List of ancient peoples of Italy
This List of ancient peoples of Italy is a list of known ethnic identities of populations living in Italy (including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia) before the Roman domination. Nearly all the names are either scholarly inventions or endonyms assigned by the writers of works in ancient Greek and Latin. The time window necessarily falls into the range of about 750 BC at the foundation of Rome to about 300 BC in the middle Roman Republic. Before then writing in Italy had not been invented or no records survive and after then Rome was dominant. Before the invention of writing, archaeological cultures might be hypothesized to have been associated with historical identities only in relatively isolated and continuous regions. Any further assumptions would be presumptuous by current standards. The ancient peoples of Italy are therefore confined to the Iron Age of Italy.
Non-Indo-Europeans
The following peoples are believed to have spoken languages that were not Indo-European, although most on scanty evidence. Some of them were pre-Indo-Europeans, and some not. For some has been also proposed the definition of Peri-Indo-European.[1]
Indo-Europeans
Italics
Celts
- Ancient Cisalpine Celts, who migrated across the Alps and settled in Northern Italy around 13th century BC
Greeks
of the Hellenic colonies of Magna Graecia
Illyrians
Venetics
Of uncertain classification
See also
Notes
- ^ Giacomo Devoto, Gli antichi Italici, Firenze, Vallecchi, 1931.
- ^ Very little is known about their language (mainly place names and personal names remain) which is generally believed to have been Indo-European at least from the 1st millennium BC; it appears to have shared many features with other Indo-European languages, primarily Celtic (Gaulish) and Italic (Latin and the Osco-Umbrian languages).
- ^ a b Strabo V, 250.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, III, 98.
- ^ Ermanno A. Arslan, "Dimenticati dalla storia: i gruppi celtici minori della Cisalpina. Una rilettura di Plinio, Naturalis historia, e di Livio, Ab urbe condita" [1]
- ^ Livy XXI, 25: "Galli Brixiani".
- ^ Act. Triumph. Capit, Th. Mommsen ed., CIL I, p. 459: "Galli Contrubei"
- ^ Ali, Linguistic atlas of Italy
- ^ Linguistic cartography of Italy by Padova University
- ^ Italiand dialects by Pellegrini
- ^ AIS, Sprach-und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, Zofingen 1928-1940
- ^ a b c Gianna G. Buti e Giacomo Devoto, Preistoria e storia delle regioni d'Italia, Sansoni Università, 1974. p.149