SICILY HISTORY
Archaeologists suggest that the earliest known inhabitants of Sicily left their imprint in cave paintings and
incised drawings such as at the Grotta dell’Addaura on the north side of Monte Pellegrino, near Palermo
on the island’s northern coast during the last stage of the Ice Age (7000BC). These earliest settlers did not
move inland from the coast of Sicily, but we know little else about them. The earliest people of Sicily
whose lifestyles and cultures are understood, and from whom the name of the island derives, were the
Sicanians and the Sikels, and the Elymians and the Phoenicians, who together inhabited Sicily from about
1500-800BC. The Sicanians inhabited the north and the interior, Sikels the east, the Elymi the northwestern tip, and the Semitic Phoenicians, the west and rest of the north-west. These peoples were
themselves settlers rather than indigenous to the island, variously coming to Sicily as Etruscans from the
Italian mainland, Greece, Anatolia, and northern Africa (from what is now Tunisia), the last of these
perhaps driven here by the progressive desiccation of the Sahara region. Although the Sicans were more
belligerent than the generally pacific Sikels and Elymians, and the Phoenicians in Sicily more interested in
trade than colonization, these culturally and racially diverse peoples lived in comparative harmony in their
respective areas of the island. Their existence the beginnings of Sicilian Italian history. They were almost
certainly the traders and adventurers on the island referred to by Virgil in the Odyssey.
History of Catania
The population of Sicels named their village after geographical attributes of the places. The Sicilian
word, katane, means "grater, skinning place". This name was adopted by Greek colonists. Other
translations: "