The secrets of Britain's connection with the world's least known ancient civilizations

Independent

27-03-2025

New archaeological research is revealing that, more than a thousand years before Britain became part of the Roman Empire, it was part of an extraordinary Mediterranean-based trading network.
Investigations being carried out by archaeologists from five European countries suggest that around 3,300 years ago, the western Mediterranean island of Sardinia started to become a powerful trading centre, eventually linking Britain, Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal in the West to what are now Turkey, Syria, Israel, Cyprus and Crete in the east.
A series of ground-breaking discoveries are revealing, for the first time, the remarkable role played by the island - one of the world's least known ancient civilizations, known to archaeologists as the Nuragic culture.
And it is showing the remarkable way in which Britain seems to have contributed to that civilization's development.
It's long been known that Sardinia's Nuragic culture had Bronze Age Europe's most impressive architecture as well as equally remarkable art - but research over recent years has begun to reveal that it also became Europe's first Mediterranean-wide maritime and mercantile power.
The island (a series of chiefdoms) was rich in copper ore - which helped turn it into a Bronze Age mercantile and economic superpower (because copper was one of the two key ingredients needed to make high quality bronze, which was far stronger than copper on its own).
But the second key ingredient, needed to make high quality bronze, was tin - and one of the best sources of tin in the ancient world was Cornwall. Tin played a crucial role in human history - because it enabled the production of really strong manufactured goods and its acquisition usually necessitated and promoted long distance trade.
Recent scientific research has revealed that Cornish tin was being delivered, probably by Sardinian or Sardinian-connected merchants, to what are now Israel and Turkey.
What's more, a study of a shipwreck off the Devon coast has revealed that a Bronze Age ship, carrying Cornish tin ingot exports, were also carrying items from Sardinia or Spain. The English Channel appears to have been a Bronze Age highway for delivering Mediterranean copper ingots and Cornish tin ingots to Scandinavia and for transporting Danish amber to Britain, Ireland, Spain and the Mediterranean.
And a growing body of evidence now suggests that, at the heart of this Bronze Age international trade, lay Sardinia's mysterious Nuragic civilization.
All parts of the network prospered as a result of that trade - and recent archaeological excavations have found a Bronze Age settlement at one of the most likely ports used at the Cornish end of the maritime route, St. Michael's Mount near Penzance
In Sardinia itself, the Italian island's role as the known world's likely premier Bronze Age trading hub helped in the development of an extraordinary civilization.
At least 10,000 high-status stone buildings were constructed - some of which were up to 30 metres tall. Eventually many of these prehistoric skyscrapers were expanded to become vast Bronze Age fortress-like complexes, some of which covered up to 3000 square metres and boasted up to 400 metres of thick walls reinforced by up to 20 towers. Around 7000 of these ancient buildings survive - including many of the largest. They represent Europe's first truly sophisticated monumental stone architecture - featuring corbelled corridors, overhanging battlements, sophisticated water collection and storage systems, giant wells and immense rooms with vast domed ceilings (some up to 12 metres high).
The civilization arguably played a little-known but important role in shaping history. Quite apart from directly or indirectly helping to boost the economies of Bronze Age Britain, Scandinavia and elsewhere, some evidence suggests that Sardinian pirates attacked Egypt (and what is now Israel) several times and that at least one Egyptian pharaoh thought that they were such good warriors that he recruited them as his personal bodyguard.
These Nuragic Sardinians may even have established a small colony in what is now northern Israel - and probably also established trading colonies in Sicily, Crete and Cyprus. Nuragic pottery (especially tableware) has been found by archaeologists excavating sites on all three islands.
Bronze Age Sardinians were also probably directly or indirectly responsible for transporting Cornish tin, Danish amber and a host of other Spanish, Portuguese and Mediterranean goods between raw material sources and consumers located in dozens of places between Europe's Atlantic Coast and the Middle East.
What isn't yet known is whether Sardinian merchants ever traded directly with Britain or Scandinavia - or whether the Atlantic sea routes between northern Europe and Portugal were navigated by Cornish, French or Iberian mariners. And indeed some of the commodities may also have been transported from the English Channel region to the Mediterranean via the French river system.
