thumb|Ethnolinguistic map of Italy in the [[Iron Age, before the Roman expansion and conquest of Italy.]]
The Umbri were an ancient people, considered an Italic people, attested during the Iron Age in inner central Italy, approximately between the middle Tiber river and the central Apennines. A region called Umbria still exists and is now occupied by Italian speakers. It is somewhat smaller than the ancient Umbria. Most ancient Umbrian cities were settled in the 9th-4th centuries BCE on easily defensible hilltops. Umbria was bordered by the Tiber and Nar rivers and included the Apennine slopes on the Adriatic. The ancient Umbrian language belongs to the Osco-Umbrian branch of the Italic languages, an Indo-European subfamily that also includes the Latino-Faliscan languages.
Origins
Ancient sources
Herodotus, writing in the 5th-century BCE, provides the earliest literary mention of the Umbrian people, stating that they inhabited the region prior to the supposed migration of the Tyrrhenians from Lydia and into Italy. However, modern scholars agree that Herodotus' account is not based on real events. Moreover, there is no archeological evidence for a migration of the Lydians into Etruria. Ancient Roman writers thought the Umbri to be of Gaulish origin; Cornelius Bocchus wrote that they were descended from an ancient Gaulish tribe. Livy suggested that the Insubres, another Gaulish tribe, might be connected; their Celtic name Isombres could possibly mean "Lower Umbrians," or inhabitants of the country below Umbria. Similarly Roman historian Cato the Elder, in his masterpiece Origines, defines the Gauls as "the progenitors of the Umbri". Plutarch wrote that the name might be a different way of writing the name of a northern European tribe, the Ambrones, and that both ethnonyms were cognate with "King of the Boii". The presence of the same Ambrones among the Celto-Ligurian populations of Northern Italy, seems to strengthen the connection between the Umbri and the Celts of the Po Valley.
Pliny the Elder wrote concerning the folk-etymology of the name: