Over the last decade, the importance of Sardinia, its metals, and its Nuragic (native) and Phoenician-Punic societies, have come to the fore in studies of the history and commerce of the Late Bronze and first-millennium Mediterranean. This volume, the proceedings of one of the rare conferences of the Istituto di Studi Etuschi ed Italici to be held outside mainland Italy, offers a fine sampling of the variety of the contacts — technological, mercantile and social — between Sardinia, Etruria, and the world beyond.
The Atti include interpretive, historically slanted essays mingled with first-time publication of artifacts that furnish incontrovertible evidence of the intense, prolonged interaction of the peoples of Sardinia with Tyrrhenian Etruria and the rest of the Mediterranean. It will be years before the full impact of the recent findings is registered in synthetic histories, and thus these reports by experts are essential for any scholars working on Greek, Near Eastern, Italian or Mediterranean ancient history.
Introduced by Giovannangelo Camporeale, Director of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici, and Giovanni Lilliu, the emeritus dean of Sardinian archaeology, the papers are arranged in order of the daily conference sessions, not in thematic or chronological order; this intersperses essays on major issues with precise analyses of artifacts to be identified with Sardinian-Etruscan relations. An exhibition in Oristano coincided with the gathering; its catalogue is still listed as “in press”:
The emerging evidence of Sardinia’s early and striking entry onto the stage of Mediterranean history continues to impress. The record is all the more dramatic because much of the data has been discovered only in the last thirty years, with stratigraphic excavation of Phoenician colonies and of the nuraghi tower-settlements of its native culture. A sound chronology and typologies of Sardinian pottery and bronzes had to be developed before an accurate evaluation of foreign relations was possible. Franco Campus and Valentina Leonelli (491-510) offer welcome news of their ongoing research to develop a complete corpus of Nuragic ceramics, sampled here with analysis of the pottery of Final Bronze and Iron Age I at Funtana di Ittireddu in northern Sardinia.
Excavation of stratified settlement contexts of the 14th century on, furnishing Mycenaean pottery and precise, C-14 dating, for instance, have shattered the old assumption that Sardinian figural art began only under the stimulus of Phoenician first contact in the 9th century. This had been accepted when the only bronzetti known were unprovenanced figurines of warriors and goddess- pietàs from the art market. Fulvia Lo Schiavo (below) shows that some figurines can also be dated to Final Bronze by the typology of the Nuragic vases they carry, more proof of their independence from Levantine stimulus. Sophisticated metallurgy drew outside contacts, such as Cypriot metallurgists, to the island during the Bronze Age,1 and fostered links between Etruria and Sardinia during the Iron Age, as noted in several articles here. Ongoing research into other technologies, such as architecture (by Sandra Davis Lakeman of California Polytechnic) is revealing more of the technological expertise and wide range of Nuragic artisans.
Past studies of relations between Etruria and Sardinia were reduced to hunts for recognizable imports, and hampered by huge statistical and chronological gaps. A better understanding of both sets of material culture is helping to correct this, furnishing a surprising number of Sardinian objects abroad and pinpointing the cities of origin of Etruscan ceramics and metalwork. While the conference specifically covered the end of the Bronze Age through the 6th century BC, a few articles refer to subsequent contacts with Etruscan and Roman Italy as well.
Lilliu’s (19-47) historiography of the study of Sardinian-Etruscan relations is a trove of information, from the 18th century (Winckelmann) to the present, with summaries of the work of several major scholars of the 20th century. Giulio Paulis (81-87) revisits the linguistics scholarship of Max Leopold Wegner (1880-1962), who attempted to link some Sardinian vocabulary with Etruscan.
