The Iberians

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Two kilometers south of Elche, on the low alluvial shelf the Vinalopó river lays down before it reaches the sea, a farm laborer named Manuel Campello Esclápez struck stone with his hoe in August 1897. What he uncovered was a limestone bust of a woman, life-sized, wearing a tiered headdress and two great spoked wheels of ornament clamped over her ears. Paint still clung to her in places — red on the lips, traces of color in the folds of cloth carved as if it were textile. The back of the head had been hollowed into a cavity. She had been made to hold the ashes of the dead. Within weeks she had passed into a French collector’s hands and crossed the Pyrenees; she would not return to Spain until 1941. The woman of Elche is the single most famous object the Iberians left, and almost everything that makes her arresting — the Mediterranean poise of the face, the wholly un-Greek apparatus of the headdress, the funerary purpose hidden in the back of the skull — is the culture in miniature: a people of the western shore who took the eastern Mediterranean into themselves and gave it back transformed.

The Iberians are the Iron Age peoples of the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, flourishing from roughly the sixth to the first century BCE along an arc that ran from the Hérault in southern Gaul, down the Mediterranean littoral of what is now Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia and eastern Andalusia, and around to the lower Guadalquivir. They were never a nation. The name is a convenience the Greeks gave first to the people near the river Iber (the Ebro) and then to the whole stretch of related cultures; the Iberians themselves lived in a mosaic of distinct peoples, each with its own territory, its own coinage in time, its own dynasts. The classical writers preserve their names — the Contestani around Alicante and Murcia, the Edetani around Valencia, the Bastetani in the southeast, the Ilergetes and Indigetes and Layetani in the northeast, the Oretani and Turdetani inland and to the south. What bound them was not a state but a shared material and religious world: the same script, the same pottery koine, the same hilltop towns, the same gods received at the same kind of sanctuary.

From the Bronze Age into iron

The Iberian world did not appear from nothing. It rose over a deep Bronze Age substrate — in the southeast, the heir of the jar-burial culture of El Argar and the societies that followed it — and the threshold between that older world and the Iberian one falls in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, the period archaeologists in Spain call the Orientalizing horizon. The catalyst came by sea. From shortly after 800 BCE, traders of the Phoenician cities planted footholds along the southern coast, at Gadir on the Atlantic and at a string of factory-towns down the Andalusian shore; their religion, the civic cults of Tyre and Sidon carrying the old Canaanite gods Baal and Astarte, traveled with their cargoes. From the sixth century the Greeks of Phocaea added a second current of contact at their colony Emporion on the northeast coast. The indigenous Late Bronze Age communities did not merely receive these contacts; they reacted to them with force and speed. Within a few generations they had taken up the potter’s wheel, iron metallurgy, the olive and the vine, monumental stone sculpture, the alphabet, and the habit of living in dense fortified towns. The result, crystallizing after about 600 BCE, was the Iberian culture proper — an indigenous synthesis, eastern in many of its techniques and wholly its own in their use. This is the entry into the Iron Age on the western edge of the Mediterranean, and the Iberians are its most articulate western expression.

A literate culture, half-read

The most consequential thing the Iberians took from their eastern neighbors was writing. By the fifth century they were inscribing their own language in scripts of their own devising — and they are, with the Etruscans of Italy, among the few peoples of the ancient western Mediterranean to leave a native literate record at all. The system is unusual. The principal script, the northeastern or Levantine Iberian, is neither a pure alphabet nor a pure syllabary but a hybrid: vowels and continuant consonants each have a single sign, while the stop consonants are written with syllabic signs that fuse consonant and following vowel into one character. A second variety, the southeastern script, runs right to left as the Phoenician alphabet does and remains only partly resolved; a third, the Greco-Iberian, simply adapts the Ionian Greek alphabet to write Iberian outright. Some scripts carry a so-called dual refinement in which an added stroke distinguishes voiced from voiceless stops.

The phonetic decipherment is largely settled. The Spanish scholar Manuel Gómez-Moreno cracked the sound-values of the northeastern signary in the 1920s, and later work — the recognition of the dual system, the fine-tuning by Joan Ferrer i Jané — has carried the reading nearly to completion. The strange consequence is that scholars can now pronounce thousands of Iberian words and understand almost none of them. The language is not related to Latin, to Greek, to Celtic, or to any living tongue; its kinship, if it has one, is unproven. So an inscribed lead plaque or a coin legend can be voiced aloud and still withhold its meaning. The great corpus that gathers this material, Jürgen Untermann’s Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum assembled across the second half of the twentieth century, is therefore a paradox among reference works: an exhaustive edition of texts that can be read but not yet translated.

Towns, trade, and the metal of war

Iberian life centered on the oppidum, the fortified hilltop town. Sites such as Ullastret in the northeast, the Puente Tablas town above Jaén, and the Bastida de les Alcusses near Valencia show planned streets, cisterns, ramparts with towers and gateways, and houses of stone footing and mudbrick. These were not villages but small urban centers, each commanding its territory and, in the wealthier cases, minting silver from the third century onward. Around them lay an economy of cereal agriculture, the vine and the olive, and — the engine of Iberian wealth — mining and metallurgy. The southeast and the Sierra Morena held silver, lead, copper and iron in abundance, and Iberian smiths turned that iron into the falcata, the forward-curving single-edged sword whose quality the Romans came to respect at close range.

The Iberians were Mediterranean traders before they were anything else. Their painted pottery — pale wheel-thrown wares decorated in dark slip with geometric bands, vegetal scrolls, and crowded scenes of warriors, riders, dancers and fantastic beasts — was exported across the western sea, turning up in southern France, Sardinia, Sicily and North Africa. In return came Attic black- and red-figure vases, Punic amphorae of wine and salt fish, and a steady traffic of ideas. The contact was never one-way absorption; the imported Greek vase and the locally painted urn sat in the same Iberian house, and the foreign god arrived to be reworked in native terms.

