Did you know? According to recent theories, the Shardana, extinct in the Mediterranean, were the ancient Sardinians: our ancestors.
Skilled sailors, warriors, revered and respected by the Egyptian pharaohs, who often wanted them to be their personal guard (for example, Ramses II), Shardana they were leaders Sea Peoples who dominated Mediterranean Sea and at the end of the age Bronzearound 1200 BC, helped bring down the great empires of the time, which Hittite, Mycenaean and Egyptian.
In some inscriptions of Egyptian monuments, they are named and mentioned as people who are respected and feared for their courage and valor. In the inscription of the stele of Tanis, referring to Pharaoh Ramses II (1287 BC), we read: “Shardans with a fearless heart always did not know how to fight them; they came with trusting hearts … in battle vessels from the midst of the great green, and it was impossible to resist them. In all likelihood, they were our Nuragic ancestors.
Shardana, or more correctly Sherdan, (also Sherden) were one of the peoples mentioned by Egyptian sources of the 2nd millennium BC, who were part of the coalition of the peoples of the Sea; their putative identification with the ancient Sardinians is currently the subject of archaeological dispute.
The problem of the area of origin or the final destination of the Sherdan people arose starting from the 19th century. Neither Greek nor Hittite documents found any mention of Sherdans, which complicated the work of scientists. Over the decades, various hypotheses have been proposed, among which two are the most common:
A) The Xerdans came from the western Mediterranean and can be identified with the Nuragic population of Sardinia.
B) The Sherdans, who came from the eastern Mediterranean, settled in Sardinia after an attempted invasion of Egypt.
The archaeologist Antonio Taramelli, the discoverer of many monuments from different periods in Sardinia and the author of studies that were decisive for the study of Sardinian Nuragic and pre-Nuragic funerary rites, was a staunch supporter of the Western origin of the Chardan. In fact he wrote:
“But I believe that the consequences of our observation of the succession of the Eneolithic elements in the elements of the Nuragic civilization are of greater importance than what my colleague saw; that is, that the civilization of the Shardana developed here fully, from its original germs, grew up here, warlike, energetic, and that it is far from seeing in Sardinia the ultimate refuge of a scattered race, pursued like a fugitive beast by the Semitic element that came here in order to bite and subdue it, we must see the nest from which it made a daring flight, leaving behind the imprint of domination, struggle, perseverance on the land it conquered for civilization.
(Antonio Taramelli, Excavations and discoveries. 1903-1910, Carlo Delfino, 1982).
Giovanni Lilliu, without delving into this topic, stated that: “The ages in which the events of the Sherdans and the Confederates, who want to expand in order to resist the hegemony of the power of the pharaohs, are those in which the Nuragic communities, guided by their principles, reach their maximum splendor in architecture and develop a consistent and organized civilized, economically prosperous life.
More recently (2005 and 2016), the archaeologist Giovanni Ugas re-proposed to identify the Sherdan, described as “people from the islands that are in the middle of a large green”, with the Sardinian-Nuraga population, in particular with the Iolei / Iliensi tribe (Sherden = Iolei-Heraclides ?), living in the central and southern part of the island, according to the scenario also proposed by Fulvia Lo Schiavo. The author also suggests a Sardinian origin for the marine inhabitants of Shekeles, identified with the Siculense of Sarrabus mentioned by Claudius Ptolemy.
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