Cunusitani Erotic

The Cunusitani were a people of ancient Sardinia, recorded once, in the second century AD, by the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, who placed them in the northern half of the island; after that they drop out of the written record, absorbed into the Romanized population from which today's Sardinians descend. Nearly everything certain about them fits inside one sentence of Ptolemy's Geography. Running down the island from north to south, he sets the Tibulati and Corsi at the top, the Coracenses below them, then the Carenses and the Cunusitani together, with the Salcitani and Lucuidonenses below. That is a position on a list, not a point on a map, and nobody has tied it to a particular valley or plateau with any confidence.

The name itself is a clue. Ancient writers routinely built Sardinian ethnic names from towns: Nora gave the Noritani, Sulci the Solcitani, Neapolis the Neapolitani. By that pattern the Cunusitani should have been the people of a place called something like Cunusi, but no such settlement has been securely identified. The Roman historians who describe fighting on the island name other peoples, the Ilienses, Balari and Corsi above all, and never the Cunusitani.

What can be said with more confidence concerns the world they belonged to. Sardinia was the country of the nuraghi, the stone towers raised by the thousands during the Bronze Age, and of communities that went on herding and farming around them long after Phoenician and Carthaginian traders settled the coasts. Rome took the island in 238 BC and spent generations fighting highland peoples it never fully trusted. By Ptolemy's day Sardinia had been a province for nearly four centuries, so the Cunusitani he listed were provincial subjects of long standing, living somewhere between the old habits of the countryside and the Latin of the administration. Their original speech would have been a form of Paleo-Sardinian, a language or group of languages that left no readable texts and survives only in place names and a layer of words in modern Sardinian. Latin replaced it, and Sardinian, the Romance language that grew from that Latin, is often called the most conservative of its family.

The Cunusitani matter less for anything they are known to have done than for what their name shows: that Roman Sardinia, to an outside geographer, was still a set of named local peoples rather than one undifferentiated population. They have no separate descendants to point to. They are part of the ancestry of Sardinians today, a population that genetic studies find has kept an unusually large share of its prehistoric inheritance.