The sculptors’ achievement

It is in stone that the Iberians speak most clearly across the silence of their language. From the fifth and fourth centuries they carved large-scale limestone sculpture of a quality found nowhere else in the pre-Roman west outside Etruria. The Lady of Elche is the masterpiece, but she stands among others: the Lady of Baza, a seated woman enthroned on a winged chair, her body hollowed to receive the cremated remains of an aristocratic woman of the Bastetani who died around 380 BCE; the Lady of Guardamar, recovered in fragments; the standing votaries of the Cerro de los Santos sanctuary, among them the Gran Dama Oferente who holds out a vessel in both hands; and a menagerie of stone beasts and hybrids — sphinxes, lions, bulls, and the man-faced bull called the Bicha of Balazote — that guarded tombs and shrines. The animal monuments of the Pozo Moro tower, with their carved scenes of myth and monstrous appetite, reach back to a Near Eastern imaginative world.

The style fuses sources without dissolving into any of them. The frontal calm of the faces, the rendering of drapery, the very idea of monumental human sculpture come from the Greek and Phoenician orbit; the costume, the heavy jewelry, the rodetes coiled over the ears, the funerary function are Iberian through and through. To call the work derivative misreads it. The Iberians had seen Hellenistic and eastern art and chosen, deliberately, what to make their own.

The gods at the high places

Iberian religion had no temples in the Greek or Roman sense and has left no native text that names a god with certainty. It is reconstructed instead from where the Iberians worshipped and what they left there. The characteristic cult place was the sanctuary set apart in the landscape — the open-air shrine on a pass or peak, and the cave shrine in the limestone hills — to which worshippers climbed to leave their offerings. The greatest of these cluster in the Sierra Morena around the Despeñaperros gorge, the gateway between the southern plateau and Andalusia: the Collado de los Jardines and, across the pass, the sanctuary at Castellar, each of which has yielded thousands of small bronze figures.

These exvotos are the most intimate record the Iberians left of their inner life. Cast in bronze by the lost-wax method and dedicated by the hundreds and thousands, they show men and women standing in attitudes of prayer or offering, warriors with shield and spear, riders, naked figures, sometimes a tonsured man who may be a priest. At the horse-sanctuary of El Cigarralejo near Mula, founded in the fourth century BCE and active until the late second, the offerings are overwhelmingly small carved horses — a cult, it seems, bound to the animal that carried the Iberian aristocracy and its prestige. A fifth-century bronze from Segura de la Sierra shows a man cutting the throat of a goat over running water, one of the few direct glimpses of sacrifice. The deity at the center of much of this was very likely a great goddess of fertility and the dead, the local heir of the eastern Astarte whose cult the Phoenicians had carried west — the same maternal and funerary power that may stand behind the enthroned ladies of stone. Alongside her, the divinized landscape itself: spring, cave, summit and pass were holy in their own right, and the sanctuary marked the place where the human world met what lay above and below it.

The dead were burned and their ashes set in urns — sometimes, for the great, in a sculpted figure like the Lady of Baza — beneath low burial mounds in cemeteries outside the town, accompanied by weapons deliberately bent and broken, by jewelry, and by the painted pottery that carried the living world into the grave.

Scholarship and the texts

The recovery of the Iberians is a story of the spade and the signary together. The decisive figure for the writing is Manuel Gómez-Moreno, whose work of the 1920s established the sound-values of the northeastern script and made the inscriptions pronounceable for the first time; the philological superstructure rests on Jürgen Untermann’s monumental Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, the corpus of all known Palaeohispanic inscriptions issued across the second half of the twentieth century, now continued in open form by the Hesperia database at the Complutense University of Madrid. The journal Palaeohispanica gathers the ongoing epigraphic and linguistic debate, including the contested question of how much of the language can yet be parsed.

For the religion, the modern synthesis treats the sanctuaries as the primary evidence; the study of the rock and open-air shrines and their inscriptions — for example the detailed reconstruction of sanctuary cult and an emergent Iberian pantheon in the survey Rock Sanctuaries, Sacred Landscapes, and the Making of the Iberian Pantheon — has replaced an older habit of reading the gods straight out of Greco-Roman analogy. Reference accounts of the cults, the votive deposits and the funerary record are gathered in standard surveys such as the Iberian Religion overview, while the broader cultural and historical picture rests on the excavations of the great oppida and the long line of Spanish and international fieldwork from the nineteenth century to the present.

Into Roman Hispania

The independent Iberian world ended in war that was not its own. In 218 BCE the armies of Rome and Carthage poured into the peninsula, and the Iberian towns, drawn in as allies, hostages and battlegrounds, were ground between them. With the Carthaginian defeat, the eastern and southern coasts passed under the Roman Republic, and across the following two centuries the apparatus of Rome — colonies, roads, the Latin tongue, the magistracy, the gods of Roman religion — settled over the Iberian one.

But absorption was slow, and for a long time it was a layering rather than an erasure. Iberian cities went on minting coins in the native script under Roman authority, the legends sometimes giving a town’s Iberian name in Iberian letters beside, or instead of, Latin. Iberian sanctuaries kept receiving bronzes into the late centuries BCE. The painted pottery, the falcata, the cremation rite, the great goddess herself persisted in local life well after the legions came. The script faded only as Latin literacy spread, and the language behind it dwindled into the place-names of the eastern provinces — the last of the Iberians not conquered in a day but dissolved, over generations, into the citizenry of imperial Hispania, where a woman of Elche or Baza, enthroned in stone with the ashes of her house gathered behind her face, had long since taken her place among the honored dead of a country that no longer spoke her name.

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