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The Portuguese people (Portuguese: Portugueses – masculine – or Portuguesas) are a Romance-speaking ethnic group and nation indigenous to Portugal, a country that occupies the west side of the Iberian Peninsula in south-west Europe, who share culture, ancestry and language.
In what is today's mainland Portugal territory, before the rule of the Roman Empire, several peoples and tribes were living there for many centuries and they had their own culture, language and political organization (tribal chiefdoms, tribal confederations and early forms of kingdoms and states), these peoples and tribes were in the Iron Age.
The history of Portugal can be traced from circa 400,000 years ago, when the region of present-day Portugal was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis.. The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted almost two centuries, led to the establishment of the provinces of Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north of what is now Portugal.
The name of Portugal itself reveals much of the country's early history, stemming from the Roman name Portus Cale, a Latin name meaning "Port of Cale" (Cale likely is a word of Celtic origin - Cailleach-Bheur her other name; the Mother goddess of the Celtic people as in Calais, Caledonia, Beira.
The Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin spoken by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. Old Galician, also known as Medieval Portuguese, began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Germanic invasions, also known as barbarian invasions, in the 5th century, and started appearing in ...
The complete Romanization of Portugal, intensified during the rule of Augustus, took three centuries and was stronger in Southern Portugal, most of which were administrative dependencies of the Roman city of Pax Julia, currently known as Beja. The city was named Pax Julia in honour of Julius Caesar and to celebrate peace in Lusitania. Augustus ...
The Kurgan hypothesis (also called a theory or model) argues that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" (a term grouping the Yamnaya or Pit Grave culture and its predecessors and successor in the Pontic steppe from the 6th to late 4th millennia BCE) were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language.
Galicia, northern Portugal, Asturias, western León, and Zamora formed a single megalithic area since [clarification needed] the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Ages (also called the Copper Age), around 4500–1500 BC. This was the first great culture to appear in Galicia, with a great capacity for construction and architecture.