Aquitani

The Aquitani (also Aquitanians; Ancient Greek: Ἀκουιτανοί, romanized: Akouitanoí) were a group of peoples dwelling in the south-west of Gaul, between the Garonne, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic Ocean, during the late Iron Age and the Roman period. Caesar set them apart from the Gauls and the Belgae by their language, institutions and laws, and Strabo held that they resembled the Iberians rather than the Gauls in both language and physique. Their indigenous language, Aquitanian, is recorded almost entirely through personal and divine names in Latin inscriptions. It was closely related to Basque and is generally taken for an early form or close relative of it. Many of the region's divine names show the same Basque affinity, alongside a Celtic layer. The Aquitani belonged to a cultural area that straddled the western Pyrenees and kept close ties with the peoples of northern Iberia. In the late Iron Age this area stood apart from Celtic Gaul in its material culture, marked by handmade pottery and by a coinage of silver and bronze rather than gold. Politically they were a mosaic of many small peoples and never formed a single state. Their shared identity found its main expression in the coalition raised against Rome in 56 BC, when Caesar's legate Publius Crassus conquered them. Under Augustus the name Aquitania was extended to a much larger, largely Gaulish-speaking province, and the older, ethnic Aquitania was later restored as Novempopulania.