Cadiz, Corduba or Cordova, and Hispalis, a Roman colony. The country was very productive. The exports of corn, wine, and oil were so considerable, that the ships in which they were brought to Ostia, the port-town of Rome, were nearly as numerous as those from Africa. * Among the exports were great quantities of gold and silver, the produce of mines in Turdetania, and tin from the mountainous country inhabited by barbarians above Lusitania. The Turdetani were the most civilized people in Spain and affected Roman manners. On the Bætis especially they spoke Latin, and forgot their native language. According to Strabo the river Bætis was in earlier times named the Tartessus, marking the site of the Phoenician settlement. Tartessus is mentioned by Herodotus as a place of great power and opulence at the period of the earliest voyages of the Phocæans in the Western Mediterranean. †

The same geographer informs us that the Turdetani were the most learned people in Spain; they were acquainted with the use of letters, and preserved among them records of antiquity and poems and laws composed in metre, handed down from a period, as they declared, of six thousand years.‡ Strabo adds "that the other nations of Spain likewise practised the art of writing, not with one form of characters; neither was their language the same." He does not inform us whether this difference of idiom amounted only to variety of dialect, or constituted an entire diversity. We have reason to believe, from the names of places, and the researches of M. de Humboldt, that there was no essential difference; that all the Spaniards spoke dialects of the Euskarian speech, except the Celtic people and those Iberian tribes whose idioms were

Strab. lib. iii. p. 192.

+ Herod. lib. i. c. 163

So the vulgar reading of Strabo imports. But Niebuhr has well remarked, that the expression νόμους ἐμμέτρους ἐξακισχιλίων ἐτῶν would not even be Greek, and he proposes to read πv for irŵv; meaning that the laws of the Turdetanians were contained in six thousand verses, or inn. Yet Niebuhr refers this literature of the Turdetanians to an era when the West, as he says, was still subsisting with all its original peculiarities, before it experienced any influence from Asia. And was there ever such a time? The alphabet of the Spaniards was Phoenician.

intermixed with the Celtic. These however constituted, as it would appear, no small part of the native tribes of the

Peninsula.

The Turduli and Turdetani were situated in part to the eastward of the Bætis, and therefore within the limits of the pure Iberian speech, according to Humboldt's demarcation. Their cities bore Euskarian and not Celtic names. To the northward of Turdetani were the Vettones, the Oretani and Carpetani, and beyond Mount Orospeda the Sedetani. To the northward of all these was Celtiberia, before described.

Paragraph 2.-Of the Lusitanians.

"Lusitania, says Strabo, is to the northward of the Tagus, containing the greatest of the Iberian nations who resisted the Romans for the longest time. To the southward it is limited by the Tagus, to the west and north by the ocean; eastward by the Carpetani, Vettones, Vaccæi, and Callaici, celebrated nations. Some formerly termed them Lusitanians. The Callaici border on the Asturians and Iberians; the other nations on the Celtiberi." It is not to be wondered at that the Lusitanians, who had Celtic people to the south and north, and Celtiberians for their eastern neighbours, should have partaken in the intermixture of Celtic with their language, and it is probable that at one time the Iberian part of the Lusitanian nation was under the dominion of Celts. We cannot otherwise account for the existence of so many places in the Lusitanian territory with evidently Celtic names. In the list of Lusitanian inland towns given by Ptolemy, in the fifth chapter of his second book, there are several names which are undoubtedly Celtic, as well as those belonging to their neighbours, the Callaici and Vettones. Strabo describes the Lusitani as in great part a lawless, predatory people, living like banditti in mountainous places, accustomed to cut off the right hand of their prisoners. He says that they were addicted to sacrifices, and accustomed to prophesy from the entrails of the victim, without cutting them out.*

* Strab. 221. Ed. Oxon.

Paragraph 3.—Nations in the Northern Parts of Spain, in the Basque Provinces.

To the northward of the Celtiberi and the Verones who were a Celtic tribe, were the Cantabri Conisci. The Verones were immediately on the Ebro. To the northward of that river were the Autrigones, the Varduli, and the Vascones, in the countries now termed Biscay and Navarre. The Cantabri occupied a part of Asturia: they were, as M. de Humboldt has observed, separated from Biscay by the country of the Autrigones. In their territory were several Celtic towns they were beyond the boundary of the pure Euskarian speech. The Vascones and Varduli occupied the modern Guipascoa and Navarre: the name of the former is still preserved in Biscay, and in the appellation of Basques, given to the people who speak the Euskarian language. For the discrimination of these tribes we have a better source of information than we can expect to derive from the writings of ancient authors, viz. an inquiry into the dialects of the people who have preserved their ancient language in the mountainous countries bordering on the Pyrenees.

