Көне Италияның Умбри тайпалары

Italic people of ancient Italy

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. Most ancient Umbrian cities were settled in the 9th 4th centuries BC on easily defensible hilltops. Umbria was bordered by the Tiber and Nar rivers and included the Apennine slopes on the Adriatic. The ancient Umbrian language is a branch of a group called Oscan Umbrian, which is related to the Latino Faliscan languages.

They are also called Ombrii in some Roman sources. Ancient Roman writers thought the Umbri to be of Gaulish origin; wrote that they were descended from an ancient Gaulish tribe. Plutarch wrote that the name might be a different way of writing the name of a northern European tribe, the and that both ethnonyms were cognate with "King of the ". (However, both Greek and Roman scholars sometimes conflated Celtic and Germanic peoples. The historical Ambrones originated in or around Jutland, were apparently a Germanic speaking people, and no evidence that they had a connection to the Celtic peoples, per se, has been found.) Livy suggested that the , another Gaulish tribe, might be connected; their Celtic name Isombres could possibly mean "Lower Umbrians," or inhabitants of the country below Umbria. Similarly Roman historian Cato the Elder, in his masterpiece Origines, defines the Gauls as "the progenitors of the Umbri". The Ambrones are also mentioned, with the Lombards and the Suebi, among the tribes of Northern Europe in the poem Widsith. Pliny the Elder wrote concerning the folk etymology of the name: quote|The Umbrian people are thought the oldest in Italy; they are believed to have been called Ombrii (here, "the people of the thunderstorm," after ὅμβρος, "thunderstorm") by the Greeks because they survived the deluge (literally "the inundation of the lands by thunderstorms, imbribus). The Etruscans vanquished 300 Umbrian cities. Their expansion was in a southward direction, according to the rite of Ver Sacrum.

Lepontic inscriptions have also been found in Umbria, in the area which saw the emergence of the Terni culture, which had strong similarities with the Celtic speaking cultures of Hallstatt and La Tène. The Umbrian necropolis of Terni, which dates back to the 10th century BC, was virtually identical in every aspect to the Celtic necropolis of the Golasecca culture.

During the 6th–4th centuries BC, Umbrian communities constructed rural sanctuaries in which they sacrificed to the gods. Bronze votives shaped as animals or deities were also offered. Umbrian deities include Feronia, Valentia, Minerva Matusia and Clitumnus. The Iguvine Tablets were discovered in 1444 at Scheggia, near Gubbio, Italy. Composed during the 2nd or 3rd centuries BC, they describe religious rituals involving animal sacrifice. The ancient sanctuary to Venus (or her Umbrian equivalent) at Hispellum was an important sacred place for Umbrian tribes from the 3rd c. BC and the site was monumentalised in the Republican age (2nd 1st century BC). The modern Festival of Ceri, celebrated every year in Gubbio on May 15 in honor of Bishop Ubald or Ubaldo of Gubbio (1084 1160), shares certain features with the rites described in the 3rd c. BC Iguvine tables mentioned above, and so may be a survival of that ancient pre Christian custom. It is also celebrated in Jessup, PA, a town with a large number of immigrants from the Gubbio area, as Saint Ubaldo Day.

While we have little direct information about ancient Umbrian political structure, it is fairly clear that two men held the supreme magistracy of uhtur and were responsible for supervising rituals. Other civic offices included the marone, which had a lower status than uhtur (closely related to Latin auctor whence English "author"), and a religious position named kvestur (cognate to or a borrowing of Latin Quaestor). The Umbrian social structure was divided into distinct groups probably based upon military rank. During the reign of Augustus, four Umbrian aristocrats became senators. Emperor Nerva’s family was from Umbria. According to Guy Jolyon Bradley, " The religious sites of the region have been thought to reveal a society dominated by agricultural and pastoral concerns, to which town life came late in comparison to Etruria."