Ligures

The Ligures or Ligurians (Latin: Ligures, singular Ligus or Ligur; Ancient Greek: Λίγυες, romanized: Lígues) were an ancient people of the north-western Mediterranean, centred on north-western Italy and extending along the neighbouring coast of south-eastern Gaul. Their name was among the oldest mentioned by ancient writers, being attested from the archaic Greek geographers down to the Roman conquest.

In a narrow sense, the name belonged to a population of north-western Italy, where a distinctive material culture is recognisable from the Bronze Age. The chief markers of Ligurian identity here were an indigenous cremation rite and distinctively non-Celtic onomastics. Another ancient tradition, going back to the 6th century BC, applied the name Ligyes to a much broader area inhabited by 'barbarians' in the far west, the earliest Greek geographers setting them at the edge of the known world beside the Ethiopians and the Scythians. Such descriptions covered a shifting, ill-defined area and their ethnic value is much debated, since several of the peoples reckoned Ligurian, especially in southern Gaul, bore unmistakably Celtic names.

The ancient Ligures are usually held to descend from the Bronze Age population of north-western Italy, though a self-aware people organised on a tribal basis probably took shape only in the Iron Age, under Etruscan and Greek stimulus. From the 7th century BC, contact with the Etruscans and Greeks, focused on the trading post (emporium) of Genoa, drew them into Mediterranean trade and offered some Ligures an outlet in mercenary service. The Ligurian economy was a poor one, resting on herding, subsistence agriculture and the exploitation of woodland, and they resorted to raiding and piracy at times when economic conditions worsened. Their language is known only at second hand, almost entirely from names, and its place within the Indo-European family, above all whether it forms a branch close to Celtic, remains unresolved.

The Ligures are remembered above all for their protracted resistance to Rome. Holding a rugged frontier where the Alps merge into the Apennines, they fought by raid and ambush rather than in pitched battle. The wars of the early 2nd century BC ended in their subjugation, marked by the deportation of some 40,000 Apuani to Samnium in 180 BC. Under Augustus the name Liguria was given a fixed administrative sense as the ninth region of Roman Italy. The ancient Ligures had a long afterlife in the historiography of the region, where from the 18th century a tradition of ligurismo asserted an unbroken descent of the modern inhabitants of Liguria from the ancient Ligures, whose name survives in the current name of the region and in the Ligurian Sea.