About 3,200 years ago Sardinia was already exporting minerals to other lands bordering the Mediterranean.
The new confirmation comes from Israel. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with that of Haifa, has in fact analyzed the load of a ship sunk off the city of Caesarea between the 13th and 12th centuries BC, found in the late 1980s.
These are lead ingots, subjected years later to modern analyzes and advanced isotope studies by a team of archaeologists, who then published the results of their research in the Journal of Archaeological Science, reconstructing and telling the story of those ingots. A story that begins, in fact, in Sardinia.
According to Israeli archaeologists, the lead used to manufacture the ingots came from the Iglesiente mines and was sent by ship to Cyprus. Here the Sardinian lead would have been processed and loaded onto another ship, then sailed to some other port in the eastern Mediterranean, but never reached its destination, due to a shipwreck off the Israeli coast.
The discovery, if combined with the discoveries of Cypriot copper carried out over the years in Sardinia, would confirm once again that there was a thriving metal trade between the two islands. A sort of exchange: Cyprus, poor in lead, obtained supplies from Sardinia and Sardinia, where copper was in short supply, obtained supplies from Cyprus.
The researchers also underline how the discovery may also be important in the context of studies on the Shardana, a people of the sea often associated and identified with Sardinia. The “Sardinian” lead ingots at the center of the study date back to the period in which the Shardana appeared in the sources. And perhaps this is not a mere coincidence.
(Unioneonline / lf)
