In between chelu and mare, as singer Maria Carta would have sang, was this Mysterious Ziggurat of Monte d'Accoddi, a location of the gods.
The massive complex of Monte d'Accoddi on the island of Sardinia is nearly 6,000 years old. ÁNGEL M. FELICÍSIMO, CC BY 2.0/WIKIMEDIA
A ziggurat in Europe, particularly in Sardinia, looked a little absurd at the sheer mention of it. Ziggurats were prehistoric step pyramids and platform mounds that appeared to be taken straight out of the Tower of Babel when they were built in Mesopotamia during the fifth millennium BC. Not exactly seven miles from Sassari, I traveled down a country road to the location, passing fields on both sides as I did so, and then I parked my car in a grassy area. It appeared to be a hill at first, but Monte d'Accoddi really translates as "mountain of stones."
A long ramp with stone borders that reached a small landing and then climbed a broad stairway of stone steps up to the top of a mound platform on the pyramid could be seen, stationed in the center of the barren plain like an air strip. I circled to where the ramp ended and stood there, feeling both amazed and perplexed.
The pyramid appeared lonely and uninhabited from a distance, devoid of any human presence or other construction-related traces. The base of it measured roughly 120 feet by 120 feet. It looked as though someone had rolled a large stone that was carved into the shape of an egg down the lengthy ramp. A sacred granite boulder designating the center of the world, the oval stone was comparable to the omphalos at Delphi in classical Greece. The menhir, which resembled a stone totem symbol and stood seven feet tall and slender, was to one side. There were another four menhirs placed nearby. There was a dolmen, a little rock stack akin to Stonehenge, on the other side of the pyramid. I climbed up the dirt ramp until I was on a platform, then I started climbing the stone steps. Despite lacking the steep elevation of the pyramids in central Mexico, it had the same weight of seriousness as if it were ascending sacred land on the last leg. I could see the entire valley from the top of the platform, with the lengthy ramp of stone steps suddenly seeming to be a hallowed route from the ground to the heavens. An altar's potent significance as a conduit to the contemporary cosmos struck me as strong.
Nearly 6,000 years ago, in the years 4000–3500 BC, the initial pyramid building was found. The Monte d'Accoddi was constructed on a meticulously laid stone foundation, brick by brick, including the corner foundations and the ramp, which set it different from other ziggurats or pyramids. For instance, mud bricks rather than stone were used to build ziggurats in Mesopotamia. The pyramid evolved in two stages, say archaeologists. The second level, which was built approximately 3200 BC, included an altar that was surrounded by the remains of sheep, pigs, and animals that were probably sacrificed, according to archaeologists.
One of the menhirs still standing at Monte d’Accoddi in Sardinia. GIANNI CAREDDU, CC BY-SA 3.0/WIKIMEDIA
The pyramid was somehow attractive despite its otherworldliness; it appeared as though it had been constructed as a stepping stone to a certain historical point in human history. To climb it was called upon. I can picture pilgrims from all around the island making their way to Monte d'Accoddi. I admired being completely alone as I stood at the top on the platform where an altar had originally been placed to either pray the gods or oppose them. Only a couple of employees working in a small office at the edge of the field were present at the scene.
This structure in Sardinia dated back thousands of years further in our timeline of existence, serving as a sacred site in Neolithic Europe. I had experienced a similar sense of wonder while climbing the Tikal pyramids in Guatemala. The antiquity, which was still in tact, marked a turning point in human history by recognizing a civilizational order that advanced beyond what was previously thought possible. According to my personal perspective, it was truly one of the most extraordinary scenes in all of Europe.
Such a location in Sardinia was completely unexpected. A hallowed location that had persisted for thousands of years, I should add, drawing pilgrims from remote parts of the island and beyond, where one stood on the pillars of "civilization" in Europe.
“We are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities,” David Graeber reminded us in his book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.”
On numerous occasions in Sardinia, I felt this way. The fact that little settlements on a small island had created architectural marvels, for instance, as well as the even more astounding fact that these enormous monuments, like the ziggurat and the nuraghes (freestanding stone towers), were still visible on the island. Despite being ancient, they weren't just myths or tales contained in a story. Regardless of how mysterious, they weren't fragments of stone in a museum. As a crossroads in the Mediterranean and ultimately in Europe, this island's origins as a center of civilization offered a window into the very stepping stones of development during a time when the first stone implements for organized farming gave way to the first stone wheels that came into being. These architectural wonders were put together in Sardinia as the result of a group effort including knowledge and skill, not as the result of some enigmatic event.
Monte d’Accoddi was built on a stone foundation, brick by brick, including the corner foundations, as well as the ramp. GIANNI CAREDDU, CC BY-SA 3.0/WIKIMEDIA
Along with numerous tombs, archaeologists discovered underground rooms in the pyramid that resembled the Neolithic domus de janas burial grounds carved into rock chambers all across the island. The graves included sculptures of bull horns as status emblems, just like many of Sardinia's stone necropolis locations. An artifact that connected the inland site to the sea was a whale's tooth, among other things.
The ostensibly prominent but concealed remains were first documented in aerial photographs of the location in 1950. For countless years, it was practically buried beneath dunes and vegetation. The location had been forgotten at the outset of the Nuragic civilization. Early archaeologists believed it to be the remains of another nuraghe, as did the majority of visitors at the time. It was left to rot underground like countless of others. If Sardinia's 7,000 nuraghes had never been unearthed, just think of how many additional Monte d'Accoddi sites there might be.
The first excavations weren't funded until the 1950s on property owned by Antonio Segni, who would later lead Italy as its president. The first funding was acquired by Segni.
