Que si l’un parlait Basque et l’autre Bas-Breton.”
The more serious of these foes of negative conclusions, of these refiners of quintessences, assert that the ancestors of the Basques are incontestably the Iberians. In the first place I will remark that, supposing this proved, the Basques, or, if you will, the Iberians, would not be the less isolated; for how could the Iberian, any more than the Basque, be allied to the Keltic or to the Carthaginian? But this Iberian theory is not yet at all proved, and it will be easy to show it to be so in a few words. It reposes first of all on the following à priori—the Iberians have occupied all Spain and the south of Gaul, but the Escuara lives still at the foot of the Pyrénées; therefore the Escuara is a remnant of the language of the Iberians. The error of the syllogism is patent; the conclusion does not follow, and is wrongly deduced from the premises. As to the direct proofs, they are reduced to essays of interpretation, either of inscriptions called Iberian or Keltiberian, or of numismatic legends, or of proper, and especially of topographical names.[5] The inscriptions and legends are written in characters evidently of Phœnician origin, but their interpretation is anything but certain. All the readings, all the translations into Basque, proposed by MM. Boudard, Phillips, and others, are disputed by the linguists who are now studying the Basque. The names collected from ancient authors form a more solid basis; but the explanations proposed by W. von Humboldt, and after him by many etymologists without method,[6] are equally for the most part inadmissible. The Iberian theory is not proved, though it is perfectly possible.
The Basques do not present, in an anthropological point of view, as far as we know at present, any original and well-defined characteristic other than their language.[7] Nothing in their manners or customs is peculiar to them. It is in vain that some writers have tried to discover the strange custom of the “couvade” among them, a custom still observed, it is said, by the natives of South America and in the plains of Tartary. It consists in the husband, when his wife is confined, going to bed with the new-born infant, and there he “couve,” “broods over it,” so to say. No modern or contemporaneous writer has found this custom among the Basques; and as to historical testimony, it is reduced to a passage of Strabo—which nothing proves to be applicable to the ancestors of the present Basques—and to certain allusions in writers of the last two centuries. These allusions always refer to the Béarnais, the dialect whence the word “couvade” is borrowed.
Prince L. L. Bonaparte has discovered that in the Basque dialect of Roncal the moon is called “Goicoa;” Jaungoicoa is the word for “God” in Basque, and would mean “the Lord Moon,” or rather “our Lord the Moon.” He cites, with reference to this, “the worship of the moon by the ancient Basques.” The only evidence in favour of this worship is a passage of Strabo (Lib. iii., iv. 16), where it is said that the Keltiberians, and their neighbours to the north, honour a certain anonymous God by dances before their doors at night during the full moon. But it must be proved that the Keltiberians and their neighbours to the north were Basques.
Another passage of Strabo has furnished arguments to the “Iberists.” He says (Lib. iii., iv. 18) that among the Cantabrians the daughters inherited, to the detriment of their brothers. M. Eugène Cordier has endeavoured, after Laferrière (”Histoire du Droit Français”), to establish that this arrangement is the origin of the right of primogeniture without distinction of sex, and which is found more or less in all the “coutumes” of the Western Pyrénées. He has developed this theory in an interesting essay, “Sur l’Organisation de la Famille chez les Basques” (Paris, 1869). But an able lawyer of Bayonne, M. Jules Balasque, has shown in Vol. II. of his remarkable “Etudes Historiques sur la Ville de Bayonne” (Bayonne, 1862–75) that there is nothing peculiar to the Basques in this fact; and we can only recognise in it, as in the opposite custom of “juveignerie” in certain northern “coutumes,” an application of a principle essentially Keltic or Gallic for the preservation of the patrimony.
In conclusion, I beg my readers to excuse the brevity of the preceding notes; but, pressed for time, and overwhelmed with a multitude of occupations, it has not been possible for me to do more. If I am still subject to the reproach which Boileau addresses to those who, in striving to be concise, become obscure, I have at least endeavoured to conform to the precept of the Tamul poet, Tiruvalluva—“To call him a man who lavishes useless words, is to call a man empty straw” (I. Book, xx. chap., 6th stanza).
Bayonne, August 28, 1876.
