In the climate, the genial warmth of the south of Europe is tempered by sea-breezes, in nearly every direction, and the fertile soil yields equally the necessaries and the luxuries of life—corn, fruit, wine, fine merino wool, and olive oil. The mountains abound in mineral treasures, and afforded in early times one of the principal supplies of gold and silver. The natives of this favoured land are brave, sober, hardy, and enterprising. Yet notwithstanding all these sources of prosperity, Spain, which in the sixteenth century startled Europe with the first fears of universal monarchy, was long the most enslaved, oppressed, ignorant, and indigent, of civilised countries.[b]
In the earliest stage of its history we find Spain occupied by a comparatively homogeneous people—the Iberians, who are related as to language; but this is probably only the result of a long, already complete development and does not at all represent the original state of the country. Unfortunately, prehistoric investigation in Spain is too far behind to offer much towards a solution of even the most pressing problems. We may assume primarily that the Pyrenean peninsula, like northern Africa, southern Europe, and western Asia, was originally settled by that short-headed, dark-haired, and light-skinned race for whom the name of Armenoids, or, from a philological standpoint, of Alarodians, has been suggested.
But the people who afterwards were called Iberian are probably nothing else than a mixture of this ancient population with the long-headed, blond race of Cro-Magnon, which came from the north and appears in France and northern Africa. For that reason alone they might be supposed to have been in Spain, situated as it is between the two, even if certain remains of their culture did not make this supposition almost a certainty. The large number of blonds which, contrary to general opinion, are found in Spain and Portugal may in the main go back to this earliest invasion of northern hordes, which was followed by two more in the course of history. Possibly the new race forced its language upon the original inhabitants and perhaps the traditions of the Iberians, which tell of the immigration of their forefathers from Gaul, refer to the invasion of this blond population. The Sicanians and Siculians in southern Italy, likewise inhabitants of territories neighbouring northern Africa, are also supposed to be related to the Iberians.[c]
Whence the Iberians came has always been, and must remain, a matter of dispute. That they, like the Celts, were a branch of the great Indo-European family, and had spread along the south of Europe from the slopes of the Caucasus, was long held as an article of faith by scholars whose opinions were worthy of respect; but more recent investigations tend somewhat to shake belief in this theory. That they were a dolichocephalic (long-headed) race of short stature and very dark complexion, with plentiful curly black hair, is certain, and they probably inhabited the whole of Spain in the neolithic age, either as successors of a still earlier race—of which it is possible that the Basques, who still form a separate people in the north of Spain and southwest of France, may be the survivors—or as the primitive inhabitants dating from the prehistoric times when Africa and Europe, and possibly also America, were joined by land. In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they were of Indo-European or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyle (Kabail) tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organisation of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic was their indomitable local independence.
From the earliest dawn of history the centre of Spanish life, the unit of government, the birthplace of tradition, and the focus of patriotism have been the town. A Spaniard’s pueblo means infinitely more to him than his town means to an Englishman or a Frenchman. No master race has succeeded in welding the Kabyles, Tuaregs (Tuariks), and Berbers into a state, as the Romans did with the mixed Iberians and Celts; and in Spain, to the present day, with its numberless paper constitutions and its feverish political experiments, the pueblo keeps its practical independence of a centralised government, which has federated pueblos into provinces, but has never absorbed or entirely destroyed the primitive germ of local administration. The village granary (posito) still stands in the Spanish village, as its counterpart does in the Atlas regions; the town pasture and communal tillage land continue on both sides of the straits to testify to the close relationship of the early Iberians with the Afro-Semitic races, which included the Egyptian or Copt, the Kabyle, the Tuareg, and the Berber. The language of the Iberians has been lost, but enough of it remains on coins of the later Celtiberian period to prove that it had a common root with the Egyptian and the Saharan tongues, which extend from Senegal to Nubia on the hither side of the negro zone. With all this evidence before us we may be forgiven for doubting the correctness of the theory which ascribes a Caucasian origin to the primitive Iberian people. Long before the dawn of recorded history, while mankind was hardly emerging from the neolithic stage, a vast incursion of Celts had come from the north and poured over the western Pyrenees into Spain.[d]
THE CELTS AND CELTIBERIANS
The second invasion from the north, that of the Celts, falls in the first period of recognised history, so that we know little of how it came about or the conditions preceding it, and can only enumerate the results. It cannot even be determined if the march of the Celts upon Spain was contemporaneous with the violent incursion of Celtism into upper Italy and southern Germany, which in its further advance carried single troops as far as Asia Minor and Greece; at any rate it is probable.
The Celts introduced a new culture into the land south of the Pyrenees, which lay off from the main track, since they represent the period which as the advanced iron age followed the age of bronze. Before them agriculture was yet in its beginning; the pure-blooded Iberians for a long time afterwards held to the rough conditions of the preceding era, lived from the products of their goat-herds, on the acorns from the mountains and from the scanty grain they raised by their primitive methods of agriculture. The Celts, indeed, like most conquering nations, considered agriculture unworthy a free man, but compelled their dependents to cultivate their territory regularly and to deliver up a part of its products.
The Celtic flood inundated only a portion of the peninsula. One tribe—later called the Celtics—settled in the region about the middle Guadiana, the centre of which is the present Badajoz. The Artebrians inhabited the northwestern coast without mixing much with the native population. On the other hand a large mixed race, afterwards called the Celtiberians, grew up in what is to-day Old Castile, and brought into subjection the neighbouring Iberian tribes who were more cultured and less warlike than the dwellers in the mountains. The domination of the Celts over the whole Pyrenean peninsula is not to be thought of: not even among the Celtic tribes themselves was there unity. The genuine mountain peoples, such as the Lusitanians in the west, the Asturians, Cantabrians and Vasconians in the north, preserved complete independence. Southern Spain, where under a milder sky a certain culture had developed at an early date, was also preserved from Celtic encroachment and saw indeed more welcome strangers at its coasts—the Phœnicians, whose commercial spirit found here a glorious field for its activity. Even before their arrival the inhabitants of the country may have fashioned ornaments from the precious metal which was so abundant in their land, without valuing this treasure particularly, or expending much toil in procuring it; now for the first time, when the marvels of a foreign culture were offered them in exchange for these things, did they turn their attention to the hidden treasures of their land. But the Phœnicians were hardly the first to visit the western shores of the Mediterranean as traders and pirates; the very fact that tribes of Iberian descent had pushed as far as lower Italy points to the existence of intercourse by ships. In the same way Etruscan commerce must have touched Spain. The nurhags—those curious solid towers, which are especially frequent on the coasts of Sardinia and which must once have served as places of refuge for the people when in danger—are dumb but intelligible witnesses to the fact that the Mediterranean must have been peopled with pirates even in prehistoric times. Egypt, the only country in the world whose inhabitants at that time already kept historical records, often saw robber hordes appear on its coasts. But we know no further particulars of these ancient conditions.[c]