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Ancient Tribes: The Ligures

Ancient Tribes: The Ligures

 Rhesusnegative.net4
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The Ligures were an ancient population that gave the name to Liguria, a region of north-western Italy. In pre-Roman times, the Ligurians occupied present-day Italian regions of Liguria, Piedmont south of the Po river and north-western Tuscany, and the French region of PACA.

Some time between the 8th and 5th centuries BC, tribes of Celts, probably coming from Central Europe, also began moving into Provence. They had weapons made of iron, which allowed them to defeat the Ligures, who were still armed with bronze weapons. One tribe, called the Segobriga, settled near modern-day Marseille.


Lucan in his Pharsalia (c. 61 AD) described Ligurian tribes as being long-haired, and their hair a shade of auburn (a reddish-brown):

…Ligurian tribes, now shorn, in ancient days

First of the long-haired nations, on whose necks

Once flowed the auburn locks in pride supreme.

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4 Comments

  1. Traci Dunaway November 23, 2020

    Hi Mike! New member! I am very intrigued by this post as I have been extremely fascinated by the ancient Etruscan civilization also of Northern Italy. I have had my DNA tested on most levels (ethnicity/health/traits, etc) and can confirm that Italian ancestry is indeed related…will share more details if you are interested. Thank you so much for all of your research!

  2. Maureen November 23, 2020

    I read it, Mike. 🙂 Thank you for posting.

  3. OtherSheeps December 13, 2020

    “The wide extension of the Ligues* westward is in agreement with the language of Eratosthenes. According to Strabo (2. i. 40, p. 92)* this old geographer taught that there were three forelands projecting from the north–the Peloponnesian, the Italian, and the Ligurian–between the first and second of which lay the Adriatic, and between the second and third the Tyrrhenian Sea. When we remember the high reputation and the real merits of Eratosthenes, it is astonishing how little attention has been drawn to the fact that he calls the Spanish peninsula the Ligurian. … The Greeks gave the name of Ligues to the tribe of the Salues who dwelt round Marseilles, and called the country Ligustike, or the Ligurian country (Str. 4)…”–Guest, Origines Celticae, v1
    _____
    *”He then notices the statement of Eratosthenes concerning the countries situated west of the Euxine, namely, that the three [principal] headlands [of this continent], the first the Peloponnesian, the second the Italian, the third the Ligurian, run from north [to south], enclosing the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Gulfs.”136
    _____
    136 Gosselin observes, that Eratosthenes took a general view of the salient points of land that jutted into the Mediterranean, as some of the learned of our own time have done, when remarking that most of the continents terminated in capes, extending towards the south. The first promontory that Eratosthenes speaks of terminated in Cape Malea of the Peloponnesus, and comprised the whole of Greece; the Italian promontory likewise terminated Italy; the Ligurian promontory was reckoned to include all Spain, it terminated at Cape Tarifa, near to the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar. As the Ligurians had obtained possession of a considerable portion of the coasts of France and Spain, that part of the Mediterranean which washes the shores of those countries was named the Ligurian Sea. It extended from the Arno to the Strait of Gibraltar. It is in accordance with this nomenclature that Eratosthenes called Cape Tarifa, which projects farthest into the Strait, the Ligurian promontory.

    * The Latin form is “Ligures.”

    Since the Latins added ‘r’ to Ligues, they probably added ‘r’ to Sallyes as well… which spelling depending upon the pronunciation, to become Silues and then Silures. Tacitus wrote in Latin, and probably had the Roman accounts at hand when he wrote about the Silures of Britain. He didn’t feel the need to explain the Silures, since the Salyes were well known as a Ligurian tribe of Provençe.

    These same people are the exact physical type of the coalminers of Wales in 1965, when their blood was typed by Morgan Watkin, who published the paper in the The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 95, No. 1, titled The Welsh Element in the South Wales Coalfield; An Anthropological Study Based on ABO Blood Groups. In this paper, he references a book that speaks of the sixth-century B.C. Phoenician periplus of a ‘Mons Silurus’ in Spain. Some writers dismiss this out of hand because they can’t find anything but that mountain and a species of fish to reference the Silures… none of which they found in Dunmonii. But they didn’t look very hard.

    Ridgeway, in his paper, Who were the Romans? says the Ligurians were the Aborigines of Italy. And since invaders who don’t bring their wives and children with them learn the language of the conquered, what became Rome had taken the language of Latin from the Ligurians.

    The oh-so-smart modernists have somehow missed all this, saying that the Romans “Romanized” all of Iberia and France… rather than admit the bald fact that Latin was the original mother-tongue of these conquered-by-a-handful-of-Roman-Soldiers native people. Europe was always Latin… Spain was always Latin… because the Ligurians had owned these countries and spoke Latin from their birth.

  4. Ligurian January 3, 2021

    “Avienus makes only one direct reference to the Celts when he mentions that
    beyond the tin-producing Oestrymnides was a land now occupied by the Celts,
    who took it from the Ligurians.”–Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts

    “As these tribes, which formed the Irish nation,
    bore the names of those who are known to have been the Belgae,
    so their language, I think, may be regarded as the ancient Belgic.”
    –Davies, Celtic Researches

    Having listened to a bit of old Norse, I have to say that it sounds like Gaelic to me. Rolling r’s in a language doesn’t suit my tongue, so I dropped the idea of learning either of them… or Spanish. French seems more like Breton, a gutteral form of Germanic. Foreign tongues modify the language they learn. The Romans added r’s to Greek words, making Ligues into Ligures, Selleeïs and Salyes into Silures. (Selleeïs must have been borrowed into Greek) Portuguese added r’s to Latin, so Roman isn’t Latin.

    People who think the whole of western Europe was Romanized… by what amounts to a handful of Roman soldiers… who must have gone from mudhut to mudhut forcing the peasants to learn Latin… at the point of a sword… hmm… they have more imagination than I can come up with.

    The scholars who talk about the Persian overlords who ruled Hurrians learned the Hurrian language and took on Hurrian names… I think they got it right.

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