Vascones

The Vascones were a pre-Roman people of the northern Iberian Peninsula, first named by Roman writers in connection with the Sertorian War of the 70s BC. Ancient authors place them around the western Pyrenees and the upper and middle Ebro, in country broadly corresponding to present-day Navarre and its borders, later organised within the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis. The language they spoke, called Vasconic, is known mainly from personal and divine names. It is generally taken to be either an ancestral form or close relative of the Basque language, and it is grouped with Aquitanian in a single Basque-Aquitanian family. Their territory was nonetheless linguistically mixed, with Celtic and Iberian as well as Basque-type names. The traditional identification of the Vascones with the medieval and modern Basques, when it implies a straightforward and unbroken line of ethnic continuity, is now generally regarded as a construct of early modern and nationalist historiography. The Vascones took shape among the Iron Age societies of the upper and middle Ebro, from which no distinctive archaeological culture sets them apart. They enter the historical record only with the Sertorian War. Under Roman rule they appear as an administrative rather than a political unit, their towns, among them Calagurris (modern Calahorra) and Pompaelo (Pamplona), set within the conventus Caesaraugustanus. Whether their territory grew at their neighbours' expense in this period is disputed. Recent scholarship has largely rejected the older thesis of a 'Vasconic expansion', treating the name instead as a label attached by Rome to a shifting territory. The deities named on their votive altars carry Basque-type rather than Indo-European names, and set the Vascones apart from their neighbours in showing no blending with the Roman pantheon and no cult of the Matres. In late antiquity the sources depict the people raiding and in conflict...