All the new research suggests that Sardinia itself acted as the major trading hub - with British, Scandinavian and Iberian raw materials and products (including tin, copper and amber) being shipped to Sardinia for transhipment to points further east like Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. In the other direction Sardinian and perhaps other ships are now thought to have carried Middle Eastern glass beads, Egyptian faience, Cypriot copper ingots, precious gemstones and other products to customers in the West.
In Britain, archaeologists have found Iranian and Egyptian beads, Scandinavian amber items, Aegean metalwork, Cypriot and Spanish copper ingots and Sicilian razors, all of which would have had to have been imported by sea.
The amber items would have come direct from Denmark, but at least some of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean trade goods are likely to have been shipped to Britain via Sardinian trading hubs and several subsidiary hubs in Portugal or south-west Spain (potentially including Huelva, around 100 miles north-west of Gibraltar). Tin from Atlantic Europe (most likely Cornwall) is known from recent metallurgical analyses to have been transported to and used in Sardinia.
Sardinia's Nuragic civilization - the first really major hub for pan-Mediterranean and European Atlantic Coast trade - was also ahead of most of the rest of the region in terms of technology and agriculture.
Archaeological investigations over recent years have revealed that they domesticated the island's own wild grape plants (rather than importing grape seeds produced by Middle Eastern horticulturalists) - and were therefore able to produce their own unique wine (a beverage still produced on the island today).
Nuragic or pre-Nuragic Sardinians also invented their own form of cheese-making (manufactured in the stomachs of freshly slaughtered young goats, and utilising the animal's enzymes to ferment it) - and that prehistoric originating type of cheese is still produced on the island today (the only place in Europe where such an early cheese-making tradition still survives).
What's more, archaeobotanical analysis carried out at a Sardinian university, Cagliari, has now revealed that Sardinia was also the first place in the western Mediterranean to start using another important food resource - melons (which prior to the Nuragic civilization had been a purely eastern Mediterranean culinary product).
Bronze Age Sardinians' cosmopolitan wine-drinking, exotic-fruit-eating culinary culture was matched by religious traditions that they had probably also acquired during their wide-ranging mercantile and other travels.
Iconographic and other evidence suggests that, like ancient Crete, they appear to have had a 'man-bull' cult (potentially similar to the Cretan cult symbolized by the famous myth of the Minotaur).
The Nuragic obsession with seafaring is reflected in the final phase of their art - for they are the ancient Bronze Age civilization which produced by far the largest number of bronze and ceramic sculptures of ships (160 bronze ones - and numerous pottery ones - have been unearthed so far).
Archaeologists have not worked out for sure how far into the unknown they sailed. They may well have been Europe's first great explorers. They definitely reached western Asia and they almost certainly traded directly with the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal (and at least indirectly with Britain and Scandinavia).
But there is one tantalising piece of evidence that ancient Sardinians themselves may have visited Britain - for there is an enigmatic and mysterious rock-cut tomb (the only one of its sort ever found in Britain) in northern Scotland, on the island of Hoy in Orkney, the nearest rock-cut parallel for which is in Sardinia.
The archaeological and other scientific investigations, that have been contributing to a greater understanding of the Sardinian Bronze Age trade network phenomenon, include research carried out at eight universities - Durham in the UK, Gothenburg (in Sweden), Aarhus (in Denmark), Cagliari and Sassari in Sardinia, Freiburg and Bochum (both in Germany), as well as at Germany's Curt Engelhorn Centre for Archaeometry in Mannheim.
"Bronze Age Sardinia's importance in the wider prehistory of Europe and of the Mediterranean region has only begun to be properly appreciated by archaeologists over recent years," said an expert in Bronze Age trade networks, Dr Serena Sabatini, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
"Metallurgical, ceramic and other evidence from many different sites across the Mediterranean and beyond have revealed the extraordinary geographical extent of the Nuragic network. What's more, mounting evidence suggests that, as well as the Mediterranean, Europe's Atlantic coast, including Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, contributed trading commodities to that network," said Dr Sabatini.