Iberia

Bora Iberian currency.

Iberia is the name by which the Greeks knew from remote times what we know today as the Iberian Peninsula. The Greek historian Herodotus (circa 484-425 BC) already cites the place name Iberia to designate the peninsula, which is known throughout the Greek world.

Introduction

The term Iberia to define what is now the Iberian Peninsula has come down to us through Greek texts, just as the term Hispania is in Latin, although the Romans also used it at the beginning the place name of Iberia, and they even added an "h": Hiberia.

Its name comes from the Íber river, probably the current Ebro, although it could also be another river in the province of Huelva, where very old texts mention an Iberus river and a town they call Iberians.

Getting to know the Iberian Peninsula as a geographical entity was a slow process, with setbacks and legendary stories. The distance from the focus of ancient culture was notable and we do not know what knowledge the Greeks and Phoenicians might have had of their geography. The interest of both towns in those times was simply economic, therefore it is assumed that perhaps they would have enough information about the coast and some inland regions.

Historians believe that the Phoenician people handled geographical data of great interest to them and that there were even texts with abundant information. It is known that in the first century B.C. C., the wise and erudite King Juba of Mauritania managed to gather a large library with Phoenician texts and literature, and that in the year 100 of our era, the Greek geographer Marino de Tiro (Phoenicia), had a large collection of material to be able to compose his map of the orb, a map that was of great use to the scientist Claudius Ptolemy. But neither the Greeks nor the Romans paid much attention to these writings and did not preserve or translate them, and this is one of the reasons why they have not reached our days.

The place name Iberia

Bullet.

The name Iberia (ancient Greek Ἰβηρία Ibēríā), at first, only referred to a small part of the peninsula: it was only a small part of the current Huelva.

In the time of the Greek historian Polybius, who was in Numantia in the 2nd century B.C. C., Iberia was only the Mediterranean coastal part of the peninsula. Later the geographical criterion prevailed more than the ethnic one and at the end of the 1st century B.C. C., Strabo already called the peninsula Iberia, geographically (in his work Geography he tells everything he knows about Iberia in earlier times, but says that in his time the limit was already in the Pyrene). Appian, in the mid-century II, wrote that the peninsula was "now called Hispania instead of Iberia by some".

It is known that there were Iberian tribes in the south of Montpellier in the 6th century BC. C., and that in the V century B.C. C. Aeschylus (Greek playwright) wrote that "the Rhone ran through Iberia".

In the fifth century B.C. C., the Greek historian Herodotus, in his work Histories, already cites the place name Iberia to designate the peninsula, although earlier that term was used by the Tartessians to define their territory. It is considered that the name comes from an Íber river, which perhaps was not originally the Ebro, but a homonymous one from the Huelva area (perhaps the Tinto river), where certain texts mention an Iberus river, and a town, which They are called Iberian, since both the Greeks and the Punics knew the southern coasts of the peninsula earlier and better than the Levantine ones.

The ancient Greek world knows by this name the limits of the Ecumene, from the Greek oikumene (oιkoυμενη) or «known world»: to the west, Iberia the peninsula; to the east the Caucasian Iberia, since the same Strabo also called Iberians to another people in present-day Georgia. The Maritsa river in Bulgaria is also called 'Evros', and in Turkish 'Meriç', the root would mean 'drink', and as in the peninsula there a few rivers called today 'Flumen', river in Latin, would find place names similar to "Ebro" from Caucasian to peninsular Iberia, as there is a river "Muga", 'border' In Basque, in the Eastern Pyrenees, the Jalón river played the same role as a border between Celtiberians and Baskos. Whether there is any relationship between these two Iberian peoples or whether it is just a coincidence of names is an open question.

It is believed that the word iber is of Iberian origin, as this town named rivers in general. This is how the Tinto river was called and this must also be the name of the current Ebro, which has retained the place name. From Andalusia to the Rhône there is a large family of rivers that somehow preserve the iber. The place name Iliberris or Ileberris, which occurs both in Narbonensis and in Granada, is recognizable in the Basque language, and refers to a city and a river, but it has not yet been It has been proven that Ibero was an ancestral language of Basque.

