The ancient Israelites’ persistent conflict with the Philistines gave the biblical writers a template for a cultural enemy, and this template was absorbed into the vocabulary of later European culture, where “Philistine” became a term of contempt entirely disconnected from its historical roots.

The Nuragic civilization of Sardinia — the Iron Age culture known for its distinctive stone towers, elaborate bronze figurines, and evidence of complex social organization — developed partly in the wake of the Bronze Age period in which the Shardana were active in the eastern Mediterranean.

Whatever the specific genetic and cultural connections between the Shardana and the Nuragic Sardinians, the island culture of the first millennium BCE developed in a Mediterranean world that had been reshaped by the movements and migrations of the Bronze Age Collapse.

The Greek tradition of the Trojan War, preserved in Homer’s epics and forming the foundation of Western literary culture, encapsulates memories — however distorted — of the world that ended in the Bronze Age Collapse.