Iberians

“ The Iberians—a general name for the short dark people who still form the greater part of the nations. They had stone weapons, and lived in tribes; they became subject to later invaders, but gradually became free. ”

“ The word ‘Iberian’, as used by ethnologists, is not always confined to the Iberians of history, that is, the inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula and of Southern Gaul between the Pyrenees and the Rhône:1683 it is often loosely applied to a people, possessing certain common physical features, who inhabited various parts of the Mediterranean basin, and, according to some writers, notably Sergi,1684 penetrated in late quaternary and neolithic times into almost every country of Europe. ”

“ When the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle huts, or even with the burial mounds, of the Iberian race. ”

“ They are things native to all our European race when it lives simply. A little knowledge of Europe will teach us that there was nothing novel or peculiar in such customs. They appear universally among the Iberians as among the Celts, among the pure Germans beyond the Rhine, the mixed Franks and Batavians upon the delta of that river, and the lowlands of the Scheldt and the Meuse; even among the untouched Roman populations. ”

“ The organisation of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence.
From the earliest dawn of history the centre of Spanish life, the unit of government, the birthplace of tradition, and the focus of patriotism have been the town. A Spaniard’s pueblo means infinitely more to him than his town means to an Englishman or a Frenchman. ”

“ The Iberians had their original seat of civilisation in the south; they thence moved northward along the coast of the Mediterranean, penetrating as far as the Alps and the Apennines. These original elements of the population were joined by colonists from the great commercial peoples of the Mediterranean. Cadiz and Malaga were founded by the Phœnicians, Cartagena by the Carthaginians, Sagonte by immigrants from Zacynthe, Rosas is a Rhodian colony, and the ruins of Ampurias recall the Emporium of the Massilians. ”

“ And I, do I know, perchance whether I am Greek or Iberian? My grandfather was a freedman from Sicily who came to take charge of a pottery and married a Celtiberian from the interior. My mother was a Lusitanian who came here on an expedition to sell gold dust to merchants from Alexandria. I call myself a Saguntine like all the rest. Those who consider themselves Iberians in Saguntum believe in the gods of the Greeks; the Greeks unconsciously adopt many Iberian customs; they think themselves different because they have divided the city in half and live separate ”

“ They pour down into Iberian Hindustan. They are strong, and the Gods are leading them; the Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire. The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not likely to. In their contests with the invaders of India, they have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong ”

“ Following them came a race, the fragments of which were powerful within historic days in the Iberian peninsula,—the Iberians of the Roman writers—the Basques of to-day. Then came from the east the Aryan race, hitherto the highest form of humanity. These races do not, of course, begin existence as new creations. They are developed from—their first members must be born from—the preceding race. ”

“ Within a hundred years, however, in spite of numerous drawbacks, the wealth of the country has vastly increased, and the population has nearly doubled.
“The Spaniards are the descendants of various races, tribes, and nations. At the dawn of history, we find the country in possession of the Iberians and Celts. Of the Iberians we know but little. From them Spain received its ancient name, Iberia; and the Iberus River, now the Ebro, took the name by which, with slight changes, it is still known. ”

“ The Celts were the first to arrive in the West, where they seized upon lands in Spain, in Gaul, and in Britain, which the Iberians had occupied before them. They did not, however, destroy the Iberians altogether. However careful a conquering tribe maybe to preserve the purity of its blood, it rarely succeeds in doing so. The conquerors (p. 006) are sure to preserve some of the men of the conquered race as slaves, and a still larger number of young and comely women who become the mothers of their children. ”

“ From Strabo we learn that the Iberians “do not attend to ease or luxury, unless any one considers it can add to the happiness of their lives to wash themselves and their wives in stale urine kept in tanks, and to rinse their teeth with it, which they say is the custom both [204] with the Cantabrians and their neighbors.” ”

“ Yet here is again a confusion of the two opposite poles in the tradition. [Pg 367] In no instance where a national migration has taken place, is the invading people to be found in scattered spots; but the inhabitants of such districts, especially in mountains, are the remnants of the ancient population which has emigrated, or been changed. Among the Celtiberians, the Iberians prevail; the Celts are the indigenous people which amalgamated with the Iberians who broke in from Africa: there may have arisen a sort of mixed language ”

“ By whatever route and at whatever epoch the Iberians came into the south-west of Gaul, they abide there still in the department of the Lower Pyrenees, under the name of Basques; a people distinct from all its neighbors in features, costume, and especially language, which resembles none of the present languages of Europe, contains many words which are to be found in the names of rivers, mountains, and towns of olden Spain, and which presents a considerable analogy to the idioms, ancient and modern, of certain peoples of northern Africa. ”

“ The sea, the Ebro, and the Pyrenees, form the natural boundaries and bulwarks of the Spanish Basque provinces. Favoured by these defences, the three provinces were the natural and safe refuge of the Iberians, when hunted by various conquerors from the plains of southern and middle Spain. ”

“ For while no facts can be brought forward in direct contradiction of the assumption that the Iberians were a short dark dolichocephalic population occupying the Iberian peninsula in the Stone Age, and speaking a non-Indo-European language, no such generalisations with regard to race, physical type, culture, geographical distribution or language are accepted for the Ligurians. Some, with Sergi [1051] , consider the Ligurians merely as another branch of the Mediterranean race. ”

