Did you know? According to recent theories, the Shardana who were popular in the Mediterranean were the ancient Sardinians: our ancestors.
Skilled navigators, warriors esteemed and respected by the Egyptian Pharaohs who often wanted them as personal guard (for example Ramses II), the Shardana they were the leaders of the Sea peoples who dominated the Mediterranean and on the decline of the age of Bronzearound 1200 BC, contributed to annihilating the great empires of the time, that Hittite, Mycenaean and Egyptian.
In some inscriptions on Egyptian monuments they are named and cited as people respected and feared for their courage and valor. In an inscription on the Tanis stele dating back to Pharaoh Ramses II (1287 BC) we read: “The Shardana with the fearless heart have always been unknown how to fight them; they came with a confident heart… on warships from the middle of the great green and one could not resist them”. In all likelihood they were our Nuragic ancestors.
The Shardana, or more correctly Sherdana, (also Sherden) were one of the populations, cited by Egyptian sources of the 2nd millennium BC, forming part of the coalition of the peoples of the Sea; their presumable identification with the ancient Sardinians is, at the moment, the subject of archaeological debate.
The problem of the area of origin or possible destination of the Sherdana people arose starting from the 19th century. No certain mention of the Sherdana has ever been found in Greek or Hittite documents, a fact which complicates the work of scholars. Over the decades, various hypotheses have been proposed, of which two are the most recurrent:
A) The Sherdana came from the western Mediterranean and could be identified with the Nuragic populations of Sardinia.
B) The Sherdana, coming from the eastern Mediterranean, settled in Sardinia following the attempted invasion of Egypt.
The archaeologist Antonio Taramelli, discoverer of many sites from various eras in Sardinia, and author of research that was crucial for the knowledge of Sardinian Nuragic and pre-Nuragic funerary rites, was a convinced supporter of the Western provenance of the Shardana. In fact, he wrote:
«But I believe that the consequences of our observation on the continuity of the Eneolithic elements in those of the Nuragic civilization have a greater scope than that seen by my colleague; that is, that the civilization of the Shardana was completely developed here, from its initial seeds, that it grew here, combative, vigorous, and that far from seeing Sardinia as the extreme refuge of a dispersed race, chased, like a fleeing beast, by the element Semitic who came here to bite her and subjugate her, we must see the nest from which she took a bold flight, after having left an imprint of dominion, of struggle, of tenacity, on the soil she gained for civilization.»
(Antonio Taramelli, Excavations and discoveries. 1903-1910, Carlo Delfino editore, 1982).
Giovanni Lilliu, although not going into depth on the subject, noted that: «The centuries in which the events of the Sherdanw and the confederates took place, who wanted to expand to counter the hegemony of the Pharaonic power, were those in which the Nuragic communities were led from their principles reach the maximum splendor in architecture and develop a consistent and organized civil life, economically prosperous.»
More recently (2005 and 2016) the archaeologist Giovanni Ugas has re-proposed the identification of the Sherdana, described as “the people of the islands that are in the middle of the great green”, with the Sardinian-Nuragic populations, in particular with the Iolei tribe /Iliensi (Sherden=Iolei-Eraclidi?) living in the central-south of the island, according to a scenario also suggested by Fulvia Lo Schiavo. The author also proposes a Sardinian origin for the people of the Shekelesh sea, identifiable with the Siculensians of Sarrabus mentioned by Claudio Ptolemy.
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