It was 540 BC when, off the coast of
Corsica, in what the ancients called the sea of Sardinia, the
first great naval battle of history took place.
An epic and bloody struggle described by Herodotus and which saw
the powerful Phoecians, Greek colonists who had settled in the
Corsican city of Alalia, come under the joint attack of
Etruscans and Carthaginians.
In the clash, the partisan Herodotus maintains, the Greeks had
the better of it.
But the ships which had managed to save themselves were no
longer able to fight, and had to take on board families, abandon
Alalia and set sail for southern Italy, where, skillful traders
that they were, they bought a piece of land and founded Hyele,
which was later renamed Elea, or Velia for the Romans, the Magna
Graecia city where the philosopher Parmenides was born.
And it is in this very place, as director-general of Italian
museums Massimo Osanna has revealed to ANSA in an exclusive,
that an excavation by archaeologists in the Archaeological Park
of Paestum-Velia has brought to light weapons which in all
probability came from that very epoch-making battle.
It is a discovery, the expert says, "that sheds fresh light on
this fascinating chapter in ancient history".
Culture Minister Dario Franceschini also hailed the find,
stressing the importance of "continuing to invest with
conviction in archaeological research that keeps yielding major
pieces of the history of the Mediterranean".
Starting last summer on the tip of what was the city's
acropolis, right underneath the remains that are still visible
today of the Temple of Athena, the dig led by Francesco Scelza
unearthed the remains of a rectangular structure of notable
size, 18 metres long by seven wide, dating back to the sixth
century BC.
On the inside, on a beaten clay floor, they found painted
ceramics all marked with the word Ire ("holy"), evidence of the
dedication to the goddess, as well as decorative architectural
elements in baked clay that proved to have been created by
craftsmen from Cumae, which was perhaps one of the leading Greek
cities in the naval fight against the Etruscans, as well as some
fragments of the ancient roof.
But that was not all.
Alongside the pottery, the temple floor also contained several
bronze and iron weapons.
There are, Scelza says, many fragments of weapons, including
what appear to be pieces of a large decorated shield and two
splendid helmets in a perfect state of preservation: one
Etruscan of the "shell" type, which experts call Negau from the
Slovenian location where they were found for the first time, and
the other of the Chalcidian type.
That is, in fact, the biggest surprise: "They are reliquaries
offered to Athena, with all probability the very spoils from the
Battle of Alalia," says Osanna, who pending the installation of
the new site director, Tiziana D'Angelo, has taken on the
running of the Park over the last year.
These are, of course, only preliminary considerations. Freed
from the earth only a few days ago, the two helmets must now be
cleaned in the laboratory and studied. There may be inscriptions
inside them, something quite common in ancient armour, and any
inscriptions could help reconstruct with precision their history
and, who knows, also perhaps the identity of the warriors who
wore them.
But already in its present state the discovery of the ancient
temple with its date and the objects kept inside it clears up
many details of that story dating back more than 2,500 years.
"The structure of the oldest temple dates back to 540-530 BC, or
the very years following the battle of Alalia," Osanna points
out.
While that of the more recent temple, which was thought to be of
Hellenistic origin, goes back to 480-450 BC, to be restructured
in the fourth century BC.
It is possible, therefore, that the Phoecians who fled Alalia
built it immediately after their arrival in this stretch of
coastline - today identified between Punta Licosa and Palinuro
in the province of Salerno - where, as was their custom and how
Herodotus tells us once again, they traded with the native
Oenotrians and bought the land necessary to settle and resume
the rich trade they were famous for.
It is almost certain that the foundation of the temple in this
process was to be considered of crucial importance for the
success of the new settlement and that the memory of the bloody
battle was still very fresh, so much so that they decided to
offer the goddess, in order to propitiate her benevolence, the
weapons they had stripped from their Etruscan enemies in that
epic clash on the sea which in fact changed the balance of power
in the Mediterranean.
Something similar was to happen one century later, in 474 BC,
with the Battle of Cumae. And if at Alalia the Greeks were
eventually forced to flee, at Cumae it would be the Etruscans
who would give way, dragging down into the pit of history also
nearby Pompeii, for a long spell of time. But that is another
story.
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