“ Celtiberians and Iberians with gloomy dress and tangled hair, looking suspiciously in all directions, and instinctively raising their hands to their broad knives; some redmen from Gaul, with long mustaches and coarse red hair tied behind and falling down their necks; people, in fine, who had come, or had been flung by the hazards of war and the sea, from one point of the known world to another, one day victorious warriors, and slaves the next, now sailors and anon pirates, acknowledging no law nor nationality ”

“ The first peoples of whom we have actual knowledge are the Iberians and Ligurians. The Basques who now inhabit both sides of the Pyrenean range are probably the last representatives of the Iberians, who came from Spain to settle between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay. The Ligurians, who exhibited the hard cunning characteristic of the Genoese Riviera, must have been descendants of that Indo-European vanguard who occupied all northern Italy and the centre and south-east Iberians and Ligurians. ”

“ He wrote this in 98 A.D., and would have heard it from Agricola himself, who was many years in Britain. No doubt, there was a likeness; but there is another explanation of it—the Iberians had once migrated westward like the Celts, and some of them migrated into Britain and others into Spain. That seems more likely than migration here from Spain.
In the Colonies and India there are races quite impervious to our civilization and living in their own ancestral way; and I imagine that these natives lived their own lives here regardless of the way the Romans lived. ”

“ In the first place I will remark that, supposing this proved, the Basques, or, if you will, the Iberians, would not be the less isolated; for how could the Iberian, any more than the Basque, be allied to the Keltic or to the Carthaginian? But this Iberian theory is not yet at all proved, and it will be easy to show it to be so in a few words. It reposes first of all on the following à priori—the Iberians have occupied all Spain and the south of Gaul, but the Escuara lives still at the foot of the Pyrénées; therefore the Escuara is a remnant of the language of the Iberians. ”

“ The brave peoples of the middle and eastern Caucasus saw with indignation the remote Occidentals encamping on their territory. There—in the fertile and well-watered tableland of the modern Georgia—dwelt the Iberians, a brave, well-organized, agricultural nation, whose clan-cantons under their patriarchs cultivated the soil according to the system of common possession, without any separate ownership of the individual cultivators. Army and people were one ”

“ The notion that the migratory conquests of antiquity resulted in the displacement of one population by another is one of the favourite illusions of popular history. In Spain no doubt the Celtic element was relatively less numerous than in Gallia Celtica, and also perhaps the Celtic civilisation became less dominant, for the Iberians were in touch more or less with another and still more highly developed civilisation, that of the Phœnicians. ”

“ As if war and rivalry were a permanent attribute of the species, when the curtain first rises upon Europe, it is a struggle of races that is discernible through the gloom. A dark-skinned race, long settled in the land, are fighting doggedly with a fair-skinned race of invaders from the East. The dark-skins were worsted, but still survive—definitely in detached groups, and indefinitely as a leaven to entire populations. That dark-skinned race have been called Iberians,—the fair-skinned new-comers were the Indo-Germans, headed by the Gaels or Celts. ”

“ Their ethnic affinities are not known, and our knowledge of their history is comparatively slight. It is almost impossible to make any statement in regard to them which will meet with general agreement. At the same time, the general lines of Iberian controversy are clear enough The principal sources of information about the Iberians are (1) historical, (2) numismatic, (3) linguistic, (4) anthropological.
1. Historical.—The name seems to have been applied by the earlier Greek navigators to the peoples who inhabited the eastern coast of Spain ”

“ They were spreading southward from the Aryan region of origin. They seem to have been a fair people, newcomers in Greece, newcomers to a land that had been held hitherto by a darker people, people who are now supposed to have belonged to a dark white “aboriginal” race, a “Mediterranean” people allied to those Iberians whom the Kelts pressed westward, and to the Hamitic white people of North Africa. ”

“ The ancient Iberians appear to have reached Spain from Chaldea across Africa; the Phoenicians and Carthaginians had flourishing colonies in the peninsula, and, in later times, the Moors possessed a large portion of the country for a century, and ruled with great splendor, a state of things leading to a mixture of race. Thus Spanish blood has three distinct times been abundantly crossed with that of Africa. The warm climate of the peninsula must also largely contribute to render its inhabitants fit for life in the tropics. ”

“ The simple formula, pre-Aryan, Aryan, non-Aryan, affords the key to the historical development of European ethnology. PRE-ARYAN PEOPLES. Of the presumably pre-Aryan peoples of western Europe the Iberians occupy easily the first place. The seat of this people at the dawn of history was in Spain and southern France; their ethnology belongs entirely to the realm of conjecture. They are of much darker complexion than the Aryans and their racial characteristic is conservatism even to stubbornness, which places them in marked contrast to their immediate Aryan neighbors, the volatile Celts. ”

“ Gr. ii. 34) , and by the time of Strabo it was the common Greek name for the Spanish peninsula. Iberians thus meant sometimes the population of the peninsula in general and sometimes, it would appear, the peoples of some definite race (γένος) which formed one element in that population. Of the tribal distribution of this race, of its linguistic, social and political characteristics, and of the history of its relation to the other peoples of Spain, we have only the most general, fragmentary and contradictory accounts. ”

“ Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and spears, clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured stones or pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians or Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands. ”