ABSTRACT

Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies. (Online Dictionary, author’s emphasis)

To begin with Latin, all Romance or Neo-Latin languages agree that the meaning of the word “inheritance,” both in real and in symbolic terms, concerns the transmission of a property from a dead to a living person (Lo Schiavo, Milletti, Toms forthcoming). For some years now this idea has dominated the studies of the last phases of Bronze Age Nuragic Sardinia, in relation to the beginning of the Villanovan and Etruscan cultures. Peninsular Italy and particularly the Tyrrhenian regions of Central Italy receive the heritage of Nuragic Sardinia that, after an extraordinary development in the Middle, Recent and Final Bronze Age, is now no more the same but has deeply changed from the social, economic and political point of view, that is, in customs, ideology, way of life, seafaring and external connections.