A Short History of Spain

by Mary Platt Parmele

We cannot say when it occurred, but at last the powerful, warlike Kelts had surmounted the barrier and were mingled with this non-Aryan people, and the resulting race thus formed was known to antiquity as the Keltiberians.

It is probable that the rugged Kelt easily absorbed the race of more delicate type, and made it, in religion and customs, not unlike the Keltic Aryan in Gaul. But the physical characteristics of the other and primitive race are indelibly stamped upon the Spanish people; and it is probably to the Iberian strain in the blood that may be traced the small, dark type of men which largely prevails in Spain, and to some extent also in central and southern France.

But the Keltiberians were Keltic in their religion. There are now in Spain the usual monuments found wherever Druid worship prevailed. Huge blocks of stone, especially in Cantabria and Lusitania (Portugal), standing alone or in circles, tell the story of Druidical rites, and of the worship of the ocean, the wind, and the thunder, and of the placating of the powers of nature by human sacrifices.

The mingling of the Kelts and the Iberians in varying proportions in different parts of Spain, and in some places (as among the Basques) their mingling not at all, produced that diversity of traits which distinguished the Asturians in the mountain gorges from their neighbors the Cantabrians, and both these from the Catalonians in the northeast and the Gallicians on the northwest coast, and from the Lusitanians, where now is Portugal; and still more distinguished the Basques, in the rocky ravines of the Pyrenees, from each and all of the others. And yet these unlike members of one family were collectively known as Keltiberians.

While this race—hardy, temperate, brave, and superstitious—was leading its primitive life upon the Iberian peninsula, while they were shooting arrows at the sky to threaten the thunder, drawing their swords against the rising tide, and prizing iron more dearly than their abundant gold and silver, because they could hammer it into hooks, and swords, and spears—there had long existed in the East a group of wonderful civilizations: the Egyptian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom and in wickedness; the Chaldeans, who, with "looks commercing with the skies," were the fathers of astronomy; the Assyrians and Babylonians, with their wonderful cities of Nineveh and Babylon, and the Phenicians, with their no less famous cities of Sidon and Tyre. Sidon, which was the more ancient of these two, is said to have been founded by Sidon, the son of Canaan, who was the great-grandson of Noah.

Of all these nations it was the Phenicians who were the most adventurous. They were a Semitic people, Syrian in blood, and their home was a narrow strip of coast on the east of the Mediterranean, where a group of free cities was joined into a confederacy held together by a strong national spirit.

Of these cities Sidon was once the head, but in time Tyre eclipsed it in splendor, and writers, sacred and profane, have sung her glories.

These Phenicians had a genius for commerce and trade. They scented a bargain from afar, and knew how to exchange "their broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate" (I Kings xxvii. 16), their glassware and their wonderful cloths dyed in Tyrian scarlet and purple, for the spices and jewels of the East, and for the gold and silver and the ivory and the ebony of the south and west.

Their ships were coursing the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and bringing back treasures from India and searching every inlet in the Mediterranean, and finally, either through the canal they are said to have cut, or the straits it had made, they sailed as far as the British Isles and brought back tin.

But the gold and silver of the Iberian Peninsula were more alluring than the spices of India or the tin of Britain. So upon the Spanish coast they made permanent settlements and built cities. As early as 1100 B.C. they had founded beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," the City of Gades (Cadiz), a walled and fortified town, and had taught the Keltiberians how to open and work their gold and silver mines systematically; and in exchange they brought an old civilization, with new luxuries, new ideas and customs into the lives of the simple people.