Sardinian Iron Age Soldiers Rising from the Dead

On the Italian island of Sardinia lie the remains of the ancient Sardinian culture.  Though they existed as a major power from the 16^th to the late 6^th century BCE, their history is relatively unknown today.  The big news in Sardinia concerns the progress of 8 years of work in restoring the remains of a small army of stone warriors that date back more than 2,700 years.  These stone monuments met their end at the hand of Carthaginian invaders who smashed them after conquering Sardinia, no doubt in an effort to remove the influence of Sardinian cultural practices.

Though the site of these stone puzzles was discovered in the 1970s, it was not excavated until nearly 10 years later.  At this point, the found stone remains were packed away to a museum.  It was not until 2004 that a serious effort was begun to restore the stone warriors to their former glory.

For 8 years, archaeologists and others have been working tirelessly to reassemble the statues.  The damage was extensive, reducing the 33 stone figures to thousands and thousands of separate parts.  These statues represent the archers, swordsmen and shield-bearers of the Sardinian army.  Currently, workers have been successful in restoring most of 25 of the warriors.  They hope to be able to put the reassembled army on display at the nearby Cagliari Museum come this summer.

Perhaps not as impressive as the terracotta army discovered at the tomb of the Chinese Emperor Qin, these statues have their own uniqueness in that they are more than 500 years older than their counterparts and crafted of stone as opposed to pottery.  It is believed that the soldiers were placed on the graves of celebrated Sardinian warriors either as representations of those warriors or to act as guardians to the dead.

It is always a shame when history is subjected to such violence.  We can only imagine at some of the things which are lost to time because of people’s urges to replace one culture with their own in the name of conquest and subjugation.  Unfortunately, these sorts of crimes are still going on today in many areas of the world.  How much more history will be lost before people learn to hold onto the past for all the lessons that it can teach?