The Vascones

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On a hilltop above the Aranguren valley, a few kilometers southeast of Pamplona, a piece of bronze the size of an open palm lay in the burned wreckage of a house for two thousand years. Archaeologists lifted it out of the ash in 2021, and in November 2022 the government of Navarre announced what it said. It is a flat right hand, fingers spread, a little over fourteen centimeters long and weighing thirty-six grams, pierced at the wrist so it could be nailed palm-outward beside a doorway — a threshold charm, the sort of thing a household hangs to keep harm off the lintel. Punched and then scratched across it run four lines of signs in a script borrowed from the Iberians, and the first word, read letter by letter, is sorioneku. Anyone who speaks the language of these valleys today hears it at once: zorioneko, “fortunate,” “of good omen,” the ordinary Basque word for a piece of luck. The house the hand guarded burned in the wars of the 70s BCE. The word it carried is still in the mouths of the people who live under that hill.

The object is called the Hand of Irulegi, after the wooded height where the settlement stood, and it is the closest thing there is to hearing the Vascones speak. For most of their recorded existence they are known only from the outside — named, placed, and cataloged by Romans and Greeks who came to their country as soldiers, geographers, and tax officials. The bronze changes the acoustics. It is a scrap of their own voice, from a doorway they nailed it to, in a settlement they themselves burned or lost, saying something ordinary and hopeful in a tongue whose descendant is spoken in the same basin now. From that one fortunate hand it is possible to widen the frame to the people the Romans named: the Vascones, the Iron Age and Roman-era nation of the middle Ebro and the western Pyrenees, and the documented ancient ancestors of the living Basques.

The Hand of Irulegi, a first-century-BCE bronze threshold charm from a Vasconic settlement in the Aranguren valley; its opening word sorioneku stands beside the modern Basque zorioneko*, “fortunate.” José Luis Larrión, Museum of Navarre, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.*

The people the Romans found

The Vascones held the country between the upper and middle Ebro and the southern slopes of the western Pyrenees — very nearly the shape of modern Navarre, with a reach into what is now western Aragon and northeastern La Rioja, and a northern arm that ran through the mountains down to the Bay of Biscay. Pliny the Elder set them at the western end of the range, their land carried, in his account, as far as the heights above Oiasso and the shore of the Cantabrian sea. Roman writers divided that country into two natures: the ager, the open grain-growing flatland of the Ebro basin, and the saltus, the wooded, broken mountain zone toward the coast — a distinction that would matter for everything that happened to them under Rome, because the two halves were Romanized to very different depths.

The oldest surviving notice of them is a passing one, and it is military. Livy, writing at the turn of the era but drawing on earlier annals, records an army crossing the flatlands of the Vascones — the Vasconum ager — during the Sertorian War, the long insurgency that tore through Hispania in the 70s BCE. That is the moment the name enters history: not a description of a people but a line on a campaign map, ground that soldiers marched over on the way to somewhere else. It is characteristic. The Vascones almost always reach the record sideways, as the setting of someone else’s war.

The fuller portrait comes from the geographers. Strabo, writing in Greek in the generation of Augustus, names their principal town Pompaelo and lists Kalagurris — Calagurris, modern Calahorra — among the cities of the ouáskones. Two centuries later Ptolemy, compiling his atlas of the known world, sets down roughly fifteen Vasconic towns: Pompaelo again, and with it Andelos, Graccurris, Cascantum, Iacca, and a string of others scattered from the Ebro to the mountains. It is a real urban list, a network of named places with roads between them, and it should correct any picture of the Vascones as a scatter of mountain herders. In the plain they were a settled, town-dwelling people inside the Roman order; in the saltus they kept the older shape of a mountain society. Their neighbors ringed them on every side — the Berones to the west, the Celtiberians to the south across the Ebro, and along the Cantabrian slope the Varduli, the Caristii, and the Autrigones, peoples whose own descendants would be folded, in time, into the wider Basque country.

The Vascones and the neighboring Caristii, Varduli, and Aquitani, with the cities named by Ptolemy, in the western Pyrenees and the middle Ebro. ecelan, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The language beneath the Roman place-names was not Latin, and not Celtic, and not any Indo-European tongue at all. The Vascones are thought to have spoken a form of Proto-Basque, kin to the Aquitanian recorded in votive and funerary inscriptions just over the Pyrenees, and thus an early stage of Euskara — the language of the living Basques, which remains a pre-Indo-European isolate with no proven relative anywhere on earth. The direct native evidence is thin and precious. For a long time the oldest scrap was the funerary stele of Lerga, a Roman-era stone from Navarre whose personal names carry recognizably Basque-looking elements. The Hand of Irulegi has now pushed the testimony back and made it a whole word rather than a name. Both are fragments; together they are enough to say that the tongue of the Vascones was the ancestor, or a close cousin of the ancestor, of the language still spoken in their old country.

