Rethinking the Phoenicians in Sardinia: Between Local Agency and Mediterranean Networks

A Question Reopened

Did the Phoenicians really colonize Sardinia? For generations the answer seemed obvious: ancient sources spoke of colonies, modern textbooks repeated the story, and archaeology was read through the lens of conquest. Yet the ground tells a subtler tale. Recent scholarship invites us to rethink not only what the Phoenicians did, but also what “colonization” itself might mean.

The Only ‚Colony‘: Sulky

Carlo Tronchetti, one of Sardinia’s foremost archaeologists, has argued that the island was never colonized in the classical sense. What we find instead are small groups of merchants and artisans, settling in limited numbers and often with the approval of local elites. The only genuinely Phoenician foundation he accepts is Sulky (modern Sant’Antioco), established around 780 BCE. Even there, the archaeological record reveals cooperation: Sardinians and Phoenicians exchanged goods, shared skills, and lived together. Mixed families are visible in the urns from the local tofet—vessels of Sardinian shape decorated in Phoenician style.

The End of the Nuraghi

This is more than a minor correction. It reframes the entire encounter. By the ninth century BCE, the monumental nuraghi had already ceased to be central places of power. Sardinians did not vanish; they shifted into smaller villages and sanctuaries, harder for the archaeologist’s eye to trace. At the same time, the ceramic record shows two clearly distinct traditions—Sardinian and Phoenician—alongside hybrid forms that testify to exchange rather than cultural replacement.

Networks, Not Conquests

Tronchetti therefore rejects the very word ‚colonization‘. For him, it misleads by importing later imperial models into a world of negotiated coexistence. Even the supposed Carthaginian ‚conquest‘ of Sardinia looks less like a sudden takeover and more like a gradual reconfiguration of trade and power.

Placed within a broader Mediterranean perspective, this interpretation resonates with Michael Sommer’s recent work on the Phoenicians. Sommer portrays them not as an ethnically unified ‚people‘ but as a constellation of city-states whose overseas ventures formed a maritime network. Colonies, in his view, were never simple transplants of Tyre or Sidon; they were pragmatic outposts embedded in local contexts, dependent on cooperation with indigenous societies.

Terminology and Perspective

Here Tronchetti and Sommer meet on common ground: both emphasize exchange, hybridity, and local agency. Their divergence lies in terminology. Tronchetti discards ‚colony‘ as an anachronism, while Sommer retains the term but redefines it, stripping it of military conquest and reimagining it as a network node.

Taken together, their perspectives yield a more balanced picture:

Sardinia was not ‚taken‘ by outsiders but remained firmly inhabited and governed by Sardinians.

Phoenician settlements were small, negotiated, and interwoven with local life.

Hybrid artifacts reveal cultural entanglement rather than domination.

Carthaginian hegemony, when it came, was slow and strategic, more economic than overtly military.

Rethinking the Language of Colonization

This reading matters beyond Sardinia. It forces us to reconsider the language we use—colony, conquest, occupation—and the way such terms carry hidden assumptions. The story of Sardinia in the first millennium BCE is not one of disappearance, but of transformation. Sardinians did not yield their world to Phoenician intruders; they reshaped it through encounter, exchange, and adaptation.

Why This Matters Today

In today’s debates about heritage and identity, such nuances resonate deeply. How we describe cultural contact in antiquity shapes how we imagine contact and exchange in the present. To speak of Sardinia as colonized is to reproduce a narrative of subjugation. To see it instead as a zone of entanglement restores agency to local communities and foregrounds the creative, reciprocal dimensions of Mediterranean history. The past thus becomes more than an object of study; it becomes a mirror for the words we choose when telling our own stories of encounter and exchange.