Camporeale (13-17) very concisely reviews the state of our understanding of the relations between Etruria and Sardinia over several crucial centuries, noting recent finds of Mycenaean pottery in Sardinia (as in Etruria) and at the important site of Sant’Imbenia (Alghero), to which many authors refer (see bibliography of Botta 238-239, and Ridgway, below). A native coastal settlement with commercial metallurgy and a mixed Nuragic-Phoenician community by the end of the 9th century, Sant’Imbenia by the early 8th century (Greek Late Geometric I) was fully integrated into the milieu of the colony of Pithekoussai in the Bay of Naples, as demonstrated in finds of Euboean pendant-semicircle cups. Greek-style painted cups were also found in the settlement of Carthage; some of these were made in Pithekoussai, where Carthaginian amphorae were used for the burials of many of the first generation of children born in the colony. Scarabs/seals, common in Levantine and Punic funerary tradition, were also deposited with the settlers’ offspring. Clearly, Sardinia, both Nuragic and Phoenico-Punic, Pithekoussai, and early Etruria partook of the same profitable circuit in merchandise and crafts-men and -women, with Phoenician Iberia coming on-line almost simultaneously.2
The phenomena cited by Camporeale are supported in other articles by the evidence of settlement and sanctuary sites, finds of artifacts and materials studies, showing that intensive and regular contact between Nuragic Sardinia and Etruria was already in full swing during the Recent and Final Bronze Age. In fact, Sardinia was linked, at least sporadically, to Etruria as early as the Neolithic, as attested by fragmentary Sardinian tripod-vases found in the recent excavations of Piazza della Signoria, Florence. This places early foreign contacts well into the northern interior of Etruria, according to Giuliano De Marinis (175-178). As several authors note, hoards of the 9th-7th centuries in Tuscany and Bologna still contained fragmentary Sardinian vessels and daggers that must have come intact to Italy as part of Late Bronze Age exchange or diplomacy.
Many tomb groups of coastal Etruria (both north and south, as well as Pontecagnano) during the 9th-8th centuries included Sardinian pottery and bronzes of all types (tools, weapons, ornaments, figurines and models). In northern Sardinia, Etruscan luxury gifts are represented by bronze razors and fibulae, the latter, according to Camporeale, almost certainly (like those dedicated at Olympia, Delphi or Samos around the same time) attached to Etruscan linen garments.3
Camporeale further notes the odd distribution pattern of Sardinian beaked jugs in Italy — many are in the northern territory of Vetulonia and Massa Marittima, only a few in cities like Caere or Tarquinia, and he suggests that, when in large concentrations, they may represent the influx of Sardinian craftsmen, metallurgists for the burgeoning mining and smelting industries of the north, who brought some as yet unidentified native drink with them. Mario Cygielman and Lucia Pagnini (387-410) point to the presence of Sardinian objects (bronzes, jugs) in 8th-century Vetulonian tombs in about equal distribution between men and women, noting the Levantine background of the earliest gold ornaments there. Adriano Maggiani (411-418), citing a bronze Sardinian jug from Vetulonia, remarks that these close ties in the 9th century between the aristocrats of Vetulonia, Populonia and Sardinia are overlaid in the course of the 8th century with Phoenician glass and other luxuries, and Greek-style painted pottery that probably was handled by the Phoenicians as they expanded into Sardinia.
Filippo Delpino (363-385) has analyzed the capacity and design of the beaked jug(lets), suggesting commensal ritual use by two persons, as early as the mid-9th century, in Sardinian cultic contexts: their spread to, use, and imitation in Villanovan Vetulonia, Vulci, Tarquinia and Caere (many were buried with women) tapers off later in the 8th century, presumably as wine-drinking supplanted them. Tatiana Cossu and Mauro Perra (511-522) analyze Nuragic finds in central Sardinia, offering evidence of viticulture and the beginnings of the beaked jugs, and possibly the banquet with wine; they note finds of beaked jugs in tombs in Etruria and Latium, at Khaniale Tekke, and at Carthage.
Andrea Zifferrero (179-212) offers extensive evidence of the actual mines and technology, noting strong Sardinian contacts with Caere in the 8th-7th centuries and also a Sardinian influence on the lead and silver mining/processing of the Cecina Valley, Volterra and Sarteano during the 8th century. In contrast, Euboean prospecting and technological influences affected Etruscan iron working. Again, it appears that no region of Etruria was backward in technology or commerce with the wider world.
