The Iberian peninsula presented Rome, as it does moderns today, with a wide variety of people living within its confines. The Mediterranean coast and its hinterland were inhabited by the Iberians, a sophisticated, town-dwelling race speaking an as yet undeciphered group of non-Indo-European languages with their own distinctive script. The Iberians were capable of spectacular works of plastic art, the best known being the funerary statue, the Dama de Eleche. In addition to this people, the area had been heavily settled by colonists from Phoenicia and Carthage, particularly in the period after the first Punic War (264-241 bc) when the Barcids established a Carthaginian empire in the region. The most notable and oldest of these Phoenician settlements was Gades, the modern Cadiz, a foundation which predated Carthage herself. The depth of Punic settlement along the southern coast led Agrippa when compiling his map of the world in the Augustan period to come to the opinion that “this entire coast was inhabited by Phoenicians” (Pliny HN 3.1.8).
The central areas of Spain were occupied by the Celtiberians. Held in antiquity to be a racial blend of Celts and Iberians, modern scholarship prefers to see this group as Celts who adopted many features of Iberian civilization, including the Iberians’ script in which they wrote their own Indo-European language (Fernandez Castro 1995). While a more pastoral people than the Iberians, they too possessed urban centers of some sophistication, such as the fortified site at Numantia, near modern Soria. The north and west of the peninsula were the preserve of Celtic tribes, dwelling in characteristic round-house settlements known as castros, such as that found at Citania de Briteiros in northern Portugal (for Celtiberians, Witt, the “celts,” section 2d).
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
World History