Geography of Iberia

During the 5th, 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. C., the time of the least number of trips by the Greeks, the news that the classical world has about the Iberian Peninsula is quite vague and sometimes even false.

When the Romans arrived on the peninsula, the entire Mediterranean coast was already considered Iberia.

The Greeks knew very specific points like the Strait of Gibraltar, which they called Stelai (it was understood Heracleous). Stelai is Greek for “columns”, which is why the Romans translated it and called the place Columnae Herculis (“Pillars of Hercules”). They also knew the Pyrenees, which they called Pyrene, in the singular. They had an unreal idea of the orientation of the mountain range, which they located in a north-south direction.

Polybius was a Greek historian of the 2nd century BC. C. who lived for a time on the peninsula. Polybius literally says:

It is called Iberia to the part that falls on Our Sea (Mediterranean), from the columns of Heracles. But the part that falls to the Great Sea or the Outer Sea (Atlantic), has no common name to all of it, because it has been recently recognized.

Polibio

The first three treatises on the geography of Iberia were written by Mela (in Latin), Pliny the Elder (in Latin) and Strabo (in Greek). Mela and Pliny, according to Strabo's account, got to know the north and northwest coasts very well. Strabo, on the other hand, was never in the peninsula. Everything he wrote was drawn from the sources of numerous geographers and historians plus the great information he received from the military and people from the administration of Rome. His writings are perhaps less scientific in terms of the terms used, but they are the most entertaining and the ones that have best reached our days. He wrote a good treatise called Geography, the third volume of which is dedicated to tracing the details of the Iberian Peninsula: rivers, mountains, limits, coasts, populations, cities, crops, cultural traits, navigators, settlers... This is where he uses the term bull skin: «Iberia looks like a bull skin, stretched out along its length from West to East, so that the front part faces East and in the direction of its breadth from the north to the south».

The fourth of the writers who dedicated their knowledge to the geographical description of Iberia was the scientist Claudio Ptolemy, a century after the previous ones. In his famous geographical tables, he offers an almost complete picture with an infinite number of place names. Ptolemy is the one that guarantees the greatest geographical and mathematical interest.

These four writers are the basis of geographical knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula in antiquity.

Demographics

Ethnography

Thanks to the classical Greco-Roman authors we have extensive lists of peoples and ethnic groups of the peninsula, although the data on their historical and phylogenetic relationships are often unclear.

Languages

Iberia linguistic groups towards 300 a. C.

Iberia as defined in Greek documents was a region that was culturally diverse and linguistically diverse as well. The languages of the region are considerably worse documented than those of ancient Italy, so their exact number is unknown and the mutual intelligibility between the speeches of different peoples is not known. In general terms, the languages of Iberia can be grouped into three groups:

• Languages of colonizerswhich would basically have been used extensively near the coast and commercial enclaves
• Indo-European indigenous languages, among these are the Spanish-language languages that were phylogenetically related, lusitano and sorotaptic (conjected on the basis of toponyms) and the former European (conjected on the basis of hydronimos).
• Preindo-European indigenous languages that would not form a phylogenetic group and probably represent different linguistic families: tartésica-turdetánica, vasco-aquitaine and Iberian.

Quotes

Strabo refers to the Iberian Peninsula:

With the name of Iberia the first Greeks designated the whole country from the Rhodanos and the isthmus that comprise the Gallic Gulfs; while the Greeks today place their limit on the Pyrene and say that the designations of Iberia and Hispania are synonymous.

Strabon, Geografica III, 4, 19

However, earlier, in the second book, Strabo refers to the Caucasian Iberians:

We can talk about things concerning those who inhabit the Kaukasos region, the Iberians.

Strabon, Geografica II, 5, 12