Sherden

The Sherden sword, it has been suggested by archaeologists since James Henry Breasted, may have developed from an enlargement of European daggers and been associated with the exploitation of Bohemian tin.

Though they have been referred to as sea raiders and mercenaries, who were prepared to offer their services to local employers, these texts do not provide any evidence of that association, and they shed no light on what the function of these "širdannu-people" was at the time.

[20] However, while some Aegean attributes can be seen in the material culture of the Philistines, one of the Sea Peoples who established cities on the southern coastal plain of Canaan at the beginning of the Iron Age, the association of the Sherden with this geographic area is based entirely on their association with that group and the Sea Peoples phenomenon writ large, rather than on physical or literary evidence (of which almost all testifies to their presence in Egypt, rather than their port of origin).

Guido in 1963 suggests that the Sherden may ultimately derive from Ionia, in the central west coast of Anatolia, in the region of Hermos, east of the island of Chios.

Guido suggests that [if a] few dominating leaders arrived as heroes only a few centuries before Phoenician trading posts were established, several features of Sardinian prehistory might be explained as innovations introduced by them: Oriental types of armour, and fighting perpetuated in the bronze representation of warriors several centuries later; the arrival of the Cypriot copper ingots of the Serra Ilixi type; the sudden advance in and inventiveness of design of the Sardinian nuraghes themselves at about the turn of the first millennium; the introduction of certain religious practices such as the worship of water in sacred wells – if this fact was not introduced [later] by the Phoenician settlers.

The theory that postulates a migration of peoples from the Eastern Mediterranean to Sardinia during the Late Bronze Age was firmly rejected by Italian archaeologists like Antonio Taramelli[24] and Massimo Pallottino[25] and by Vere Gordon Childe,[26] and more recently by Giovanni Ugas, who instead identifies the Sherden with the indigenous Sardinian Nuragic civilization.

[31] According to Robert Drews, Sardinians from the Gulf of Cagliari and the nearby areas were encouraged to become warriors and leave their island in order to improve their life conditions in the kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean.

[33] The project, conducted by the Egyptologist Giacomo Cavillier, aims to verify the possible interconnections and contacts between the Sherden and the local culture of these islands, in a broader Mediterranenan view, and to reassess all data available on this phenomenon.

[34] The identification of the Sherden with the Nuragic Sardinians has also been supported by Sebastiano Tusa in his last book[35] and in its presentations,[36] and by Carlos Roberto Zorea, from the Complutense University of Madrid.

[38]Adam Zertal, and more recently Bar Shay from Haifa University, have also argued that the Shardana were Nuragic Sardinians, and connected them to the site of El-Awat in Canaan.

[40] Late Bronze Age Nuragic pottery had been found in the Aegean and in the Eastern Mediterranean particularly in Crete at Kommos and on the island of Cyprus, at Kokkinokremnos, a site attributed to the Sea Peoples,[41][42] and Hala Sultan Tekke.