In the dig, pottery items, including a bowl with dancing characters, were found. In one of the tombs, there was a small piece of limestone with distinct cuts that appeared to be recording time or a name. Undoubtedly, it served as a landmark for an island lexicon in antiquity. Along with a male figure painted in red ochre, more pottery fragments were also discovered. Shells, obsidian, and other items covered a portion of the tombs in that location. The pyramid was encircled on one side by the limestone hut foundations for a community.
The Sardinian countryside is dotted with thousands of stone towers, or nuraghes, most of which have never been excavated by archaeologists. HANS HILLEWAERT, CC BY-SA 3.0/WIKIMEDIA
A lovely stone carving of a deity was also found in the tombs' underground chambers by researchers. The goddess was thought to be a representation of Mother Earth, or la Dea Madre, because she had her hands on her hips, skinny arms, and a triangle body. With her rounded head and "globe" eyes, the adorable figure wasn't alone herself. Similar dea madre carvings have been discovered in Neolithic necropolis sites all throughout Sardinia, from the smaller island of Sant'Antioco to the western beaches close to Cabras, the Barbagia highlands close to Orgosolo, and domus de janas sites close to Alghero, Porto Torres, and Sassari. The oldest known female sculpture was discovered in the 1940s by a carpenter working close to Macomer who was excavating close to his orchards. He had dug down and retrieved the so-called "Venus of Macomer," which was made of volcanic or basalt rock and was cracked in some places but had a clear face, trunk, and thighs. Recently, it was assigned a Late Pleistocene age, making it at least 15,000 years old.
Such antiquity, along with art and ritual, didn't feel out of place on the island today, like a remnant of some other culture, but rather a crucial aspect of the Sardinian experience.
In his own analysis published in 2019, American archaeologist Gary Webster posed the following question: "How could Monte d'Accoddi, with its singular existence, be missing from most studies on Neolithic Europe, including the most recent Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe, which in fact featured a dea madre sculpture from Sardinia on its cover?" In the once-tight corridors of western culture, Sardinia had undoubtedly found a new place for itself thanks to classical archaeology and its plethora of specialists. The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean handbook even included a Nuragic bronze ship on the cover, as if the shipment were still awaiting inspection.
Footed food warmers found near Monte d’Accoddi. DEA / A. DE GREGORIO/DE AGOSTINI VIA GETTY IMAGES
Around the year 23, Strabo wrote in his Geography in Greek that "the Carthaginians drown any strangers who sail past, on their voyage to Sardinia," reminding us that a nation's odyssey was not always silent, but muted. That silence persisted in more subtle ways in recent times.
The worship of a female deity that persisted from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and apparently came to an end in the Bronze Age also piqued my interest. The focus on dea madre objects subsequently switched to Nuragic bronze and other sculptures that included a lot of male characters, such as archers and warriors, boxers and wrestlers, priests and village headsmen. Giovanni Lilliu, a pioneering Sardinian archaeologist, remarked glibly in 1963 that "in this society of men—body and soul—women bring a note of kindness and grace but also of dignity and severe composure, sometimes of a silent and solemn tragic nature: as she still is today, the Sardinian woman." This statement may have been made as a reflection of his own times.
Archaeologist Fulvia Lo Schiavo noted that Nuragic women truly shared "equal treatment" in life and death rites at a level that was "almost unique in the ancient world" in her analysis of burial tomb materials and bronze statuettes of Nuragic priestesses. Many years after Lilliu's groundbreaking research on the Nuragic people, Lo Schiavo's more recent analysis proposed that the "secret" of Nuragic welfare and equality for women ultimately vanished during the instability caused by the colonization of the Phoenicians and then the Carthaginians.
Figures of Dea Madre, or Mother Earth, have been found at Neolithic sites across Sardinia, including this limestone figurine known as the Venus of Cuccuru S’Arriu. DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES
In the 1390s, when Eleonora of Arborea took control of her judicadu in opposition to Aragon assaults on the island, that "secret" was still a matter of debate. Eleonora positioned Sardinia ahead of most European countries in the Middle Ages by amending and enacting the Carta de Logu system of rules, which was written in Sardinian and gave women inheritance rights, restitution for adultery, and stronger punishments for rape.
Five thousand years after Eleonora's reign, Grazia Deledda's novel After the Divorce questioned that "secret" in Sardinian life for women: "In the ‘stranger’s room’ of the Porru house a woman sat crying." The book, which was released in 1902, was among the first to address the subject of divorce.
In a news report published in the United States after Deledda received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, it was stated that it was "strange" that she continued to write about Sardinia after relocating to Rome. For the entire world, Sardinia is of relatively little interest. Contrary to most of Italy, it is not abundant in artistic artifacts. Perhaps Sardinia's attractiveness lies in its solitude; civilization hasn't yet tarnished it or reduced it to the conventional pattern.
To poet Antioco "Montanaru" Casula, Sardinian poet Marianna Bussalai once penned a letter in the 1920s about "the Sardinian women, quiet and ignored poetesses of the shadows." Bussalai was an outspoken feminist, anti-fascist, and independence activist from the mountain village of Orani until her death in 1947. Bussalai considered her identity as a woman and as a Sardinian poet and performer as being linked.
She later added: “My Sardism dates from before the Sardinian Action Party arose, that is, from when, on the benches of elementary schools, I humbled myself why in the history of Italy there was never any talk of Sardinia. I came to the point that Sardinia was not Italy and had to have a history of its own.”
You may add that it has a history of its own, similar to Monte d'Accoddi, the dea madre, and all the ladies in Sardinia.
