QUARTUCCIU IN THE ANCIENT TOPONOMASTICS.

Quartùcciu is near to Quartu S.Elena, but is very much smaller; it’s understood as ‘Little Quartu’ without ponder over that in the past centuries, when the two villages were alike, the name was the same. The Spanish for paronomasy named it Quarto Tocho ‘Quartu lout’.

Historians and linguists openly assert that Quartu (S.Elena) is so named from latin Quartus (or Quartum), referring to the forth milestone from Cagliari (Kàralis). But the Roman mile (m 1478) multiplied by 4 is 5912 meters, very different from the real distance from Roman forum of Karalis (7400 meters). The linguists never noticed that mile too (Italian: miglio) wasn’t a word used by Romans. In the Italian language miglio is the ‘millet’ (a grass), whereas miglio as linear measure is a linguistic innovation of XIII century. The Romans used to say milia passuum ‘thousand of steps’.

The toponym Quartù-cciu is from Quart ‘city’, a very ancient word used by Phoenicians (qrt), Ugaritians (qrt), Arameans (qiryā), Assyrians (qrītā) + ugû ‘mother. The compound means ‘Metro-polis’. We suppose Quart (qrt) to be a Shardanas’ headword. The city, near Karallu (see report on Cagliari), 3000 years ago was divided into three parts, or rather it contained three neighbouring villages (Quartucciu, Selargius, Quartu S.Elena), with a triple economy: agrarian, fishing, of saltworks.

Quartucciu is a Semitic name, maybe the first toponym in the flat land. Selargius < Bab. Ša-Elû (+ adj. suff. -rius > Sard. -rgius) ‘crop, grape harvest place’ is a vocational name of the same land; Quartu (S.Elena), being an autoreferential nonsense, maybe was, in the beginning, a village of little huts, a dependence on Quartucciu along the lagoon, devoted to salt gathering, to fishing and to aquatic bird-fauna capture.