There are, according to some writers, four, according to others, six dialects of the Euskarian language. 1. The Biscayan or Biscaina, which has been termed the Cantabrian, but is more properly the Autrigonian. This is the most westerly dialect: it is spoken most purely about Bilbao, Ordunna, and Aduna. 2. The Guipuscoan, or Vardulic dialect, spoken in Guipuscoa, the country of the old Varduli. 3. The dialect of Upper Navarre and Alave, which some consider as two dialects: it may be termed the Vasconian. 4. The French Basque, including the dialects spoken in the districts of Labourd and Soule: this prevails at St Jean de Luz. Some reckon the Labourdin and the Souletin as distinct dialects, and as Soule is situated in Gascony, term the idiom of that district the Gasconian. If we consider these subordinate dialects as distinct, we shall then find six or seven varieties of the Euskarian language. All the varieties of the fourth, or Basque dialect, belong to tribes descended, as it would

appear, from the Aquitani. The three former belong perhaps severally to the Autrigones, Varduli, and Vascones of ancient authors.

That the Euskarian language should extend so far in Gaul is no matter of surprise. The Garonne, as we learn from Cæsar, was the boundary of Aquitania and Gallic Celtica. We are informed by Strabo that Augustus added to the province of Aquitaine ten tribes between the Garonne and the Loire, which were probably Celtic Gauls. These tribes became Aquitanians in a political, not in an ethnographical sense. The real Aquitani, as Strabo expressly declares, were very different, both in language and in physical characters, from the Gauls, and in both these respects resembled the Iberi. Humboldt's researches confirm this statement. He has shown that nearly all the names in Aquitania proper are Euskarian; that many have plain significations in that language, and the usual Euskarian terminations. The instances which appear to the contrary are all explained by historical facts. Lugdunun was built by the Convenæ, a mixed assemblage from different tribes, who had formed the army of Sertorius. On comparing with the Aquitanian names those which were immediately on the northern side of the Garonne, a striking difference is immediately perceived. The characteristic terminations of Celtic towns and tribes occur in the dominion of every tribe, and the traces of the Euskarian speech immediately disappear.

SECTION VI.-Traces of the Euskaldunes in Countries beyond the Boundaries of Spain and Aquitaine.

The great body of the Iberian race, as it existed at the era of the Roman conquest in Spain, was comprehended in that country and in the neighbouring districts of Aquitaine, where the Basque language is still spoken. A few scattered branches of the same stock may be obscurely discerned in periods of

• Τοὺς μὲν ̓Ακουιτανούς, τελέως ἐξηλλαγμένους, ἐ τῇ γλώττη μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς σωμάσιν ἐμφερεῖς Ιβηρσι μᾶλλον ἢ Γαλάταις. Ib. iv.

remote antiquity in countries at a distance from Spain, and the investigation of these traces may throw light on the early history of the Euskaldunes. It cannot be determined with certainty whether these remains are the vestiges of the first migratory progress of the Iberian people, supposing them to have proceeded originally from the East through the South of Europe and to have left tribes separated from the great mass of their population behind them on their way, or colonies which proceeded at a later period from Spain. The former supposition is the most probable: there is at least nothing which can lead us to adopt the alternative, or to conclude that the tribes of this race who inhabited at an early period Liguria, and probably made their way through Italy into the island of Sicily, came originally from Spain.

The early Greek writers, under the term Iberia, comprehended the coast of the Mediterranean to the westward of the Tyrrhene Sea, but it is uncertain what limitations were ascribed by them to the tracts which they so designated. Herodotus says that the Phocæans, in their early voyages, explored the Adriatic and the Tyrrhene seas, Iberia and Tartessus.

In the Periplus of Scylax, which Niebuhr supposes to have been compiled from the nautical records of ancient voyagers in a very early period, the Iberi are mentioned as inhabiting the coast of Gaul as far eastward as the mouth of the Rhone, hamlets of the Iberi being interspersed among those of the Ligurians.* From the Rhone to the Arnus, or Arno, was Liguria. There is no vestige of any Ligurian people westward of the Rhone, and it would therefore appear probable that the country from which it was traditionally reported that the Iberi were expelled by the Ligurians, must have been to the eastward of that river. We can, on this supposition, more easily understand how this relation is connected with the story which follows it, purporting that the people driven out by the Ligurians sought refuge in Sicily, whither they probably must have made their way through Italy. The fact that the Iberians were among the most ancient inhabit

• ̓Απὸ δὲ Ιβήρων ἔχονται Λίγυες καὶ Ιβήρες μιγάδες μέχρι ποταμοῦ Ροδανοῦ. Scyl. Caryand. Peripl. 2, Hudson. 1.