Towards a Language Map of Southern Hispania: Onomastic Arguments

Abstract

Determining the languages spoken in the south of the Iberian Peninsula in antiquity, in pre-Roman times and during Romanization, is no easy task. Although we have an important corpus of indigenous inscriptions, the different writing systems identified have not been fully deciphered, which is especially true for the southern varieties of the complex Palaeohispanic family of scripts. This paper opens with a brief introduction to the different epigraphic areas of the southern Iberian Peninsula with a note to the special situation of the southwest, to offer an alternative look on the contours of “Tartessian” topographic layer. The author points out that the Tartessian label should be limited to a territory in a specific region of the central and lower Guadalquivir valley and that the region of southern Portugal (in the Algarve) where an important collection of about 100 large funerary stelae has been found, seems to be outside or at least on the periphery of the Tartessian world, even if these inscriptions are called “Tartessian” by many researchers. To date, there are different ways of interpreting the language(s) reflected in the southern epigraphic texts, especially those from the central and western regions of Andalusia and southern Portugal. The Iberian language inscriptions found in the southeast are comparatively better read and understood. The present paper seeks further arguments in the discussion of southern languages by analysing a set of onomastic elements (personal and place names) distributed over a wide region of the central and lower Guadalquivir valley and southern Portugal, attested in antiquity. Some conclusions are drawn as to what they may imply in terms of the linguistic map of the area, as well as in terms of the different linguistic strata during the centuries before the arrival of the Romans.