CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE NURAGIC HERITAGE IN ETRURIA

F. Lo Schiavo and M. Milletti

THE NURAGIC HERITAGE (F. LO SCHIAVO)

Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts and obligations upon

the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies.

(Online Dictionary, author’s emphasis)

T

o begin with Latin, all Romance or Neo-Latin languages agree that the meaning of
the word “inheritance,” both in real and in symbolic terms, concerns the transmission
of a property from a dead to a living person (Lo Schiavo, Milletti, Toms forthcoming).
For some years now this idea has dominated the studies of the last phases of Bronze Age
Nuragic Sardinia, in relation to the beginning of the Villanovan and Etruscan cultures.
Peninsular Italy and particularly the Tyrrhenian regions of Central Italy receive the
heritage of Nuragic Sardinia that, after an extraordinary development in the Middle,
Recent and Final Bronze Age, is now no more the same but has deeply changed from
the social, economic and political point of view, that is, in customs, ideology, way of life,
seafaring and external connections.
It is not a question of “death” but of “resurrection”: in the Early Iron Age, Sardinia
is not empty and not in a period of decline; on the contrary, it is an extraordinary
period of renewal, experimentation and varied application of many different infl uences
that reach the island from the East (the Levantine peoples, from the late ninth century
bc onwards, mainly represented by the Phoenicians) and from the West, since the
western routes, opened as early as the eleventh century bc, are now fl ourishing in both
directions (see Chapter 10). Later on, the Phoenicians will play an important role in
the distribution of Sardinian products from the West to the South and to the East,
widening and stabilizing a trade network already opened in the Bronze Age by the
Cypriot–Nuragic connection.