page_title: Sardinian people
section_title: Antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: Sardinian people / History / Antiquity
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Situazione politica in Sardegna durante il periodo romano
context_page_description: The Sardinians, or Sards, are a Romance ethnic group native to Sardinia, from which the western Mediterranean island and autonomous region of Italy derives its name.
context_section_description: In the 9th century BC, the Phoenicians founded cities and ports along the southern and western coast, such as Karalis, Bithia, Sulki and Tharros; starting from the same areas, where the relations between the indigenous Sardinians and the Phoenician settlers had been so far peaceful, the Carthaginians proceeded to annex the Southern and Western part of Sardinia in the late 6th century BC. Well into the 1st century B.C., the native Sardinians were said to have preserved many cultural affinities with the ancient Punic-Berber populations from the North African Mainland.
  After the First Punic War, the whole island was conquered by the Romans in the 3rd century BC. Sardinia and Corsica were then made into a single province; however, it took the Romans more than another 150 years to manage to subdue the more belligerent Nuragic tribes of the interior, and after 184 years since the Sardinians fell under Roman sway, Cicero noted how there was still not on the island a single community which had had friendly intercourse with the Roman people. Even from the former Sardo-Carthaginian settlements, with which the Sardinian mountaineers had formed an alliance in a common struggle against the Romans, emerged indigenous attempts at resisting cultural and political assimilation; Punic-style magistrates, the sufetes, wielded local control in Nora and Tharros through the end of the first century B.C., although two sufetes existed in Bithia as late as the mid-second century CE.
  
  During the Roman rule, there was a considerable immigration flow from the Italian peninsula into the island; ancient sources mention several populations of Italic origin settling down in Sardinia, like the Patulcenses Campani (from Campania), the Falisci (from southern Etruria), the Buduntini (from Apulia) and the Siculenses (from Sicily); Roman colonies were also established in Porto Torres (Turris Libisonis) and Uselis. The Italic immigrants were confronted with a difficult coexistence with the natives, who were reluctant to assimilate to the language and customs of the colonists; many aspects of the ancient Sardo-Punic culture are documented to have persisted well into Imperial times, and the mostly mountainous innerlands came to earn the name of Barbaria ("Land of the Barbarians", similar in origin to the word Barbary) as a testament of the fiercely independent spirit of the tribes who dwelled therein (in fact, they would continue to practice their indigenous prehistoric religion up until the age of Pope Gregory I). Nevertheless, Sardinia would eventually undergo cultural Romanization, the modern Sardinian language being one of the most evident cultural developments thereof. Strabo gave a brief summary about the Mountaineer tribes, living in what would be called civitates Barbariae, Geographica V ch.2:
  There are four nations of mountaineers, the Parati, Sossinati, Balari, and the Aconites. These people dwell in caverns. Although they have some arable land, they neglect its cultivation, preferring rather to plunder what they find cultivated by others, whether on the island or on the continent, where they make descents, especially upon the Pisatæ. The prefects sent [into Sardinia] sometimes resist them, but at other times leave them alone, since it would cost too dear to maintain an army always on foot in an unhealthy place.
caption: The Barbaria (in blue) and the Roman-controlled regions of Sardinia (in yellow) with the red dots being their most prominent settlements.
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