CAGLIARI AND ITS HINTERLAND.

Tolomaeus (II century a.C.) distributed the populus of Korakénsioi in the far north of Sardinia. But it’s difficult to understand the definitive place. By the etymology it is perhaps possible to better dislocate them because the precise function they rule in the territory. The Korakénsioi (< sumeric korra ‘purple’ + Akkadian kinšu ‘round hut’) maybe dwelled in the gulf of Alghero or in the Sinis peninsula. They were purple gatherers living in circular huts, and maybe they had a relationship with Kornus (nearby Oristano: so named equally < Sum. korra ‘purple’) and the neighbouring harbour of Korakodes (equally named < Sum. korra ‘purple’).

If Korakòdes was the classic loading port for the wonderful supply of purple gathered in west-Sardinia for the Phoenician manufacturing industry, Cagliari can be seen as a coral loading harbour: nomen omen. Cagliari in fact has the Babylonian name of coral Karallu, that means par excellence also ‘jewel’, but for abstraction it meant ‘happy, blessed, lucky, rich, splendid’, with the same semantic of Olbia. Cagliari and Olbia, then, as Shardanic harbours for exporting the wonderful coral supply gathered along the Sardinia coasts, if it’s true what all ancient and modern historical sources testify for the island.

Concerning Karallu the Romans made neither any paretymology nor a translation in Latin. Simply they corrected the twin liquid (-ll-) since they considered the shardanian doubles as a thickening of ancient simples. Therefore Karallu became Karál-is with latin suffix, upon which counted the latin phonetic law and the stress was degraded (Kàralis).

Cagliari today appears as a city without territory, since the land around it belongs to the bordering towns. But Cagliari never had territory: it’s like Washington. That’s an indication of vocation, that wasn’t agricultural, since its seven hills were surrounded by ponds and the one faraway was Monte Urpinu ‘the distant hill’ (< Akk. rūqu ‘distant’, with following sardian metathesis *urqu, with following sardian substitution of -q- > -p-, and finally the adjectival latin suffix -īnus). But perhaps Urpinu had an etymologic basis < Akk.. uru ‘tree’ + lat. pīnus ‘pine’, to indicate a desert hill where the nature, besides the ubiquitous palm (dwarf or tall), favoured the growth of pine timber. Since the Akk. uru means ‘palm’, too, it isn’t strange that on the hill there was a mixed wood.

Karallu vocations were triple: 1. the gathering and export of sardian coral, first of all; 2. an incredible supply of murex gathered in the huge lagoons to extract the purple, which provided the fortune of Phoenician Tyros; 3. the salt gathered at east and west, along the lagoon borders and other marshy grounds, real white gold, international money, the dollar of Antiquity.

Karallu was not only a commercial city but also one which dealt with the preliminary processing of the famous Phoenician purple which allowed the Phoenicians to fill their holds with goods made already precious before the final working was finished in Tyros.

But the economy of Karallu was triple so to speak. In fact it was complex. Where do we put the salted sardines wrapped up to export? With the saltworks monopoly Karallu was able to salt and deliver a large quantity of blue fish (It. sardina), not by chance become famous with the Assyrian term sardum ‘wrapped up fish’ (wrapped up in Sardò, in Sardinia, of course). The baskets for the packing were of asphodel, a Sardian plant that not by chance till now has kept the dialectal name arbùthu < bab. harbūtu.

Karallu had to also be the exporter of all foodstuffs produced in the nearby mountains, for those it was famous, starting with the Pecorino Romano, of which a centuries-old scatterbrained rumor is going about, saying its manufacture to have been taught to Sardians by Romans. Very contradictory, this rumor: why did Romans became affable teachers of a populus (the Ilienses or Iolaenses) they fought continuously in order to relegate them to the mountains? In fact the Pecorino Romano has the same etymology of the Logudorian town Romana and the Sassarian long hill named Rumanedda. Romano doesn’t refer to Romans but is an adjectival of height, high ground, from Hebraic rōmēm ‘high’, rūm ‘height, altitude’. Pecorino Romano therefore means ‘mountain sheep’s milk cheese’.

Karallu had an important harbour. The first port was the beach named Scaffa, by folk-etymology understood as ‘flat boat’ but really coming from bab. kuppu ‘cistern’ (in the sense of excavation that contains water).

But Scaffa is a later toponym in comparison to Santa Gilla. The need for draging the ships to the Santa Gilla calm lagoon, 100 meters beyond the seashore, persuaded them to use tug-men, tow-men (< bab. āgilu, also agillu > Sardian *agilla > gilla, that later became Santa Gilla and Santa Cecilia) on the initiative of bizantine priests. Santa Gilla is the first sign of an industrialization of the port; Scaffa is the second industrialization sign, when the beach was excavated to connect the sea with the lagoon.

Igia (Santa Igia) means the third industrialization. Igia was neither a woman nor holy: it is the adaptation of Akk. īgu ‘excavation’ and is a name that alternates with Gilla, indifferently. The bizantine priests made a tidying up of the misunderstood toponyms, and invented the equivalence Gilla = Igia = Cecilia, taking advantage of the naïve belief of posterity and of our still alive academics, too.

To an important harbour, important traffic. Karallu was reached from all over the Mediterranean. The noise must have been tremendous, in presence of cultic prostitutes, too. In Sardinia there were seventeen cultic prostitution places (referred only to 1900 analyzed toponyms), brothels not built by Phoenicians, since those were scattered all over, in the mountains too. Specifically, the brothels give an historic track which makes understood the road map, in the mountains too.

In Cagliari there were really three places of cultic prostitution. Herodotus I,94, passim, remembered all women must prostitute themselves before their wedding: they had to give themselves to foreigners passing through. Cagliari, which was the busiest Sardinian harbour in the Phoenician age, posted three temples, one at Capo S.Elia, one at Su Siccu on the site of the present Bonaria church, one at Lapola on the site of the present S.Eulalia church.

For Su Siccu etymology, see the book. Lapòla derives from Bab. labû ‘to howl, whine, squeal, cry out’, and the bizantine priests, shocked by the 'advertising cries' coming from the ancient Astarte temple, were moved to even cancel the word. And so they built a church upon this sinful place with a greek name: Eulalia, that was accepted by the crowd since this church, like Lapòla, means ‘chatty’. Afterwards this church acquired the Catalan characteristic.