Shardana: the Sardinian lords of the Mediterranean peers of Mycenaean pharaohs and kings
Shardana warriors in the pharaoh's army
Towards the end of the Bronze Age, in the 13th century BC, a people first threatened the pharaoh Ramses II, then sided with him as mercenary warriors taking part in the first known great battle of antiquity. This people were the Shardana or Sherden.
Paintings such as “People of the Sea” have often been identified with the ancient warriors of the Nuragic civilization, which flourished at its peak at that time. This identification was initially derived from linguistic similarities, but also from the fact that the warriors described by the Egyptians had an armament very similar to that of the ancient fighters portrayed in the statuettes found in the nuraghi, that is, as warriors with a round sword and shield wearing a breastplate and a horned helmet.
Anyone must admit that the similarity between these warriors is remarkable , but in 2022 these inductive tests were joined by another very interesting one. A ship from the Minoan era was found off the coast of Israel, therefore corresponding to the period in question, in which lead weights with Cypriot-Minoan inscriptions were found which, upon chemical analysis, turned out to come from the Sulcis mines. The traffic between Cyprus, Crete, Palestine and Sardinia was significant and confirmed not only by other weights of Sardinian origin, but also by Cypriot copper loaves found in Sardinia.
The late Bronze Age was a period of great turbulence also due to the incursions of these fierce "Peoples of the Sea" of which the shardana were part which led to the fall of powerful empires such as the Hittite one, but the shardana were something more, enough to enter the service of the Egyptian Pharaohs and be installed in colonies on the coasts of Palestine. So Sardinia was not the seat of a closed and rural civilization, but of a living world, rich in trade, of which the Shardana were the protagonists.
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The article Shardana: the Sardinian lords of the Mediterranean peers of Mycenaean pharaohs and kings comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/shardana-i-signori-sardi-del-mediterraneo-coetanei-di-faraoni-e-re-micenei/ on Fri, 19 Aug 2022 21:22:05 +0000.