History of Cagliari

This article presents a history of Cagliari, an Italian municipality and the capital city of the island of Sardinia.

Cagliari was called Krly during the Phoenician-Punic domination, while in Latin it was called Caralis or Calares (plural) or Karales. Around the 16th century Roderigo Hunno Baeza, a Sardinian humanist stated that the name Karalis derived from the Greek κάρα meaning head, as Cagliari was the main center of the island. The Semitist William Gesenius said the name came from Kar Baalis, which in Phoenician means "city of God." This version was, albeit with some differences, accepted by Giovanni Spano, who claimed that Cagliari derived from the Phoenician name Kar-El [32], which also means "city of God."

Max Leopold Wagner traced the term to Protosardinian Karalis, reflecting the Sardinian place names of Carale (Austis), Carallai (Sorradile), Karhalis or Karhallis (Carallia) of Pamphylia and Karhalleia of Pisidia (Turkey). The toponym Karalis was connected with such words as cacarallai, criallei, crielle, chirelle, ghirelle (wild chrysanthemum [33] and Macerone) and garuleu, galureu, Galileu (pollen deposited in honey, which is yellow gold), which has affinity with the Etruscan garouleou (wild chrysanthemum).

Francesco Artizzu noticed that the root "kar" in the languages of the Mediterranean peoples meant "stone/rock" and the suffix "al/ar" gave collective value, so the word Karali could be translated as "place of the rock community" or simply "rocky place." As for the plural, Kalares, Artizzu explained that an initial settlement core was joined by other neighboring nuclei, thus increasing the extent of the city. In conclusion, Karalis/Caralis originally most likely had the meaning of "place of community on the rock/yellow or white rock".

Over time the judicial city became the center of what is now the neighborhood of Santa Gilla or Stampace, and in medieval Sardinian was thus called Santa Igia. With the arrival of Pisans the city was identified in the documents as Kastrum Karalis and later by the Catalan-Aragonese as Castell de Caller in Catalan. Then on adoption of the Spanish language during Spanish rule the name became Callari and finally in the Savoy period the name was simply transliterated into Italian, obtaining the current Cagliari. In the Sardinian language the current name Casteddu identifies the city with the city's fortified castle built during the rule of Pisa. Other scholars think that the name Casteddu is much older, going back to the very beginnings of Roman rule, and is nothing but the translation into Latin of popular Karalis. The two place names survived, the one as the official name of the Municipium (municipality) until today, the other as a literal translation of the Latin which became prevalent in common parlance when pre-Latin languages became extinctin the city and throughout the whole island. An extant fragment by Varro Atacinus, a Latin poet of the 1st century BC mentions: munitus Vicus Caralis, meaning "fortified town of Caralis", Castellum in popular Latin. In any case, the word Casteddu is the direct descendant of the Latin castellum and not a loan from the dialect of Pisa as might suggest the "refounding" of the fortified medieval city. Furthermore, at that time the hill of the castle was named Monti Castru; castru is a Sardinian word that descends from Latin Castrum (military encampment, fort or castle) and means "jagged mountaintop". A local Renaissance writer, Roderigo Hunno Baeza, describes the Roman city, from the ruins that still remained in his time, as an Arx on the hill, from which the Via Sacra descended to the port.

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