Contestani

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Contestani (Ancient Greek: Κοντεστανοί) is an ethnonym of Roman Spain of the imperial period. It appears chiefly in the Greco-Roman writers Pliny the Elder (Natural History (Pliny) iii.iii.19-20), 1st century, and Claudius Ptolemy (The Geography ii.5 on Hispania Tarraconensis), 2nd century. Pliny might be considered the more creditable, as he was for a time procurator of the official Hispania Tarraconensis, a province of the Roman Empire encompassing all the north and all the east of the Iberian Peninsula (the chief part of the future nation of Spain). A geographic ethnonym from ancient times, however, was not necessarily the name of a people. It might be a toponym. Perhaps the name of the supposed people came from the name of the place. In that case, anyone could live in the place and be counted as one of its people without the necessity to belong to an ingroup such as a tribe. L. A. Curchin did an etymological study of all the ancient names in Contestani and Edetani to the north of it. The implied distribution was multilingual and therefore multiethnic: 14% Iberian, 3% Punic, 35% Indo-European, including 19% Greek and 18% Latin, the rest uncertain. An earlier literary fragment presents the same system. Livy, historian living in the Augustan period, writes in a fragment of Book 91 describing the revolt of the Iberian people under Quintus Sertorius against Rome under Sulla, calls Ilercavonia and Contestania both gentes, "peoples" (a well-known word in Spanish). Here he uses the toponyms ending in -ia for the ethnics, equating place and people. The ethno/topo-nyms are made to fit into the grammatical contexts of the Greco-Latin sources just as though they were Latin words. They give the appearance of being Latin, and seem to contain segments of Latin. One is tempted to see contest in Contestania...