That continuity is written into the name itself. Vascones is the root from which three living words descend: Basque, the English name for the people; Spanish vasco; and, by a softening of the initial sound in the mouths of their northern neighbors, Gascon and Gascony, the name of the country across the mountains in France. The Vascones are, in the plainest etymological sense, the named ancestors of the Euskaldunak, the Basque-speakers of today — which is why the small bronze hand from Irulegi carried, four years ago, so much weight. It was not a curiosity. It was a receipt.

A province that was negotiated

What set the Vascones apart from most of their neighbors was the manner of their entry into the Roman world. The Cantabri to the west and the Aquitani to the north were conquered — beaten in hard, famous campaigns and absorbed by force. The Vascones seem instead to have negotiated their status. In the winter of 75–74 BCE, during the war against Sertorius, the general Pompey quartered his army in their land, and out of that winter came the town that fixed their name in the imperial map. Pompey is credited as the founder, or refounder, of the settlement the Vascones themselves called Iruña — simply “the city” — over which the Romans laid the name Pompaelo, which Strabo glosses as though it meant Pompeiopolis, Pompey’s city. It is a telling piece of diplomacy: the Roman commander stamps his name on the place, but the place goes on being Iruña to the people who live in it, and Iruñea is what Basque-speakers call Pamplona to this day.

Under the empire, Pompaelo was a civitas stipendiaria, a tribute-paying town, within the conventus — the judicial district — of Caesaraugusta, modern Zaragoza. It stood on the great trunk road that the itineraries call the Ab Asturica Burdigalam, running from Burdigala, Bordeaux, across the western Pyrenees and down through the Ebro country to Asturica Augusta, Astorga, in the far northwest. A tribute town on a main imperial road is a town that has made its peace with Rome, and in the plain that peace ran deep. The Ebro basin filled with villas, mosaics, Latin inscriptions, and the ordinary furniture of provincial Roman life; the Vascones of the ager became, to outward appearance, Hispano-Romans like their Celtiberian neighbors. In the saltus, the wooded mountains toward the sea, Romanization stayed thin. There the old society, the old language, and — as far as the sparse evidence reaches — the old sacred world persisted under a light imperial hand, in valleys that no road particularly needed to cross. The two halves of Vasconic country went into the empire together and came out of it very differently, and the difference is the hinge of everything that follows.

The question of a spreading tongue

Here the entry meets the problem that has organized modern scholarship on the Vascones, and it is a genuinely contested one, to be set down as debated rather than settled. It goes under the name of “Vasconization,” or “late basquisation,” and it asks a deceptively simple question: how did the Basque language come to occupy the country it occupied by the early Middle Ages, which is wider than the Vascones’ Ebro-and-Navarre core?

One long-influential answer, associated with the German philologist Adolf Schulten in the early twentieth century and extended on the linguistic side by the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in 1972, held that Basque spread outward — west along the Cantabrian slope and north into Aquitaine — relatively late, in the centuries when Roman authority thinned and finally failed. On this reading the Vascones, expanding out of their heartland in late antiquity, “basquized” neighbors whose own speech had been half-Romanized or displaced, carrying their name into Gascony in the bargain. A related and much-argued strand runs the current the other way, proposing instead a movement of Basque-speakers from Aquitaine down into the Ebro. What the debate shares across its versions is a picture of significant late-antique movement, and it remains, in the words of its own reviewers, a minority reconstruction rather than a consensus — an argument built on the distribution of old place-names, on the thin scatter of pre-Roman inscriptions, and on the shape of the early Basque dialects, none of which speaks unambiguously.

Recent work has pushed back on the whole frame, and the pushback is itself part of the load-bearing picture. Much of the apparent late “spread” of the Vascones may be an artifact of how outsiders wrote about them. When Gregory of Tours records a Vasconic raid into Aquitaine in 587, it is a brief incursion, not a migration; and the Goths and Franks who kept the records had a habit of calling Wascones anyone who spoke the incomprehensible mountain tongue, from the Ebro to the Garonne, conflating distinct communities under a single alarming label. On that view the “expansion” of the Vascones in the sources is partly the expansion of a word — a loose exonym for all Basque-speakers — rather than the documented march of a people. The toponymic argument, too, cuts both ways: the relative scarcity of old Vasconic place-names further west can be read as evidence that Basque arrived there late, or as evidence that it was there early and was overwritten. The honest statement is that the geography of the language before the sources go quiet is not recoverable with confidence, and that the “Vasconization” thesis is one reading among several. A scholarly study of how the Vascones were depicted “from antiquity to the middle ages” makes the sharper point that much of what looks like the history of a people is in fact the history of an image — the Vascones as the empire’s and then the kingdoms’ internal other, the untamed mountain folk against whom a settled order defined itself.

