The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

c. The Laburtanian is the Euskarian of France, spoken in the parts about St. Jean de Luz; and which, in the district of Soule, is supposed to fall into a sub-dialect.

The Euskarian language has always been the standing point to those inquirers who have argued backwards, from the existing state of things, towards the reconstruction of the ethnology and philology of antiquity; first and foremost of whom, both in date and importance, is Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose essays on the subject form two of the most classical monographs in comparative philology. The method he employed was much more of a novelty then than now. We may guess what it was beforehand. It was the analysis of local names. In this he was successful. Roots like ast-, ur-, and others, found in the ancient names of Spanish and Portuguese localities, far beyond the present pale of the Euskarian tongue, he referred to the Basque, and found them significant therein; thus uria=town or city, and ast=rock or mountain—whereby Asturias means the mountainous country, and Astures the mountaineers.

His inference was (as might be expected) that the Euskarian was as little a modern and local tongue as the Welsh; indeed, that it was so far from anything of the kind, as to be one of the oldest in Europe, and not only old, but widely-spread also. The whole of the peninsula, France as far as the Garonne and the Rhone, and even portions of Italy, were, according to Humboldt, originally Basque; or, as it is more conveniently called, Iberic or Iberian, from the ancient name of Spain—Iberia.

So that now we talk of the ancient Vascones, Varduli, Autrigones and Caristii as particular divisions of the great Iberic stock, under their ancient names, the Euskaldunac being the same under a modern one; whilst the Basques and Navarrese are Euskaldunac, under French and Spanish designations.

The present Euskaldunacs must be a population of as pure blood as any in Europe, lineal descendants from the Autrigones, Varduli, and Vascones, and closely related to the Asturians. At any rate they are the purest blood in the Peninsula. This we infer from their language, and the mountaineer character of their area. They are the Welsh of Spain.

With the pure Euscaldunac let us now contrast the most mixed portion of the Peninsular population; which is that of the water-system of the Guadalquiver, and the parts immediately south and east of it—Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Grenada, and Murcia, if we take the modern provinces; the country of the Turdetani and Bastitani, if we look to the ancient populations—Bætica, if we adopt the general name of the Romans, Andalusia in modern geography.

The mountain-range between Jaen and Murcia, the Sagra Sierra, was originally the Mons Oros-peda, a fact which I notice, because the element -peda, occurs with a mere difference of dialect in the ancient name of the mountains of Burgos, Idu-beda. So that here, if nowhere else, we have a geographical name common to the northern and southern parts of the peninsula—an Iberic gloss in two distant localities. It was the Iberians of these parts who were the first to receive foreign intermixture, and the last to lose it, the Iberians of the Bætis, or Guadalquiver, favoured above all other nations of the peninsula in soil, in climate, and in situation. Strabo expatiates with enthusiasm almost unbecoming to a geographer, on their wealth, their industry, their commerce, and their civilization; and all this is no more than their physical condition prepares us to expect. Cities to the number of two hundred and upwards, docks, anachyses (or locks), lighthouses, canals, salt works, mines, agriculture, woven articles, fisheries, an alphabet, and a literature attest the civilization of the ancient Turdetanians as known to the writers of the reign of Augustus; at which time, however, the country was so Romanized that the Iberic tongue was already superseded by the Latin throughout the whole level country; Cordova and Seville,—the pre-eminently Roman towns of Spain,—having been founded by picked bodies of Romans and natives. Hence, in respect to its date, the Spanish of Andalusia is the oldest daughter of the Latin.

But the Romans were as little the first intruders who introduced foreign blood and foreign ideas into Southern Spain as they were the last. Their predecessors were the Phœnicians—sometimes direct from Tyre and Sidon, oftener from the Tyrian colony of Carthage. It was through the accounts of the Phœnicians that the earliest notices of Iberia found their way into Greece; it was through the Phœnicians that the Hellenic poets first heard of the columns of Hercules. It was through the Phœnician—Punic or Tyrian, as the case might be—that the mining and commercial industry of Turdetania was developed. Through them, too, probably (but not certainly) came the alphabet. I say probably, because the shape of the letters is Greek or Italian rather than Phœnician. As the Phœnician settlements seem to have been factories rather than colonies, and as their marriages must have been with native women, their influence was moral rather than physical, i.e., they introduced new ideas rather than new blood. Their contact with the Turdetanians may be spread over some seven centuries—from about 900 to 200 B.C.

New ideas, too, rather than new blood was what was introduced by the Romans; the great change which they effected being that of the language from Iberic to Latin. At the same time, it is by no means safe to say that the Turdetanian civilization was wholly of foreign origin—half Roman and half Phœnician. The inland cities could scarcely be the latter. Yet they existed when Rome first began its conquests. So high do I put either the actual civilization of the southern Iberians, or (what is nearly the same thing) the capacity for receiving its elements, that I doubt whether it stands on a lower level than that of Northern Italy itself minus its geographical advantages of contiguity to Greece. Their remote position was a great disadvantage, and so was the comparative smallness of their sea-board, arising from the unindented character of the peninsular coast.

Between the garrisons of Rome and Carthage we may safely assume some intermixture of native African blood—Numidian, Gætulian, or Mauritanian—Amazirgh, Kabail, or Berber. It is safe, too, not exactly to exclude Greek influences from Turdetanian Iberia altogether, but to hold as a general rule that, from the monopolizing character of the Phœnician commerce—especially the Carthaginian branch of it—the Greek and Phœnician influences were in the inverse ratio to each other.