Sicels

The Sicels (ˈsɪkəlz,_ˈsɪsəlz ; Siculī) were an Indo-European tribe who inhabited eastern Sicily during the Iron Age. Their neighbours to the west were the Sicani. The Sicels gave Sicily the name that it has held since antiquity, but they rapidly fused into the culture of Magna Graecia. Archaeological excavation has shown some Mycenean influence on Bronze Age Sicily. The earliest literary mention of Sicels is in the Odyssey. Homer also mentions Sicania, but makes no distinctions: "they were (from) a faraway place and a faraway people and apparently they were one and the same" for Homer, Robin Lane Fox notes. It is possible that the Sicels and the Sicani of the Iron Age had consisted of an Illyrian population who (as with the Messapians) had imposed themselves on a native, Pre-Indo-European ("Mediterranean") population. Thucydides and other classical writers were aware of the traditions according to which the Sicels had once lived in Central Italy, east and even north of Rome. Thence they were dislodged by Umbrian and Sabine tribes, and finally crossed into Sicily. Their social organization appears to have been tribal, economically and agriculturally. According to Diodorus Siculus, after a series of conflicts with the Sicani, the river Salso was declared the boundary between their respective territories. The common assumption is that the Sicels were more recent arrivals, had introduced the use of iron into Bronze Age Sicily and brought the domesticated horse. That would date their arrival on the island to the early 1st millennium BC. However, there is some evidence that the ethnonym may predate the Iron Age, based on the name Shekelesh given to one of the Sea Peoples in the Great Karnak Inscription in the 5th year of Merneptah's reign ( 1207 BC). The name Shekelesh is also cited in a wall relief at Medinet Habu (Ramses III mortuary temple), with picture and writings describing the second invasion within a 30 years' period by the "sea peoples" in the 8th year of Ramses III's reign (1177 BC or 1186 BC, historians differ between these two dates).