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Sardinia (Sardigna, Sardinna or Sardinnia in the Sardinian language, Sardegna in Italian, Sardenya in Catalan), is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, between Italy, France and Tunisia, south of Corsica.
Sardinia has an area of 24,090 km2 and a population of 1.65 million. It was called "Ichnusa" by the Phoenicians and "Sandalyon" by the Greeks because of its shape, recalling a footprint.
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The traditional Sardinian flag
Several gold and silver mines operate on the island.
The Sardinian economy is today focused on tourism, industry, commerce, services and information technology; an increasing income is coming from its famous wines and gastronomy.
In Prehistory Sardinia's inhabitants developed a trade in obsidian, a stone used for the production of the first rough tools, and this activity brought Sardinians into contact with most of the Mediterranean peoples.
In the age from Neolithic times to the Roman Empire, the Nuragic civilisation took shape on the island. Still today, more than 7,000 Nuraghe survive. It is speculated that the mysterious Shardana people landed in Sardinia coming from the eastern Mediterranean Sea, in about the 20th century BC. Very little is known about this people, whose name (which probably means the People of the Sea) has been found in some Egyptian inscriptions, and most hypotheses are developed following some linguistic studies; according to these, the town of Sardis (Lydia) would have been their starting point from which they would have reached the Tyrrhenian Sea, dividing into what were to become the Sardinians and the Etruscans.
However most theories regarding the original population of Sardinia have been formulated prior to genetics research and in the traditional frame of east-west movements. Genetics has now shown that Sardinians are a pre-Indo-European population different from all surrounding and much younger groups. The density, extensiveness and mere size of the architectural remains from the Neolithic, pointing to a considerable population of the island, together with recent theories about the location of the Hercules Columns, reverse the question into where Sardinians did land, or where the Shardana settled besides the known Egyptian destination.
A Roman and later Byzantine province, the island was divided from the 9th to 12th century among four independent Giudicati, which fell to the Kingdom of Aragon in 1323-1409: the giudicato of Arborea was the last to fall. The autochthonous population of the city of Alghero (S'Alighera in Sardinian, L'Alguer in Catalan) was expelled and the city repopulated by the Catalan invaders, whose descendants speak Catalan to this day.
See also: History of Sardinia
Sardinia is also a place in the State of Ohio in the United States of America; see Sardinia, Ohio.
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