Sardinians

Sardinians or Sards are an ethnolinguistic group of Italy indigenous to Sardinia, an island in the western Mediterranean which is administratively an autonomous region of Italy.

==Etymology== thumb|left|180px|Depiction of the Sardus Pater|Sardus Pater Babai in a [[Roman coin (59 B.C.)]] Not much can be gathered from the classical literature about the origins of the Sardinian people. The ethnonym "S(a)rd" may belong to the Pre-Indo-European (or Indo-European) linguistic substratum, and whilst they might have derived from the Iberians, the accounts of the old authors differ greatly in this respect. The oldest written attestation of the ethnonym is on the Nora stone, where the word Šrdn (Shardan) bears witness to its original existence by the time the Phoenician merchants first arrived on Sardinian shores. According to Timaeus, one of Plato's dialogues, Sardinia and its people as well, the "Sardonioi" or "Sardianoi" (Σαρδονιοί or Σαρδιανοί), might have been named after "Sardò" (Σαρδώ), a legendary Lydian woman from Sardis (Σάρδεις), in the region of western Anatolia (now Turkey). Some other authors, like Pausanias and Sallust, reported instead that the Sardinians traced their descent back to a mythical ancestor, a Libyan son of Hercules or Makeris (related either to the Berber verb Imɣur "to grow", to the specific Kabyle word Maqqur "He is the greatest", or also associated with the figure of Melqart) revered as a deity going by Sardus Pater Babai ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians"), who gave the island its name. It has also been claimed that the ancient Nuragic Sards were associated with the Sherden (šrdn in Egyptian), one of the Sea Peoples. The ethnonym was then romanised, with regard for the singular masculine and feminine form, as sardus and sarda.