Roncevaux and the kingdom

Whatever the language did, the people endured the collapse of Rome better than most of their neighbors, precisely because so much of their country had never been closely held. When the Germanic invaders crossed the Pyrenees in the early fifth century, the Vascones fought them; through the Visigothic period they remained a byword for a frontier that would not stay pacified, raided against and raiding in turn. And in 778 they walked into the most famous ambush in medieval literature. Charlemagne, withdrawing from an unsuccessful campaign in Spain, sent his army back through the Pyrenean passes, and in the defile at Roncevaux — Orreaga, in Basque — the rear-guard was cut to pieces. Frankish chroniclers, unwilling to credit mountain irregulars with the destruction of Frankish knights, called it wasconicam perfidiam, “Vasconic treachery.” Three centuries later the Song of Roland reworked the disaster into the great chanson of Christendom against the Saracen, quietly editing the actual ambushers — the Basques of the passes — out of their own victory. It is a small, exact instance of the alterity that follows the Vascones everywhere: even when they win, the record is written by the side that lost, and it renames them.

Out of that same frontier the Vascones’ heartland became a state. In the early ninth century, in the vacuum between the Frankish march to the north and the Muslim emirate to the south, the lords of Pamplona made themselves independent, and around 824 — in the wake of a second clash at Roncevaux, and in alliance with the powerful Banu Qasi of the Ebro — Eneko Arista, Íñigo in Castilian, was raised as the first king of Pamplona. That kingdom would grow into the Kingdom of Navarre, and it carried the Vasconic core, its language and its towns and its name for its capital, straight through the Middle Ages into the modern era. The line from the Vasconum ager of Livy’s soldiers to the Reyno de Navarra runs unbroken through this hill country. Iruña became Iruñea became Pamplona, and never stopped being any of them.

The ancestors, and a slandered sacred world

In the reception the Vascones are, above all, the ancient anchor of Basque and Navarrese identity — the named forebears in whom a living people locates its deep past. That work of anchoring is done partly in the ground. The archaeology of Pompaelo beneath modern Pamplona, the excavation of hill settlements like Irulegi, and the reading of the scattered Aquitanian and Vasconic inscriptions all feed a continuous inquiry into who these people were and how their speech relates to the Euskara now taught in the ikastola schools and standardized, in the twentieth century, as Euskara Batua. The language is not a relic under glass. It is a vigorously revived, everyday tongue, and the Vascones’ role in the modern story is to be the point where the archaeological record and the living language touch. That is exactly why the Hand of Irulegi, when it was announced in 2022, was received less as an antiquarian find than as a national event: declared an Asset of Cultural Interest and installed in the Museum of Navarre, it is the oldest word of the ancestors’ own speech, and it happens to mean “fortunate.”

There is a darker thread in the afterlife, and it must be named because it is a distortion the tradition still labors under. The pre-Christian sacred world of the Vascones and their descendants — the world of Mari, the earth-and-weather goddess who keeps her seat in the high mountain caves such as Anboto; of Sugaar, the storm-serpent whose crossing of the sky foretells the tempest; of the sorginak, her attendant wise-women; of Akerbeltz, the black he-goat who guards the herd — was not extinguished by the relatively late Christianization of this country. It was renamed. As the old religion was hunted, Mari was recast as a witch and her sorginak as her coven, and the Basque word akelarre, aker-larre, “the he-goat’s meadow,” was mapped onto the learned European fantasy of the witches’ sabbath. That inversion climaxed, four centuries ago, in the Spanish Inquisition’s proceedings at Zugarramurdi and the Logroño auto-da-fé of 1610 — a persecution built on a construct, and one the skeptic inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías himself discredited within a few years. The full weight of that history, and its slow correction by the great Basque folklorists, belongs with the Basque people themselves. What belongs here is only the correction’s premise: Mari is a goddess, not a witch; the meadow is a meadow; and the sacred world of the Vascones’ descendants was the victim of the “witchcraft” frame, never its author.

The commercialization of that same frame is worth marking as reception in its own right. Zugarramurdi today is a site of witch-tourism, with its cave, a Museum of the Witches, and a summer festival that stages the akelarre as heritage spectacle — the persecutors’ fiction repackaged, four centuries on, as a brand. It is understandable, and it sits on a real grave, and it is not the tradition. The tradition is older and quieter and still legible in the country itself: in the name of a capital that means “the city,” in a bronze hand that means “fortunate,” in a language that outlasted Rome and Charlemagne and the Inquisition and is spoken now, every day, in the valleys where the Vascones nailed their charms to the door.

→ Related: The Basques · The Aquitani · Mari Goddess · Sugaar · Basajaun · Lamiak · Akerbeltz · Anboto · Aralar · Zugarramurdi · Txindoki