atlantis and the pharoahs having a unit of Sardinian body guards. I'm not sure if there is a thread I could post this in as I seldom venture into this sub-forum. Any ideas?
 
4-5 metres sounds like a real exaggeration, unless they may be skeletons of some other creatures (people once thought elephant skeletons were the remains of giant humans).

There are a lot of fake pictures and Youtube videos of giant skeletons doing the rounds (example below):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1RD49XG12Y
 
There was that slightly infamous photo of the archaeological dig uncovering a giant skeleton from a few years back, proven to be fake. Anyone know the one I'm thinking of? It was in the FT.
 
Mythopoeika said:
4-5 metres sounds like a real exaggeration, unless they may be skeletons of some other creatures (people once thought elephant skeletons were the remains of giant humans).

That was my first thought. Perhaps even a mix of human remains and extinct megafauna in the same field, hence his confusion.
 
gncxx said:
Anyone know the one I'm thinking of? It was in the FT.
The Cardiff Giant (US, not Wales). Lots about it all online.

However, the FT did cover true giants, including found bones, in 276, available from the site here. Many of us remarked at the time, though, that given the credentials of the authors the piece itself is very nebulous, including the baffling comment:
A dead True Giant was once measured to be 13ft (4m) tall; heights of 15 and 20ft (4.6 and 6m) have been reported after more recent sightings.
..with no qualifying data attached at all. When?? Where? How recent?

A bit shoddy for Loren Coleman. Anyway, it's a place to start.

Also, I started a thread about giant skeletons a while ago, here. I'll probably merge this one in after a while.
 
The notion of 'giants' or 'titans' in Sardinia has a long history - especially in relation to the megalithic 'giants' tombs' and other large stone structures found there. These are mentioned in (e.g.) FT 277:

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/fo ... dinia.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (and photos) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:


https://web.archive.org/web/2014120...rtean_traveller/5773/secrets_of_sardinia.html

Secrets of Sardinia
Life, death and rebirth amongst the mysterious Nuragic peoples of ancient Sardinia
Text: Mark Pilkington / Images: Mark Pilkington
July 2011
 
Last edited:
Reuters seems to have distributed a wire story about two skeletons "more than eight feet tall" having been discovered near Porto Torres almost 60 years ago.

Image of the story in print:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78709115@N ... otostream/

Publication venue:

Regina (Saskatchewan) _Leader-Post_, 30 October 1953.
 
National Geographic Teams with Simcha Jacobovici to Find Atlantis in Sardinia
9/17/2016

When Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic, there was deep concern among lovers of science that the Fox News magnate would send the magazine and its affiliated cable channel into the gutter. Murdoch’s son James, who now National Geographic and its TV channel through his management of 21st Century Fox, had his flunkies go on a media blitz promising that under his leadership, NatGeo properties would emphasize high-quality science with the production values of HBO. James Murdoch claimed that the new National Geographic Channel would be a high-end destination for wealthy viewers looking for real science. “It’s better shows, it’s bigger talent,” National Geographic Channel CEO Courteney Monroe told Business Insider.

So naturally the new and improved NatGeo hired Holy Bloodline conspiracy theorist Simcha Jacobovici for a splashy new documentary about finding the “real” Atlantis. In Sardinia.

According to The Star, the documentary is a sequel to the terrible 2011 Finding Atlantisdocumentary that aired on NatGeo. That film, which I reviewed at the time, claimed that Atlantis was located in Spain, earning the ire of Spanish archaeologists, who felt that their legitimate work on Bronze Age Spain had been hijacked by a religious crank who dropped in, spouted nonsense about Atlantis being the source of King Solomon’s wealth, and claimed credit for their work. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/n...imcha-jacobovici-to-find-atlantis-in-sardinia
 
Wondered if this lengthy and informative article might be of interest.

It would seem the subject last came up on this thread:

Post #27 - 17 February, 2012, by Rynner2.

The Mont’e Prama Giants: A Massive Archaeological Mystery


Source: ancient-origins.net
Date: 29 February, 2020

1974, Sinis region, Sardinia (Oristano): the plow of a farmer being blocked by a piece of stone marked the beginning of a series of excavations in the area of Mont'e Prama, near the village of Cabras. Unable to continue plowing, the man got off the tractor and perplexedly examined an outcropping of stone. Digging with his hands, he pulled a huge head out of the ground. It had double-carved eyes, something he had never seen before and which no one else had laid eyes on for many centuries. Thus began the mystery of the Mont’e Prama Giants.

What came to light immediately held considerable importance: in the approximately 50 meters (164 ft.) that initially delimited the burial ground, there were numerous stone slabs that covered many tombs with large statues originally placed above them. The dating, at the time not completely certain, assigned the construction to the 9th century BC and was attributed to the families of local aristocrats. It was obviously a sacred complex of great importance. Never before had such an imposing and pronounced complex been found, with a form of statuary so unusual and older than the Greeks.

The statues soon began to be studied, despite the scarcity of means and funds at the time, and boxers, archers and warriors soon were unearthed with models of nuraghe and betyls (from the Hebrew Beth-El, house of God) - stones of sacred value worked in a truncated cone shape, sometimes with quadrangular recesses.

[...]

In 2015 / 2016 the Archaeological Superintendence of Cagliari, with the participation in 2017 of the University of Sassari, carried out extensive research outside the area of the 1974-1979 findings, verifying the archaeological correspondence of the anomalies found in 2014 by Prof. Ranieri’s team. Other elements (a monumental wall) excavated by the Superintendence in the N-NW direction corresponds to the anomalies revealed by the electrical and Georadar investigations.

It is obvious that there is a vast, hidden universe under the surface just waiting to be brought to light.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/mont-e-prama-giants-0013355
 
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