Exchange continued through the 7th-6th centuries, which are reckoned the heyday of the Etruscan thalassocracy; bronze Sardinian boat models ornamented the tombs of Vetulonia, while in Sardinia Etruscan bucchero wine service and Etrusco-Corinthian painted wares (some containing unguents) form a subset, of slightly lesser variety and quantity, of the pattern seen in Tunisia/Carthage and Punic Spain. Social differences remained distinct between the two societies, though, as indicated by the contexts of the imports: the early Sardinian goods are found in Etruscan tombs, but Etruscan exports instead appear in Sardinia in the nuraghe settlements and cultic contexts, recalling a contemporary phenomenon, the distribution of princely Orientalia in tombs in Etruria but in sanctuaries in Greece.
During the 8th and 7th centuries, competing and cooperating exchanges come from Phoenician, North Syrian and Phoenician-Cypriote contacts, as illustrated by bronze bowls with ornate handles (see Camporeale, Maggiani). It is still too soon for assumptions about the “registry” of the ships carrying imports, for every party in the exchange had full seagoing capabilities; several authors favor Etruscan and Sardinian carriers, and Phoenician over Greek vessels. At the end of the 7th century, some change has occurred, for the Sardinian boat models then appear at the sanctuaries of Tarquinian Graviscae and Greek Croton (Hera Lacinia deposit).
On the ships themselves, Marco Bonino (523-535) reconstructs the design and construction of Sardinian sailing vessels, based upon the finely detailed bronze boat models and other evidence, and illustrated with his fine drawings. The toy-like models reveal the variety of Sardinian shipbuilding and seafaring, including oared longships, flat-bottomed craft, round merchant vessels, and sewn wooden hulls; from the 9th century (at least), they shared the Tyrrhenian Sea with Villanovan longships, as attested by clay models found in the ship-owners’ graves at Tarquinia, Cerveteri and Bisenzio. The relations between Etruria and Nuragic Sardinia are discussed authoritatively by Lo Schiavo (51-70) with special reference to metal types. Miniature bronze pilgrim flasks, boat models and fibulae, as well as amber, show a wide circuit of exchange, probably powered by small nuclei of traveling or metic craftsmen. Atlantic (Iberian) hinged spits were known in Amathus in Cyprus and Monte Sa Idda in Sardinia. During Recent Bronze, Cypriot metalworkers established bases in Nuragic Sardinia; intense Levantine contacts during Final Bronze brought exchange, but the Phoenician bases could only be placed in southern Sardinia. With the Early Iron Age, small groups of Sardinian technicians moved to Etruria, especially Populonia. Back in Sardinia, by the 7th century, native culture had undergone urbanization and adaptation to the proximity of the Phoenicians, resulting in the first individual tombs at Antas, and Monte Prama, with its dramatic statues of boxers and warriors, paralleled by the more sedate but no less monumental early funerary statues of Vetulonia, Casale Marittimo and elsewhere in central Italy.4
Of course, the real changes will have occurred in the years preceding these material developments that we recognize; after all, what are our chances of discovering the very grave, house, or ship of the first settler/visitor? Ellen Macnamara (151-174) discusses the interaction in typologies of swords, fibulae, mirrors and tripods during the crucial period 1200 to 700 BC. She notes that, while some Italian bronzes reached the Aegean in the period 1000-850/825, the Greek products of that period, such as Proto-Geometric or Early Geometric pottery were not acquired in Italy: the cultures of the Italian archipelago interacted instead with each other, and perhaps the occasional Cypriot-Levantine allies.
Metallurgy being the source of Nuragic Sardinia’s famed expertise, other metals studies in the volume include Paolo Bernardini (421-431) on the find of Sardinian bronzes in the Cavalupo tomb (Vulci). He notes the association of such figures with power and political hierarchy both in Sardinian sanctuaries and in the “princely” tombs of 7th-century Etruria. Andrea Babbi (433-452) identifies a number of distinctive Sardinian conical bronze pendants and other miniature ornaments representing craftsmen’s tools that were found in Villanovan burials at Tarquinia, with intriguing implications for the persons, many female, who wore them as status symbols.
Armando Cherici (123-133) analyses the famous bronzes depicting warriors for the information they offer on native Sardinian society; daggers worn on baldrics enable rapid deployment for stabbing in one-on-one duels, while stilettos carried in quivers are for archers to throw in battle. Although the nuraghi began as peaceable communal structures, the later days of their society had become notably bellicose and continued to foster their reputation among the Romans for guerrilla warfare (Diodorus Siculus 5.15).
