A Short History of Spain

No name is more fraught with picturesque and romantic interest than that of the "Spanish Peninsula."

After finishing this rare bit of handiwork nature seems to have thrown up a great ragged wall, stretching from sea to sea, to protect it; and the Pyrenees have stood for ages a frowning barrier, descending toward France on the northern side from gradually decreasing heights-but on the Spanish side in wild disorder, plunging down through steep chasms, ravines, and precipices-with sharp cliffs towering thousands of feet skyward, which better than standing armies protect the sunny plains below.

But the "Spanish Peninsula," at the time we are about to consider, was neither "Spanish" nor was it a "peninsula." At the dawn of history this sunny corner of Europe was known as Iberia, and its people as Iberians.

Time has effaced all positive knowledge of this aboriginal race; but they are believed to have come from the south, and to have been allied to the Libyans, who inhabited the northern coast of Africa. In fact, Iberi in the Libyan tongue meant freeman; and Berber, apparently derived from that word, was the term by which all of these western peoples were known to the Ancient Egyptians.

But it is suspected that the Iberians found it an easy matter to flow into the land south of the Pyrenees, and that they needed no boats for the transit. There has always existed a tradition of the joining of the two continents, and now it is believed by geologists that an isthmus once really stretched across to the African coast at the narrowest point of the Straits, at a time when the waters of a Mediterranean gulf, and the waters flowing over the sands of Sahara, together found their outlet in the Indian Ocean.

There is also a tradition that the adventurous Phenicians, who are known to have been in Iberia as early as 1300 B.C., cut a canal through the narrow strip of land, and then built a bridge across the canal. But a bridge was a frail link by which to hold the mighty continents together. The Atlantic, glad of such an entrance to the great gulf beyond, must have rushed impetuously through, gradually widening the opening, and (may have) thus permanently severed Europe and Africa; drained the Sahara dry; transformed the Mediterranean gulf into a Mediterranean Sea; and created a "Spanish Peninsula."

How long this fair Peninsula was the undisturbed home of the Iberians no one knows. Behind the rocky ramparts of the Pyrenees they may have remained for centuries unconscious of the Aryan torrent which was flooding Western Europe as far as the British Isles. Nothing has been discovered by which we may reconstruct this prehistoric people and (perhaps) civilization. But their physical characteristics we are enabled to guess; for just as we find in Cornwall, England, lingering traces of the ancient Britons, so in the mountain fastnesses of northern Spain linger the Basques, who are by many supposed to be the last survivors of that mysterious primitive race.

The language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that Tubal brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! And still another relates that the devil once tried to learn it, but that, after studying it for seven years and learning only three words, he gave it up in despair.

A language which, without literature, can so resist change, can so persist unmodified by another tongue spoken all around and about it, must have great antiquity; and there is every reason to believe that the Basque is a survival of the tongue spoken by the primitive Iberians, before the Kelts began to flow over and around the Pyrennees; and also that the physical characteristics of this people are the same as those of their ancient progenitors; small-framed, dark, with a faint suggestion of the Semitic in their swarthy faces.

We cannot say when it occurred, but at last the powerful, warlike Kelts had surmounted the barrier and were mingled with this non-Aryan people, and the resulting race thus formed was known to antiquity as the Keltiberians.

It is probable that the rugged Kelt easily absorbed the race of more delicate type, and made it, in religion and customs, not unlike the Keltic Aryan in Gaul. But the physical characteristics of the other and primitive race are indelibly stamped upon the Spanish people; and it is probably to the Iberian strain in the blood that may be traced the small, dark type of men which largely prevails in Spain, and to some extent also in central and southern France.

But the Keltiberians were Keltic in their religion. There are now in Spain the usual monuments found wherever Druid worship prevailed. Huge blocks of stone, especially in Cantabria and Lusitania (Portugal), standing alone or in circles, tell the story of Druidical rites, and of the worship of the ocean, the wind, and the thunder, and of the placating of the powers of nature by human sacrifices.

The mingling of the Kelts and the Iberians in varying proportions in different parts of Spain, and in some places (as among the Basques) their mingling not at all, produced that diversity of traits which distinguished the Asturians in the mountain gorges from their neighbors the Cantabrians, and both these from the Catalonians in the northeast and the Gallicians on the northwest coast, and from the Lusitanians, where now is Portugal; and still more distinguished the Basques, in the rocky ravines of the Pyrenees, from each and all of the others. And yet these unlike members of one family were collectively known as Keltiberians.

While this race-hardy, temperate, brave, and superstitious-was leading its primitive life upon the Iberian peninsula, while they were shooting arrows at the sky to threaten the thunder, drawing their swords against the rising tide, and prizing iron more dearly than their abundant gold and silver, because they could hammer it into hooks, and swords, and spears-there had long existed in the East a group of wonderful civilizations: the Egyptian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom and in wickedness; the Chaldeans, who, with "looks commercing with the skies," were the fathers of astronomy; the Assyrians and Babylonians, with their wonderful cities of Nineveh and Babylon, and the Phenicians, with their no less famous cities of Sidon and Tyre. Sidon, which was the more ancient of these two, is said to have been founded by Sidon, the son of Canaan, who was the great-grandson of Noah.

Of all these nations it was the Phenicians who were the most adventurous. They were a Semitic people, Syrian in blood, and their home was a narrow strip of coast on the east of the Mediterranean, where a group of free cities was joined into a confederacy held together by a strong national spirit.

Of these cities Sidon was once the head, but in time Tyre eclipsed it in splendor, and writers, sacred and profane, have sung her glories.

These Phenicians had a genius for commerce and trade. They scented a bargain from afar, and knew how to exchange "their broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate" (I Kings xxvii. 16), their glassware and their wonderful cloths dyed in Tyrian scarlet and purple, for the spices and jewels of the East, and for the gold and silver and the ivory and the ebony of the south and west.

Their ships were coursing the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and bringing back treasures from India and searching every inlet in the Mediterranean, and finally, either through the canal they are said to have cut, or the straits it had made, they sailed as far as the British Isles and brought back tin.

But the gold and silver of the Iberian Peninsula were more alluring than the spices of India or the tin of Britain. So upon the Spanish coast they made permanent settlements and built cities. As early as 1100 B.C. they had founded beyond the "Pillars of Hercules," the City of Gades (Cadiz), a walled and fortified town, and had taught the Keltiberians how to open and work their gold and silver mines systematically; and in exchange they brought an old civilization, with new luxuries, new ideas and customs into the lives of the simple people.

But they bestowed something far beyond this-something more enriching than silver and gold,-an alphabet,-and it is to the Phenicians that we are indebted for the alphabet now in use throughout the civilized world.