The Sardinians, or Sards ( or ; Italian and Sassarese: Sardi; Gallurese: Saldi), are a Romance language-speaking ethnic group native to Sardinia, from which the western Mediterranean island and autonomous region of Italy derives its name. Etymology Not much can be gathered from the classical literature about the origins of the Sardinian people. The ethnonym "S(a)rd" belongs to the Pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum, and whilst they might have derived from the Iberians, the accounts of the old authors differ greatly in this respect. The oldest written attestation of the ethnonym is on the Nora stone, where the word Šrdn (Shardan) bears witness to its original existence by the time the Phoenician merchants first arrived to the Sardinian shores. According to Timaeus, one of Plato's dialogues, Sardinia and its people as well, the "Sardonioi" or "Sardianoi" (Σαρδονιοί or Σαρδιανοί), might have been named after "Sardò" (Σαρδώ), a legendary Lydian woman from Sardis (Σάρδεις), in the region of western Anatolia (now Turkey). Some other authors, like Pausanias and Sallust, reported instead that the Sardinians traced their descent back to a mythical ancestor, a Libyan son of Hercules or Makeris (related either to the Berber verb Imɣur "to grow", to the specific Kabyle word Maqqur "He is the greatest", or also associated with the figure of Melqart) revered as a deity going by Sardus Pater Babai ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians"), who gave the island its name. It has also been claimed that the ancient Nuragic Sards were associated with the Sherden (šrdn in Egyptian), one of the Sea Peoples. The ethnonym was then romanised, with regard for the singular masculine and feminine form, as sardus and sarda. History Prehistory Sardinia was first colonized in a stable manner during the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic by people from Continental Europe. During the Neolithic period and the Early Eneolithic, early European farmers of the Neolithic Cardium pottery culture from Italy, Spain and the Aegean area settled in Sardinia. In the Late Eneolithic-Early Bronze Age the "Beaker folk" from Southern France, Northeastern Spain and then from Central Europe settled on the island, bringing new metallurgical techniques and ceramic styles and probably some kind of Indo-European speech. Nuragic civilization The Nuragic civilization arose in the Middle Bronze Age, during the Late Bonnanaro culture, which showed connections with the previous Beaker culture and the Polada culture of northern Italy. Although the Sardinians were considered to have