The challenges of translating the Iberian script

Although the Iberian alphabet did not come into use until the closing decades of the fifth century BC, it became widespread around 300 BC.

Some scholars hold that its script came from an older people of the Peninsula, since the language spoken by the Iberians was not Indo-European: it was older, perhaps inherited from Palaeolithic and Neolithic populations — its origin is, almost certainly, prehistoric. The Phoenician influence, however, is unmistakable: the Phoenician alphabet had thirty-two characters, which the Iberians adapted and reshaped into a semi-syllabic script of twenty-eight signs.

More than 2,000 pre-Roman Iberian inscriptions have been documented, of which 1,800 are reliably in the Iberian language, though some are written in non-Iberian alphabets. From the second century BC, the Celtiberians also used the Iberian alphabet — but to write their Indo-European language, which had nothing to do with Iberian. Celtic-language inscriptions can be read; when we encounter writing in Iberian script that records the Iberian language, it is, for the most part, undecipherable.

The earliest inscriptions in the Iberian script marked ownership on pottery and on funerary stelae. Trade and political uses came later.

Classical Iberian script began to be used along the Levantine coast around 425–400 BC and reached its peak from roughly 300 BC.

The known script types are Libyo-Phoenician, the Greco-Iberian alphabet, the Southern Iberian script, the Levantine script and the Southwestern alphabet.

The Iberian script is semi-syllabic: vowels are written as such, while most consonants — b, d, g, (p), k — are written in syllables with a vowel attached. Iberians did not distinguish between the sounds ka and ga, de and te, be and pe. A b, for instance, does not exist on its own; it needs another letter to be sounded.

Levantine script is written from left to right, while Southern script is written from right to left.

Sometimes we can identify city names from the suffixes -uli or -icti; when a word ends in certain other suffixes, it can be recognised as a personal name.

The surfaces on which inscriptions appear include pottery vessels; funerary objects; mosaic inscriptions (very rare); isolated letters on amphorae or pieces of pottery; painted inscriptions (tituli picti) on Oliva-Liria pottery; coins, which are fundamental — without them the Iberian alphabet, especially Levantine and Southwestern, could not be read; and rock inscriptions in sacred sites. Without coinage, the transmission of the Iberian language and script would not have been possible.

On the earliest Iberian coins the word salir, meaning coin or money, appears. Iltirtasalir, for example, can be translated as "silver" or "coin of Iltirta" (Ilerda, modern-day Lleida). Sometimes a city name appears alongside another word: from this we infer that the Iberian language was inflected. We see the same Iltirta as iltirtasalir on one coin and as iltirtesken or ausesken on others, so -esken would be the genitive plural meaning "of the people of Ilerda". The same construction appears on ancient Greek coins with emporiton ("of the Emporitans") and on Roman coins with romaion ("of the Romans"). All of this indicates that the Iberian language was also inflected.

The most representative writing was that on thin lead sheets, inscribed with a stylus and rolled up — it is believed under heat — to make them easier to carry. About seventy of these are known, mostly in Levantine Iberian, but also in Southern and Southwestern, and they appear to be, for the most part, commercial and private documents or letters, though some may be religious. Who the authors of these Iberian texts were, and to whom they were addressed, is a puzzle still unsolved. One theory holds that they were merchants — both maritime and overland — but no proof of this has yet emerged.

We also find Iberian writing on pottery, on funerary stelae and on mosaics.

On pottery we find ownership marks, often scratched onto Attic ware as graffiti on amphorae, with endings in -ar, -er, -an. These are genitives and mean "belongs to X", written in the singular. For example, on a Greek cup: iberoser, "of Ibero". Some inscriptions include the particles mi or ban, which are pronouns. The word alorsortinarmi is translated as "I am of Alorsortin": alorsortin/ar/mi.

Among the words whose meaning we know are:

• On drinking vessels: baikar, meaning "cup".

• On the funerary stelae of the third and second centuries BC:

  Proper names with the occasional genitive.

  • Sentar, meaning "monument" or "tombstone".
  • An inscription on an Iberian funerary stone:
  • Iltirbikis:en:sentar:mi ("I, the monument of Iltirbikis").
  • At times, a formula appears before the name of the deceased: are take ("here lies").
  • When there is more than one name, the second belongs to the person who dedicated the stone to the deceased: (T)EBAN(EN). When this appears next to a name, it is the action of the dedicator: "he made the monument…".
  • IKONKEI(MI)ILTU BELESEBAN: "Iltu Beles made it for him".

Few inscribed mosaics are known; on some decorated objects we find the word ekiar. In a mosaic at Teruel we read LIKINETE EKIAR OSEKERTEKU: "Likine of the workshop of Osicerda made it".

The studies of Manuel Gómez Moreno (1870–1970), in 1922, led to the deciphering of this script by collating Iberian symbols with letters and syllables of the modern Spanish alphabet. He worked from several pieces with inscriptions, such as the Bronze of Ascoli — the bronze tablet that records the rewards granted by Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo to the Turma Salluitana for the taking of Asculum during the Social War (c. 90 BC). The list of names on it is entirely Iberian, which allowed Gómez Moreno to grasp the internal structure of Iberian personal names. He also worked on a Greek text, in the Ionic alphabet, found at the sanctuary of La Serreta (Alcoy, Alicante). Roman Republican coins minted in Iberia with bilingual Latin–Iberian legends were another of his fields of study.

Gómez Moreno's remarkable discoveries allow us to read Iberian texts, but reading them does not mean understanding them. We can pronounce what is written, but we do not know the meaning of the vast majority of words in the Iberian language.

The most important recent work is that of Jürgen Untermann (1928–2013) in 1990, which gathered every known Iberian text up to that year. His research focused on the so-called "fragmentary languages" — Italic and Palaeohispanic. He came to be regarded as the leading authority on Palaeohispanic inscriptions, and especially on Iberian ones.

Iberian epigraphy was one of the most developed of antiquity, second only to Etruscan and ahead of Gaulish, North African or Black Sea inscriptions. Levantine and Greco-Iberian scripts are easier to read than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Only the sign Y poses real difficulty.

Another interpretive problem with the Iberian language is that, naturally, it must have had local variants — dialectal forms — which compound the difficulty of pinning down meaning.

A theory linking Iberian to Basque claims a kinship because the two sound phonetically alike. Although this supposed link has not been proved, certain similarities cannot be ignored — for example, the Iberian word ekiar and Basque egin, both meaning "to make". There are many more: iltir and ili mean "city" in Iberian, and iri means "city" in Basque. The Iberian salir (money) is matched by modern Basque sari and old Basque sali with the same meaning.

For all that, we cannot conclude that, neither being Indo-European, the two languages share a common Neolithic root.