Ancient peoples of Italy

This is a list of ancient peoples living in Italy before the Roman conquest. Many of the names are either scholarly inventions or exonyms assigned by the ancient writers of works in ancient Greek and Latin. In regard to the specific names of particular ancient Italian tribes and peoples, the time window in which historians know the historical ascribed names of ancient Italian peoples mostly falls into the range of about 750 BC at the foundation of Rome to about 300 BC in the middle Roman Republic, the period in which most of the written documentation first exists of such names and prior to the complete assimilation of Italian peoples into Roman culture.

Before the invention of writing, and before ancient sources existed that describe ancient Italian tribes, archaeological cultures might be hypothesized to have been associated with historical identities, especially in relatively isolated and continuous regions. However, due to the lack of written documentation, any further assumptions as to the historical names or cultural identities of these ancient archeological cultures and those Italian peoples existing prior to known ancient written sources would be presumptuous by current archeological and historical standards.

The specifically named ancient peoples of Italy listed here are therefore confined mostly to the Iron Age of Italy, when the first known written evidence, generally from Ancient Roman or Greek sources, can be found ascribing names to these tribes or peoples, before such peoples became assimilated into Roman culture through the Roman conquest. In contrast to those tribes or peoples documented by ancient sources, pre-Roman and pre-Iron Age archeological cultures are also listed, following the lists of specifically named ancient Italian peoples and tribes; however, the names of these pre-Roman archeological cultures are modern inventions, and most of the actual names of the peoples or tribes that belonged to these proposed cultures, if such names existed, are currently unknown.

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.

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