The South-West of Ancient Hispania in its Linguistic and Epigraphic Context

Abstract

This paper provides a linguistic and epigraphic context to the so-called 'Tartessian' or 'Southwestern' inscriptions from ancient Hispania. Starting from the general linguistic landscape in the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman and Roman times, with an overview of Lusitanian, in the vicinity of these texts, and of the relatively well-known Celtiberian and pre-Indo-European languages (Iberian and Vasconic-Aquitanian), a description of the Palaeo-Hispanic variety of the writing system used in these texts is offered. In the final section, analysing in detail some of the arguments to defend the Celticity of these inscriptions, a conclusion is reached that the large funerary stone stelae from Southern Portugal are not written in Celtic or any other Indo-European language, but rather in a largely unknown non-Indo-European agglutinative language.