The most common indicator of exchange, pottery, is amply treated. Vincenzo Bellelli and Massimo Botto (277-307) remind us of the utilitarian aspects of ceramics, namely that Phoenico-Punic bowls signal a specific technique of food preparation and thus offer a link to ethnic cuisine and the identity of their users, or the domestic familiarity of the two ethnic groups. The bowls appear in Etruria in the third quarter of the 7th century, and link the spheres of Carthage and Etruria, and, a generation later, both Punic (Tharros) and Nuragic Sardinia join the phenomenon.
Botto (225-247), referring to the groundwork of the late William Culican, analyses a full set of type-fossils denoting exchange of ceramics from Phoenico-Punic colonies in Sardinia with Etruria. The markers are tripod bowls, plates, and double-wick lamps, which, now that they are recognized, fill in chronological gaps in our evidence of concerted and continuous exchange. The use of tripod bowls as mortaria attests to the active presence of Phoenicians or North Syrians (preparing food) in Populonia, Marsiliana d’Albegna, Caere etc., as in Sardinia (Sant’Imbenia), Malta and Carthage. The plates, often illustrated as coasters for lamps, actually held meat for the funeral meal and should also be read as part of a Levantine-inspired funerary ritual, paralleled in the tombs of Phoenician Trayamar (Spain). During the late 8th and first two-thirds of the 7th century, Tyrrhenian Etruria, northwestern Sardinia (Nuragic settlements and also Phoenician colonies like Sulcis and Tharros), the Balaerics, Andalusian Spain and Carthage were all parts of a trading circuit as variegated in male and female voyagers as in goods.
Further strong evidence of close ties between some Sardinians and some Etruscan centers is furnished by Gilda Bartoloni (343-362) in her analysis of the tombs of Populonia and their contents. She emphasizes the correlation of imports (over 130 Sardinian bronzes in Etruria) with prime metallurgical regions, from the 8th century on; in addition to bronze ornaments, swords and daggers reflect high-level social and military interactions, while model quivers indicate links in votive religion. She notes a potential Corsican connection, and points to the early inception and preference for inhumation at Populonia (8th century) and the unique, tholos-like masonry tombs of the 7th century that betray some familiarity with megalithic masonry throughout the archipelago.
Piero Bartoloni (249-254) notes that no recently excavated Sardinian center of the mid-8th through 6th centuries, whether Nuragic or Phoenician, has not produced Etruscan ceramic imports. Hints of a much earlier link to the eastern Mediterranean (a terracotta “Philistine” coffin fragment, Late Bronze Age pottery) support his suggested derivations of Phoenician place names: Pithekoussai-Inarime from the Semitic root NR (light) “Island of the lighthouse”, or Elba-Aithalia, from aitalim (fires) from the furnaces of the iron foundries there. He sees Etruscans as responsible for most of the banquet ware in Sardinia during the 7th century, and for the wine trade itself, having acquired viticulture from the Near East/Levant during the second millennium.
Jean Gran-Aymerich (135-141) emphasizes the global aspect of the exchange system linking Etruria and Sardinia with Atlantic Iberia as well as the Mediterranean littoral and the river networks of Gaul, from the 8th through 6th centuries BC. The first finds of Etruscan goods as far west as Huelva, Malaga and Ibiza, and the evidence of the great volume of the Etruscan trade in wine (and peripherals like banquet ware) to the interior of Gaul, illustrate Sardinia’s integral place on the Etruscan sea routes to Gaul and the West.
Marisa Bonamici (255-264) presents recent finds of Etruscan export wares of the 8th-6th centuries in the Phoenician colony of Nora; besides the omnipresent bucchero ware, Nora has a fragmentary 6th-century transport amphora from Vulci, the only one yet found in a Phoenician center. In a survey of Etruscan pottery on the island, she points out the importance of the cities of origin: Vulci, Tarquinia and Caere equally. The profile of objects exchanged matches Punic Sardinia with Carthage but distances it from Iberia. We are reminded that at least some trade was done by traveling merchants, for instance (probably) “Araz Silqetenas Spurianas,” the man “from Sulcis” who left his ivory tessera hospitalis in the 6th-century Sant’Omobono sanctuary at Rome.5 As background on the colony of Nora, Ida Oggiano (265-275) discusses the recently excavated cult site at Coltellazzo as a node of the city’s commercial network.
