Ancient Spanish Artefact Upends What We Knew About Basque Predecessors

The Vascones – a tribe that lived on the north of Spain 2,000 years ago – was considered illiterate. A new-found artefact challenges this point of view.

The Hand of Irulegi was unearthed in 2021 near the village of Irulegi. However, its significance became clear only recently.

This hand was probably a protective amulet for the household that brought luck and averted evil charms. The hand bears a lot of inscriptions. The only word that was identified so far is ‘sorioneku’. Scientists believe it is a forerunner of ‘zorioneko’ (good luck, good omen) in th modern Basque language.

Up to this moment, historians considered the Vascones to be illiterate, despite the inscriptions on the coins. Scientists though that the Vascones started writing only after Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. Some historians and philologists suggested that the Vascones probably had a written language before the Roman invasion, but there wasn`t enough data to support this idea.

`We had imagined that to be the case but until now, we had hardly any texts to bear that out. Now we do – and we also know that the Vascones used writing to set down their language … This inscription is incontrovertible; the first word of the text is patently a word that’s found in modern Basque’, Javier Velaza, professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona, said.

Now it is official – the Vascones – the predecessors of the modern Basque had a written language.

The Vascones were an Iron Age tribe that lived in the North of Spain.