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The Lepontii were an ancient Celtic people[1][2] occupying portions of Rhaetia (in modern Switzerland and Northern Italy) in the Alps during the late Bronze Age/Iron Age. Recent archeological excavations and their association with the Golasecca culture (9th-7th centuries BC) and Canegrate culture (13th century BC)[3] point to a Celtic affiliation. From the analysis of their language[4] and the place names of the old Lepontic areas,[5] it was hypothesized that these people represent a layer similar to that Celtic but previous to the Gallic penetration in the Po valley. The suggestion has been made that the Lepontii may have been celticized Ligurians.[6]
The chief towns of the Lepontii were Oscela, now Domodossola, Italy, and Bilitio, now Bellinzona, Switzerland. Their territory included the southern slopes of the St. Gotthard Pass and Simplon Pass, corresponding roughly to present-day Ossola and Ticino.
A map of Rhaetia shows the location of the Lepontic territory, in the south-western corner of Rhaetia. The area to the south, including what was to become the Insubrian capital Mediolanum (modern Milan), was Etruscan around 600-500 BC, when the Lepontii began writing tombstone inscriptions in their alphabet, one of several Etruscan-derived alphabets in the Rhaetian territory.
↑ Sciarretta, Antonio (2010). Toponomastica d'Italia. Nomi di luoghi, storie di popoli antichi. Milano: Mursia. pp.143–173. ISBN978-88-425-4017-5.
↑ The Cambridge Ancient History: Plates, New ed. University Press. 1988. p.718.
Sources
Piana Agostinetti P. 1972, Documenti per la protostoria della Val d’Ossola. San Bernardo d’Ornavasso e le altre necropoli preromane, Milano.
Tibiletti Bruno, M. G. (1978). "Ligure, leponzio e gallico". In Popoli e civiltà dell'Italia antica vi, Lingue e dialetti, ed. A. L. Prosdocimi, 129–208. Rome: Biblioteca di Storia Patria.
Tibiletti Bruno, M. G. (1981). "Le iscrizioni celtiche d'Italia". In I Celti d'Italia, ed. E. Campanile, 157–207. Pisa: Giardini.
ULRICH-BANSA O.1957, Monete rinvenute nelle necropoli di Ornavasso, in “Rivista Italiana di Numismatica”, LIX, pp.6–69.
Whatmough, J. (1933). The Prae-Italic Dialects of Italy, vol. 2, The Raetic, Lepontic, Gallic, East-Italic, Messapic and Sicel Inscriptions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
AA.VV. and Prosdocimi, A.L. (1991). I Celti, pag.50-60, Lingua e scrittura dei primi Celti. Bompiani.
AA.VV. and De Marinis, R.C. (1991). I Celti, capìtol I Celti Golasecchiani. Bompiani.
Stifter, D. 2020. Cisalpine Celtic. Language, Writing, Epigraphy. Aelaw Booklet 8. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza.
Stifter, D. 2020. «Cisalpine Celtic», Palaeohispanica 20: 335–365.
The Camunic language is an extinct language that was spoken in the 1st millennium BC in the Valcamonica and the Valtellina in Northern Italy, both in the Central Alps. The language is sparsely attested to an extent that makes any classification attempt uncertain - even the discussion of whether it should be considered a pre–Indo-European or an Indo-European language has remained indecisive. Among several suggestions, it has been hypothesized that Camunic is related to the Raetic language from the Tyrsenian language family, or to the Celtic languages.
Cisalpine Gaul was the part of Italy inhabited by Celts (Gauls) during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.
The Ligures were an ancient people after whom Liguria, a region of present-day north-western Italy, is named.
The Hallstatt culture was the predominant Western and Central European culture of Late Bronze Age from the 12th to 8th centuries BC and Early Iron Age Europe from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, developing out of the Urnfield culture of the 12th century BC and followed in much of its area by the La Tène culture. It is commonly associated with Proto-Celtic populations. Older assumptions of the early 20th century of Illyrians having been the bearers of especially the Eastern Hallstatt culture are indefensible and archeologically unsubstantiated.
Lepontic is an ancient Alpine Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Rhaetia and Cisalpine Gaul between 550 and 100 BC. Lepontic is attested in inscriptions found in an area centered on Lugano, Switzerland, and including the Lake Como and Lake Maggiore areas of Italy.
Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language, usually classified into the Italic subgroup, that was spoken by the Veneti people in ancient times in northeast Italy and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po River delta and the southern fringe of the Alps.
Rhaetic or Raetic, also known as Rhaetian, was a language spoken in the ancient region of Rhaetia in the Eastern Alps in pre-Roman and Roman times. It is documented by around 280 texts dated from the 5th up until the 1st century BC, which were found through Northern Italy, Southern Germany, Eastern Switzerland, Slovenia and Western Austria, in two variants of the Old Italic scripts. Rhaetic is largely accepted as being closely related to Etruscan.
The Italic peoples were an ethnolinguistic group identified by their use of Italic languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
The Umbri were an Italic people of ancient Italy. A region called Umbria still exists and is now occupied by Italian speakers. It is somewhat smaller than the ancient Umbria.
The Golasecca culture was a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age culture in northern Italy, whose type-site was excavated at Golasecca in the province of Varese, Lombardy, where, in the area of Monsorino at the beginning of the 19th century, Abbot Giovanni Battista Giani made the first findings of about fifty graves with pottery and metal objects.
Ornavasso is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola in the Italian region Piedmont, located about 110 kilometres (68 mi) northeast of Turin and about 11 kilometres (7 mi) northwest of Verbania.
The Insubres or Insubri were an ancient Celtic population settled in Insubria, in what is now the Italian region of Lombardy. They were the founders of Mediolanum (Milan). Though completely Gaulish at the time of Roman conquest, they were the result of the fusion of pre-existing Ligurian and Celtic population with Gaulish tribes.
The Camuni or Camunni were an ancient population located in Val Camonica during the Iron Age ; the Latin name Camunni was attributed to them by the authors of the 1st century. They are also called ancient Camuni, to distinguish them from the current inhabitants of the valley. The Camunni were among the greatest producers of rock art in Europe; their name is linked to the famous rock engravings of Valcamonica.
The Celtic Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions are frequently combined with the Lepontic inscriptions under the term Celtic language remains in northern Italy. While it is possible that the Lepontii were autochthonous to Northern Italy since the end of the 2nd millennium BC, it is known from ancient sources that the Gauls invaded the regions north of the river Po in several waves since the 5th century BC. They apparently took over the art of writing from the Lepontii, including some of the orthographic peculiarities. There are 20 Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions, five of them longer than just one or two words. The inscriptions stem largely from the area south of the Lepontians.
The prehistory of Italy began in the Paleolithic period, when species of Homo colonized the Italian territory for the first time, and ended in the Iron Age, when the first written records appeared in Italy.
The Canegrate culture was a civilization of Prehistoric Italy which developed from the recent Bronze Age until the Iron Age, in the areas of what are now western Lombardy, eastern Piedmont, and Ticino. Canegrate represented a completely new cultural dynamic to the area expressed in pottery and bronzework, making it a typical example of the western Hallstatt culture.
The Este culture or Atestine culture was an Iron Age archaeological culture existing from the late Italian Bronze Age to the Roman period. It was located in the present territory of Veneto in Italy and derived from the earlier and more extensive Proto-Villanovan culture. It is also called "civilization of situlas", or paleo-venetic.
The Orobii were a Celto-Ligurian tribe dwelling around present-day Como and Bergamo during the Iron Age.
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