An excavation at the Nuragic site of Ruinas in Sardinia has unearthed a Phoenician scarab seal, produced 2,700 years ago in what is now Lebanon. The scarab is made of steatite stone and has a flat side engraved with hieroglyphic-like symbols.
The scarab, currently undergoing a delicate conservation process and a battery of non-invasive diagnostic analyses in the laboratories of the Archaeological Superintendency, presents a morphology well known in the glyptic tradition of the ancient Near East. Its surface, precisely worked in soft but durable steatite, shows incisions of hieroglyphic characters that will be the subject of detailed decipherment once the stabilization work has been completed.
According to the conventions of the time, these objects fulfilled a dual practical and symbolic function: they served as protective amulets, frequently worn around the neck, and acted as seals of authority or property, whose impression in clay or wax was unique and unrepeatable given the exclusive design of each piece, which explains the variability that exists among the thousands of known scarabs.
Phoenicians established several coastal settlements on Sardinia, part of their extensive trade network of colonies and trading posts that spanned the whole Mediterranean between the 9th and 6th centuries B.C. The scarab, however, was found in the deep rugged interior of the island occupied by the Ilienses, a Nuragic people credited by ancient sources as the oldest population on Sardinia, inhabiting the interior since the Bronze Age.
A number of artifacts that had to have been imported from long distances have been discovered in Ilienses territory, including pottery from Mycenaean Greece and oxhide-shaped copper ingots believed to have produced in Cyprus. In return, characteristic Iliense grey pottery dating to between the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. has been found in the Minoan palace of Knossos in Crete.
For some scholars, such as the archaeologist Giovanni Ugas, the Ilienses represented the most important population of nuragic Sardinia and could be directly or indirectly related to the Shardana, one of the so-called Sea Peoples who appear in Egyptian records as mercenaries and adversaries of the pharaohs.
The scarab of Ruinas thus fits into a pattern of contacts that can no longer be described as sporadic or merely incidental. Its Phoenician provenance adds a new layer of complexity to the map of interactions, showing that the nuragic communities of Barbagia maintained links with multiple cultural centers of the eastern Mediterranean, not only with the Aegean-Mycenaean world.
The piece is a personal object, a movable good of value that traveled more than two thousand kilometers by sea and land, crossing cultural borders, until ending its useful life in a mountain village of inland Sardinia. Its presence materializes the commercial networks, prestige flows, and perhaps the movements of specialized individuals (artisans, merchants, smiths) who connected the Levant with the insular West.
After the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Phoenicians took over what had been the Minoan/ Mycenaean trading network, until once more the Greek expansion and trading activities. The Assyrian conquest of Egypt begun in 673 BC.
Herodotus describes in the 5th century BC, how in 596-94 Phoenicians had sailed around the African continent (“Africa is washed on all sides by the sea, except where it is attached to Asia. This discovery was first made by Necos (II) the Egyptian king”).
Actually, it was Carthage that had been founded by the Phoenicians, according to Herodotus 4.196…
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(…) outside the Pillars of Heracles, to whom when they have come and have taken the merchandise forth from their ships, they [the Carthaginians] set it in order along the beach and embark again in their ships, and after that they raise a smoke; and the natives of the country seeing the smoke come to the sea, and then they lay down gold as an equivalent for the merchandise and retire to a distance away from the merchandise. The Carthaginians upon that disembark and examine it, and if the gold is in their opinion sufficient for the value of the merchandise, they take it up and go their way; but if not, they embark again in their ships and sit there; and the others approach and straightaway add more gold to the former, until they satisfy them: and they say that neither party wrongs the other; for neither do the Carthaginians lay hands on the gold until it is made equal to the value of their merchandise, nor do the others lay hands on the merchandise until the Carthaginians have taken the gold.
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