acquired a sense of national identity, at that time, the grand tribal identities of the Nuragic Sardinians were said to be three (roughly from the South to the North): the Iolei/Ilienses, inhabiting the area from the southernmost plains to the mountainous zone of eastern Sardinia (later part of what would be called by the Romans Barbaria); the Balares, living in the North-West corner; and finally the Corsi stationed in today's Gallura and the island to which they gave the name, Corsica. Nuragic Sardinians have been connected by some scholars to the Sherden, a tribe of the so-called Sea Peoples, whose presence is registered several times in ancient Egyptian records. The language (or languages) spoken in Sardinia during the Bronze Age is unknown, since there are no written records of such period. According to Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, the Proto-Sardinian language was akin to Proto-Basque and the ancient Iberian, while others believe it was related to Etruscan. Other scholars theorize that there were actually various linguistic areas (two or more) in Nuragic Sardinia, possibly Pre–Indo-Europeans and Indo-Europeans. Antiquity In the 8th century BC, the Phoenicians founded cities and ports along the southern and western coast, such as Karalis, Bithia, Sulki and Tharros; starting from the same areas, where the relations between the indigenous Sardinians and the Phoenician settlers had been so far peaceful, the Carthaginians proceeded to annex the Southern and Western part of Sardinia in the late 6th century BC. Well into the 1st century B.C., the native Sardinians were said to have preserved many cultural affinities with the ancient Punic-Berber populations from North Africa. After the First Punic War, the whole island was conquered by the Romans in the 3rd century BC. Sardinia and Corsica were then made into a single province; however, it took the Romans more than another 150 years to manage to subdue the more belligerent Nuragic tribes of the interior, and after 184 years since the Sardinians fell under Roman sway, Cicero noted how there was still not on the island a single community which had had friendly intercourse with the Roman people. Even from the former Sardo-Carthaginian settlements, with which the Sardinian mountaineers had formed an alliance in a common struggle against the Romans, indigenous attempts emerged aimed at resisting cultural and political assimilation: inscriptions in Bithia dating to the period of Marcus Aurelius were found, and they still followed the old Punic script at