Wentworth Webster and Julien Vinson

“ After so many centuries of close contact and interpenetration with other peoples, we can hardly expect to find a pure physical type among the present Basques. All that we can expect is to be able to differentiate them from their neighbours. The earliest notice we have of the Basques, by Einhard (778) , speaks of their wonderful agility. The next, the pilgrim of the Codex Calixtinus (12th century) , says the Basques are fairer in face (facie candiliores) than the Navarrese.
Anthropologists no longer rely solely on craniology, and the measurement of the skull, to distinguish race. ”

“ When the old self-sufficient village industries declined, in consequence of the invention of machinery and manufacture elsewhere, the Basques entered at once upon emigration to the agricultural parts of the Americas, and the result has been that the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque probably have never been more prosperous than they are now, and perhaps a new Eskual-herria and a new Eskuara are being built up in the distant lands to which they are such valued immigrants. ”

“ BASQUES, a people inhabiting the three Basque Provinces—Biscay, Álava and Guipúzcoa—and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and Mauléon in France. The number of those who can be considered in any sense pure Basques is probably about 600,000 in Europe, with perhaps 100,000 emigrants in the Americas, chiefly in the region of La Plata in South America. The word Basques is historically derived from Vascones, which, written Wascones, has also given the name Gascons to a very different race. ”

“ There is no aid to be got from folk-tales; none can be considered exclusively Basque and the literature is altogether too modern. The first book printed in Basque, the Linguae Vasconum Primitiae, the poems of Bernard d’Echepare, is dated 1545. The work which is considered the standard of the language is the Protestant translation of the New Testament made by Jean de Liçarrague, under the auspices of Jeanne d’Albret, and printed at La Rochelle in 1571. The pastorales are open-air dramas, like the moralities and mysteries of the middle ages. ”

“ To a man one says: eztakiat (for eztakikat) , “I do not know it, oh man!” moreover, certain dialectic varieties have a respectful form: eztakizut, “I do not know it, you respectable one,” from which also a childish form is derived, eztakichut, “I do not know it, oh child!”
The Basque conjugation appears most complicated, since it incorporates not only the subject pronouns, but, at the same time, the indirect and direct complement. Each transitive form may thus offer twenty-four variations—“he gives it,” “he gives it to you,” “he gives them to us,” &c., &c. ”

“ Basque names abound in the older colonial families, and Basque newspapers have been published in Buenos-Aires and in Los Angeles, California. As soldiers they are splendid marchers; they retain the tenacity and power of endurance which the Romans remarked in the Iberians and Celtiberians. They are better in defence than in attack. ”

“ Ethnology and Anthropology.—The earliest notices of the geography of Spain, from the 5th century B.C., represent Spain as occupied by a congeries of tribes distinguished mainly as Iberi, Celtiberi and Celts. These had no cohesion together, and unless temporarily united against some foreign foe, were at war with one another and were in constant movement; the ruder tribes being driven northwards by the advancing tide of Mediterranean civilization. The tribes in the south in Baetica had, according to Trogus and Strabo, written laws, poems of ancient date and a literature. ”

“ Instead of the plough, the Basques used the laya, a two-pronged short-handled steel digging fork, admirably adapted to small properties, where labour is abundant. They alone of the peoples of western Europe have preserved specimens of almost every class of dance known to primitive races. ”

“ Neither markedly brachycephalous nor dolichocephalous, the skull has yet certain peculiarities. In the conjunction of the whole physical qualities, says Collignon, there is a Basque type, differing from all those he has studied in Europe and northern Africa. There are differences of type among themselves, yet, when they emigrate to South America, French and Spanish Basques are known simply as Basques, distinct from all other races.
On the origin of the Basques, the chief theories are:— (1) that they are descended from the tribes whom the Greeks and Latins called Iberi ”

“ The feast of Corpus Christi instituted by Pope Urban IV. (1262) still appears in Basque almanacs as Phesta-berria, the New Feast. The earliest notice that we have of them speaks of their liberality to the clergy; yet with all this religious conservatism they have never allowed themselves to be priest-ridden. They constantly resisted the attempts of the crown to force upon them the authority of the Spanish bishops. When Ferdinand the Catholic came to Biscay in 1477 to swear to the fueros, he was compelled to send back the bishop of Pamplona whom he had brought with him. ”

“ Of these suffixes some are joined to the definite, others to the indefinite noun, or even to both.
The personal pronouns, which to a superficial observer appear closely related to those of the Semitic or Hamitic languages, are ni, “I”; hi, “thou”; gu, “we”; zu, “you” in modern times, zu has become a polite form of “thou,” and a true plural “you” (i.e. more than one) has been formed by suffixing the pluralizing sign k—zuek. The pronouns of the third person are mere demonstratives. ”

“ In civil institutions and in the tenures of property the legal position of women was very high. The eldest born, whether boy or girl, inherited the ancestral property, and this not only among the higher classes but among the peasantry also. ”

“ In the fueros an insult done to a woman, or in the presence of a woman, is punished more severely than a similar offence among men. This did not prevent women from working as hard as, or even harder than, the men. ”

“ It was paid in a lump sum, and the repartition and levying were left entirely in the hands of the junta and the municipalities.
As a further precaution against the inroads of absolutism, no lawyer was allowed to be a deputy to the junta and all clergy were likewise excluded. The Basques considered that men of these professions would be always on the side of tyranny. ”

“ Hervé) and through the ancient Libyans, from a people depicted on the Egyptian monuments; (3) the Atlantic theory, that they belong to a lost Atlantic continent, whose inhabitants were represented by the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and by a fair race on the western coast of Africa; (4) that they are an indigenous race, who have never had any greater extension than their present quarters.
The remains of prehistoric races hitherto discovered in Spain throw little light on the subject, but some skulls found in southeastern Spain in the age of metal resemble the Basque skulls of Zaraus. ”

“ They are a highly religious people, eminently conservative in their religious practices. In religion alone, through Ignatius de Loyola of Guipúzcoa and Francis Xavier of Navarre, they have left their mark upon Europe. ”