An excavation on the Nuragic web site of Ruinas in Sardinia has unearthed a Phoenician scarab seal, produced 2,700 years in the past in what’s now Lebanon. The scarab is made from steatite stone and has a flat aspect engraved with hieroglyphic-like symbols.
The scarab, at the moment present process a fragile conservation course of and a battery of non-invasive diagnostic analyses within the laboratories of the Archaeological Superintendency, presents a morphology well-known within the glyptic custom of the traditional Close to East. Its floor, exactly labored in gentle however sturdy steatite, reveals incisions of hieroglyphic characters that would be the topic of detailed decipherment as soon as the stabilization work has been accomplished.
In keeping with the conventions of the time, these objects fulfilled a twin sensible and symbolic operate: they served as protecting amulets, regularly worn across the neck, and acted as seals of authority or property, whose impression in clay or wax was distinctive and unrepeatable given the unique design of every piece, which explains the variability that exists among the many 1000’s of identified scarabs.
Phoenicians established a number of coastal settlements on Sardinia, a part of their intensive commerce community of colonies and buying and selling posts that spanned the entire Mediterranean between the ninth and sixth centuries B.C. The scarab, nonetheless, was discovered within the deep rugged inside of the island occupied by the Ilienses, a Nuragic individuals credited by historical sources because the oldest inhabitants on Sardinia, inhabiting the inside because the Bronze Age.
Quite a lot of artifacts that needed to have been imported from lengthy distances have been found in Ilienses territory, together with pottery from Mycenaean Greece and oxhide-shaped copper ingots believed to have produced in Cyprus. In return, attribute Iliense gray pottery relationship to between the 14th and thirteenth centuries B.C. has been discovered within the Minoan palace of Knossos in Crete.
For some students, such because the archaeologist Giovanni Ugas, the Ilienses represented crucial inhabitants of nuragic Sardinia and could possibly be straight or not directly associated to the Shardana, one of many so-called Sea Peoples who seem in Egyptian data as mercenaries and adversaries of the pharaohs.
The scarab of Ruinas thus matches right into a sample of contacts that may now not be described as sporadic or merely incidental. Its Phoenician provenance provides a brand new layer of complexity to the map of interactions, displaying that the nuragic communities of Barbagia maintained hyperlinks with a number of cultural facilities of the jap Mediterranean, not solely with the Aegean-Mycenaean world.
The piece is a private object, a movable good of worth that traveled greater than two thousand kilometers by sea and land, crossing cultural borders, till ending its helpful life in a mountain village of inland Sardinia. Its presence materializes the business networks, status flows, and maybe the actions of specialised people (artisans, retailers, smiths) who related the Levant with the insular West.
