On the rock nr. 50 of the National Park of Naquane (Capodiponte, CCSP relief) two warriors armed with short sword and small shield, adorned with ritual skirt and fringed helmet, dance around (or fight in front of) to another warrior who has his arms up and he is holding a long battle sword and a round shield in his hands assuming an attitude of jubilation. In Iron Age rock art (VII-IV / III century BC) there are thousands pairs of warriors facing each other in a duel, but only in a limited number of cases between the two warriors, or near them, is represented a further element (anthropomorph, aquatic bird, cup ring or something else) that indicates in figurative terms the cosmological relationship existing between the image and the support that hosts it. The rhythmical and bloodless behavior of the warriors confirms that there is no battle going on, so much so that in the entire Camunian repertoire only a very small number of warriors is reached by sword shots. The rock scene 50 offers interesting hints to ponder. In the first place we find here the confirmation of a general rule: in each phase of the Iron Age the warriors facing each other are without exception portraits in profile. On the contrary, the central character is raised (as if suspended in the air) with respect to the support surface of the dancers and every body detail (head, arms, torso, lower limbs) expresses a frontal view, which inserts this figure into a category of super-human beings. Following an intuition by Silvio Ferri (Ferri, 1972), a few years ago I presented a hypothesis (G. Ragazzi, 1994), according to which the warrior at the center of the scene is the hero killed in the battle attending the funeral ritual held in his honor. We are facing what Berard calls the scene of “Anodos”, the ascent from the inferior world through a “chthonic passage” (C. Bèrard, Anodoi, Essai sur l’imagerie des passages chthoniens, 1974) which links the “below “and the” above “.
Sword dance of the Curetes, (Campanian terracotta found in Cerveteri, II-I century BC, British Museum, London). As also in the Camunian representations the shield is almost always opposed to another shield, their beat and the consequent noise could have had the same function of scaring and keeping the spirits away from the cultivated fields.