It's cold. The day is cloudy. The Italian-Israeli calendar marks September. The last days of the month. The year is 1995. The time is late, ten minutes before ten at night. The Alitalia DC 9 arrives at Elmas airport from Rome, but the passenger on board started the flight from the deep eastern Mediterranean. Takeoff is from Tel Aviv, the capital of Israel. That middle-aged gentleman, with facial features of Aaron, the biblical brother of Moses and first high priest of the Jewish people, lands as a refugee on Sardinian land. He says live: «I was the only Israeli among the ninety passengers. When I landed in the small airport of Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, I had not yet booked a hotel room. I had no idea where this adventure would take me, as I observed the coast of southern Sardinia divided by the waning light."

The way of the Shardana

He knew what he was looking for in the land of the Nuraghi, he imagined scenarios, he set his sights on ideal horizons, but he didn't even have the faintest idea where to start. The philosophy that animates it is that of adventure, the spirit is that of the Klondike gold prospector turned archaeologist. He himself tells it: «Archaeological discoveries, like discoveries in general, can take different paths. Sometimes things become clear in a flash, quickly, all at once. Most discoveries, however, crystallize slowly, as small facts accumulate. This was the case in our case." He, Adam Zertal, the number one archaeologist of the Promised Land, was convinced that the ancient peoples of Sardinia, the Shardana, had left their mark on that strip of land which had always been marred by endless and perennial wars.

Nuragic people in the desert

The idea had been bouncing around the back of his brain for some time, at least since the remains of the ancient village of El-Ahwat began to re-emerge, in the 'Iron Valley', north of Israel, a stone's throw from Tel Aviv, towards the border with Lebanon. The steps in the labyrinths of history are soft, but he had never seen those boulders lined up one above the other, in a circular direction, in the pre-desert lands on the border of Cis Jordan. And he makes no secret of it: «Our story begins with the archaeological investigation that my team and I have conducted continuously since the Seventies. During our strenuous but satisfying systematic walk across the Earth, we discovered a site, El-Ahwat, in the 'Valley of Iron', positioned at the center of our history." The gaze is turned to that research: «In the last fifteen years – says Zertal in his diary – we have dedicated an enormous effort and a lot of time to understanding exactly what we found on that site. We have taken into account archaeological, historical and geographical facts and tried to combine them with new information, but we have not yet been able to find a site similar to this one, neither in Israel nor in the entire Middle East."

The mystery, the discovery

The mystery is not around the corner: «After two entire seasons of excavation at the site, the possibility emerged that those who built it came from another place. The connection with Sardinia emerged after a search of archaeological literature, when we saw the similarities between the architecture of El-Ahwat and those of the ancient cultures of the western Mediterranean."

The Sardinian adventure

The story in Adam Zertal's Israeli notes supports the journey into the unknown: «When, that September evening in Cagliari, I went by taxi from the airport to the city and found a room at the Hotel Italia in the center, I perceived the beginning of a new adventure. I arrived in Sardinia without knowing a single person on the island. I arrived blank, not knowing what I would find. I knew almost nothing about the island. I came because of some sketches I saw in the archaeological literature of Sardinia, which looked so similar to what we had found at El-Ahwat that I imagined, that we all imagined, that the source of this culture was on this distant island ». It was the mystery of El-Ahwat that pushed him to the nearby island of Sardinia. «Originally the excavation of El-Ahwat - the archaeologist who passed away 8 years ago recounts in his notebooks - was supposed to bring to light an Israelite site from the Iron Age, to examine the historical process of the Israelite settlement. But the findings from the site were confusing and pointed in a different direction, and this is where the mystery began. It was necessary to compare the city of el-Ahwat with other cities to understand its period and character."

Sardinian-Israeli confrontation

The meeting with Giovanni Ugas, the professor-archaeologist, recognized heir of the Sardus Pater Giovanni Lilliu, shattered the darkness of the mystery. «Only after having known the ancient culture of Sardinia, the guiding idea crystallized. During my first visit to the island, in 1995, Professor Ugas took me to visit the "sacred well of Santa Vittoria", in the western part of the island. The well, dug ten or more meters deep to reach the groundwater, was also surrounded by a circular wall. You went down to the water level via a sloping corridor with stairs. Both the corridors and the stairways were constructed of hewn and polished stones, a common feature of "sacred wells". We must note the hydrological knowledge of the Sardinian people, since all the "sacred wells" were dug and reached the groundwater. From this it is clear that their people knew about underground water sources and knew how to reach them. The great similarity, both in shape and size, between our "round square" and the squares of the "sacred wells", has led to the hypothesis that perhaps ours was a kind of "sacred well".

Promised Land

That was just the beginning of that Sardinian-Israeli thread which subsequently led to the rewriting of the scenarios and identities of the peoples of the sea. Giovanni Ugas and Adam Zertal, the Sardinian and the Israeli, from that moment began to intertwine data, analysis, dating and characteristics of the sites. Until the joint excavation between the Universities of Cagliari and the Israeli one at the site of El Ahwat in Israel, giving concreteness to the presence of the Shardana, considered by many studies to be the people of the sea of Sardinia, in the Eastern Mediterranean. And it was that meticulous reconstruction that led Ugas and Zertal to «suppose that the Shardana had settled in a relatively vast area whose borders ran between Abu Awam and Sidon or perhaps Byblos along the coasts and, in parallel, in the interior along the Jordan, from the country of Hazor or Dan to Sartan." The current lands on the borders of the West Bank, with the lands of Palestine to the south and those of Lebanon to the north.

The role of the Sardinians in Israel

It is precisely on the analyzes carried out by Giovanni Ugas and Adam Zertal that the role and presence of the Sardi-Shardana in the lands of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the heart of the Promised Land, is reconstructed. It is Professor Ugas who summarizes: «Most scholars believe that there is a relationship between the Shardana and Sardinia, but mostly maintain that they arrived on the island after the clashes with Ramesses III. However, this is not possible because, while the Nuragic civilization was taking place from the 16th to the 10th BC, no such radical political and social changes occurred in Sardinia as to suggest the arrival of another population. Conversely, many reasons lead us to consider the reverse route taken from West to East and to identify the Shardana with the Sardinians. Just like the islands in the heart of the Verde Grande, Sardinia is immersed in the middle of the Mediterranean and has large quantities of silver and other important minerals. The island was celebrated by the ancient Greeks not only for its beauty and climate, but also for its wealth of livestock and agricultural products and was therefore capable of maintaining a notable population."

The conclusion of the two archaeologists is extraordinary: in the area of the Near East where it is presumable that the Shardana had settled, non-negligible signs of the presence of the Sardinians in the Near East emerged in the architecture of the fortifications and hydraulics, in the mobile artefacts. East before and after the invasions of the Sea Peoples. El Ahwat, therefore, the land of Sardinia at the heart of the conflict.

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