Maria Ausilia Fadda (311-331), publishing the excavation of Nuragic “megaron” sacred buildings at Romanzesu, offers evidence from votive beads representing the Baltic amber routes. In a votive context associated with the nuraghe at Nurdòle, Phoenician faience aegyptiaca of the same types as found in 7th-6th century Etruscan tombs, as well as later 6th century Etruscan imports (bucchero oinochoe, bronze lion from basin) attest close ties during more than a century, according to Marcello Madau (335-340). Mario Sanges (481-490) presents recent finds of Etruscan objects in Nuragic sites, including fragments of bossed rim basins, a Villanovan ring-askos, and a late Archaic Schnabelkanne, the bronze jug type so prized in Gaul and Carthage.
Giovanni Colonna (95-108) discusses Strabo book 5 for textual sources linking Etruria and Sardinia; the tales give the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans and place them in the Italian archipelago, living in towers (cf. Pyrgi/Pyrgoi) like their Sardinian relatives, well before any possible Lydian migration. An appendix surveys the evidence of Etruscan funerary towers, including Porsenna’s legendary tomb.
David Ridgway (215-223) emphasizes the light shed upon the field by scholarship of the past thirty years, which has established the important place of Sardinia in the global community of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean. Chevron skyphoi, another marker of this phenomenon, are appearing in more of the metallurgical centers, including the later 8th-century tombs of the miners’ town at Lago dell’Accesa, where Sardinian beaked jugs have also been identified. The circulation of people, so evident in the graves and products of Pithekoussai, should be postulated for the other nodes of this network, from Accesa and Vetulonia to Carthage and Sardinian Sulcis, where one family used a Pithekoussan geometric urn for an infant burial in the Punic tophet ritual.
Luigi Pedroni (143-148) discusses the Battle of the Sardinian Sea (Battle for Alalia, ca. 540-535 BC a sort of Pyrrhic victory in which a secondary wave of Phokaian colonists were driven from Corsica (to Elea/Velia and Marseille) by a coalition of Etruscans and Carthaginians, suggesting that the image of a seal tucked into the sea-monster scene on a Caeretan hydria (ca. 515 BC) is a veiled allusion to the failed colony. Greeks were never especially familiar with Sardinia, as Raimondo Zucca (111-121) indicates in his analysis of the Greek name for the island, Ichnoussa; a variety of Archaic Greek pottery in the north, the area of Olbia, and in Phoenician sites (Tharros, Bithia) shows that some Greeks knew more, or that Greek goods were often distributed by Etruscan, Sardinian or Phoenician merchants.
Specialized studies include: Paolo Melis (453-461) on the Nuragic cultic and votive objects, and ancestor cult at Santa Maria di Tergu (Sassari); Vincenzo Santoni (463-479) on the evidence of votive ritual in the burnt 8th-century level of one of the huts attached to the Nuraghe of Piscu di Suelli; and Fritzi Jurgeit (333-334) seeking the provenance of a group of bronzes now in Karlsruhe, including male and female figurines. An intriguing article of exchange, a bone knife handle in the form of a feline, found in a 9th-8th-century Sardinian votive well at Predio Canopoli di Perfugas, is identified by Giuseppe Pitzalis (563-567). Such Phoenician athrymata inspired by royal gifts of 18th Dynasty Egypt may one day be identified in Etruria as well.
