Spain - The Iberians

Today, the adjective “Iberic” is commonly used to refer to the land located just south of the Pyrenees. In Antiquity, the word “Iberian” has the same meaning, after having been used to refer to the populations that inhabit the Mediterranean Coast regions.

The very name, Grecified, probably derives from an indigenous term, iber, which refers to a river, or any river: the Ebre, one of the three major rivers on the Peninsula takes its name from there. The Greeks of the 6th century used the name for the inhabitants of a tribe on the Southern or Western coast of the Iberic Peninsula, the location of which remains inexact. According to another tradition, the Iberians are said to have formed a nation that brought together several different tribes. The idea of a scattered population remains essential and the final change occurred during the Hellenistic Era, when the term Iberia lost its ethnic meaning to take on a geographic meaning and encompass the entirety of the Peninsula; it was then that the word became a synonym of Hispania.

The definition of Iberia can be described as the fruit of a century’s worth of erudition, which takes into account the data provided by texts and an interpretation of archaeological discoveries. The Iberian world, from between the 6th and 2nd centuries, was a cultural arena, the main characteristics of which were:

  a pre-Indo-European and culturally-diverse population, between Andalusia and Languedoc, which had contact with the Phoenician merchants from the 8th century and with the Greeks from the 6th century.

  the language it used was not Indo-European and the semi-syllabic writing was derived in part from the Phoenician and Greek alphabets.

  settlements were arranged as fortified groupings, most often small in size (from a few hundred square metres to a few hectares) and established on raised sites.

  the sacred is displayed in unequivocal fashion by works sculpted in stone or in bronze, which are found in funerary monuments or in sanctuaries.

  the Iberian style can be recognised by the sharply-geometrised shapes, and the fine strokes incised in the sculpture, both to bring out the volumes and reproduce details.