A few contributions have the potential for controversy. Linguistic, etymological and topographic evidence for early Sardinian-Etruscan connections is furnished by Domenico Silvestri (71-80), who reviews studies of pre- and protohistoric Sardinian language, especially toponyms. Massimo Pittau (89-92) suggests certain morphological links between Nuragic language and Etruscan, such as the plural ending in —r (Etr. aiser, gods, and clenar, sons, Sardinian nurakhe/ Nurakhor, houses, nuraghi), arguing that such basic elements of language as plurals and demonstratives (Etruscan ta, ita, this, and Sardinian tha) must betray a close ancestral (and he means Indo-European) link.6 Salvatore Italo Deledda (537-562) discusses the literary sources on slightly later interaction between central Italy and Sardinia in the foundation of the Roman colony of Feronia, near Posada, on the NE coast of Sardinia, suggesting associations of the Villanovan Tiber region in later legends and rituals (Roman through modern) with intimate interaction of legendary ancestors on both sides of the Tyrrhenian.
Thorough bibliographies accompany each article. While this volume of meticulously presented research findings by distinguished experts is essential to a re-evaluation of the history of Italy and its cross-Mediterranean contacts, much of the material presented is highly technical. For non-archaeologists, it could be overwhelming without some more basic background.7 From now on, those who read (and write) history are warned that no culture in the proto-historic Mediterranean functioned in isolation, and that no dark age was as severe in reality as it may be in the modern audience’s mind.
Notes
1. See V. Karageorghis and L. Bonfante, eds., Italy and Cyprus in Antiquity: 1500 to 450 BC (Proceedings of Conference, New York 2000; pub. Nicosia 2001). Another major conference and set of articles is Der Orient und Etrurien (Conference Tübingen 1997; pub. Biblioteca di Studi Etruschi 35, Rome 2000).
2. For perspective on this phase of seemingly joint Levantine-Euboean-Corinthian and Italian colonization, see D. Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (Cambridge 1992); B. D’Agostino, “Pitecusa e Cuma tra Greci e Indigeni,” in La Colonisation Grecque en Méditerranée Occidentale (Rome: École Française de Rome 1999) 51-62.
3. An approach to identification of these organic goods has been undertaken by Margarita Gleba; see “Textile production at Poggio Civitate (Murlo) in the 7th century BC,” in Archéologie des textiles des origins au Ve siècle, Actes du Colloque de Lattes, Oct. 1999, eds. D. Cardon and M. Feugere (Montpellier, 2000) 75-80. For Villanovan and Italic offerings in Greek sanctuaries, see A. Naso, “Etruscan and Italic artifacts from the Aegean,” in D. Ridgway, F.R. Serra Ridgway et al., eds., Ancient Italy in its Mediterranean Setting. Studies in Honor of Ellen Macnamara (Accordia Specialist Studies on the Mediterranean, vol. 4, London 2001) 193-207.
4. For the recent finds at Casale Marittimo (Volterra), see A.M. Esposito, ed., Principi Guerrieri. La necropoli etrusca di Casale Marittimo (Milan 1999 and 2001).
5. “Puina of Karthage,” buried on the Byrsa of Carthage around the same time, had another such tessera, also inscribed in Etruscan. See G. Messineo, ” Tessera hospitalis?” Xenia 51 (1983) 3-4. it is also illustrated in E. Acquaro, “Phoenicians and Etruscans,” in S. Moscati, ed., The Phoenicians (Milan 1988) 532-537, 536 color fig. For Silqetenas, see M. Cristofani, ed., La grande Roma dei Tarquini. Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 12 giugno-30 settembre 1990 (Rome 1990) 21 no. 1.6, pl. 1. Another was found at Poggio Civitate (Murlo): J.M. Turfa and A.G. Steinmayer, Jr., “Interpreting early Etruscan structures: the question of Murlo,” PBSR 70 (2002) 1-28, see p. 21.
6. For the Etruscan language, still viewed by Etruscologists and by Indo-Europeanists like Giuliano Bonfante, as non-Indo-European, see now G. and L. Bonfante, The Etruscan Language. An Introduction (Manchester and New York 2002).
7. For those who require background on Sardinia, here are some basic references. Survey, prehistory through medieval period: R.J. Rowland, Jr., The Periphery in the Center. Sardinia in the ancient and medieval worlds (B.A.R.Int.Ser. 970, Oxford 2001). Nuragic Sardinia: G.S. Webster, A Prehistory of Sardinia 2300-500 BC (Sheffield Academic Press 1996). M.S. Balmuth, “The Nuraghi of Sardinia: An Introduction,” in Studies in Sardinian Archaeology (vol.