The name Iberians seems to have been applied by the earlier Greek navigators to the peoples who inhabited the eastern coast of Spain; and there is considerable probability in the suggestion that it originally meant the ripuarians of the Iberus or Ebro. On the other hand, the term Iberia is said to have embraced in older Greek usage the country as far east as the Rhone (see Herodorus of Heraclea, Fragmenta Historiarum Croecarum, tom. ii. p. 34), and by the time of Strabo it was the common Greek name for the Spanish peninsula,—Iberians meaning sometimes theinhabi-tants of the peninsula in general, and sometimes, it would appear, the peoples of a definite race or γένος. Of the tribal distribution of this race, of its linguistic social and political characteristics, and of the history of its relation to the other peoples of Spain, we have only the most general, fragmentary, and in part self-contradictory accounts. On the whole our historical evidence authorizes the assertion that in Spain, when it first became known to the Romans and Greeks, there existed a large number of separate and variously civilized tribes connected with each other by at least apparent identity of race, and by similarity (but not identity) of language, their general characteristics sufficiently differencing them from Phoenicians, Romans, and Celts. The statement that the mingling of these Iberians with the immigrant Celts gave rise to the Celtiberians (Keltiberians) is in itself sufficiently probable, and has been impugned by nothing more precise than the general untrustworthiness of the author by whom it is made (Diodorus Sicħlus). Varro and Dionysius Afer went so far as to identify the Iberians of Spain with the Iberians of the Caucasus, the one regarding the eastern and the other the western settlements as of earlier date.

The only material relics which have come down to us with the imprint of the ancient Iberian or Celtiberian civilization are a variety of coins and a few inscriptions of dubious interpretation. So difficult has the reading of the legends of the coins been found that the Spanish numismatists have regularly catalogued them as the desconoeidas or unknown; and the explanation of them has been sought now in Visigothic runes (Olaus Wormius and Olaus Rudbeck), now in Hebrew (L. J. Velasquez), now in Latin, and now in Celtic. By the general consensus of more modern investigators, however, their Iberian character is recognized, though the methods and results of interpretation have been sufficiently various. According to M. Heiss, the Celtiberian coins are found most frequently in the north-east and east of Spain, in smaller numbers in the centre, rarely in the south, and more rarely still in Portugal and Asturias. The legends, he maintains, belong to peoples who inhabited the country at the time when the Greeks were still coining pieces with the type of Apollo and the wheel,—that is, before the completion of the Roman conquest. Their monetary system seems to have been imitated from that of the Roman republic, having a division analogous to that of the denarii and quinarii. The principal type on the reverse is either a horseman galloping with lance in rest or bearing a palm-branch or laurel-branch, or a man leading two horses and brandishing a sword or a bow. The Latin coins of Bilbilis, Osca, Segobriga, <fcc., retain the type of the galloping horseman. Pieces with inscriptions in the same alphabet and similar images are found in the district of Narbonne.

The following is a list of Μ. Heiss’s proposed identifications, and the accompanying alphabet is that which he has compiled from the coins :—

Ovriasav, Turiaso; klaqriqs, Kalaquri-qos, Calagurris; iak, Jaca; plplis, Pilpilis, Bilbilis; ilovre, Iluro; nerencon, Narbo; pavrp, Perpinianum; clse, Celsa; seqbrics, Segobrica; alaavn, Alavona; setiscon, Setisacon; öligem, Oligito; gli, Gili; aavses-con, Ausa, Ausenses; avsecrt, Osicerda; laavrii, Laurona; cse, Cose; QNTRBA, Contrebia; seqtzas, Segontia; briritz, Bebryces; HRNESQN, Huernes; hlscan, Iliosca, Osca; secisa, Segisa; tmaniav, Dumania; arciliqs, Arcocili, Ocili; oelieqs, Beliones; VR8ONE8, Balsiones.

It was not till 1821 that the Iberian problem became an established pièce de resistance in the ethnographical programme. In that year Karl Wilhelm Humboldt published his Prüfung der Untersuchungen uber die Urbewohner Ilispanicns vermittelst der l·Vaskischen Sprache, Berlin, 1821. As a matter of course this was a work of exuberant learning and bold hypothesis; and partly through its inherent attractiveness, partly through the prestige of its author, the theory which it expounded met with general acceptance. The main arguments were these :—that the Iberians were one great people, speaking a distinct language of their own; that they were to be found in Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, in southern France, and even in the British Isles; and that the Basques of the present day were the distinctly recognizable remnants of the race which had elsewhere been expelled or absorbed. This last was the central and seminal idea of the work, and it has been the point round which the battle of scholarship has mainly raged. The principal evidence which Humboldt adduced in its support was the possibility of explaining a vast number of the ancient topographical names of Spain, and of other asserted Iberian districts, by the forms and significations of Basque. The first serious attack on the theory was made by Graslin (Be l’Ibérie, Paris, 1839), who maintained that the name Iberia was nothing but a Greek misnomer of Spain, and that there was no proof that the Basque people had ever occupied a wider area than at present; and Μ. Blade has since, in his Origine des Basques (Paris 1869), taken up the same line of argument and brought to bear on the subject a vast amount of laborious and many-sided erudition. His criticism is almost purely negative. Of the whole structure of the Iberian theory he would not leave one stone upon another. He holds that Iberia is a purely geographical term, that there was no proper Iberian people or race, that the whole Basque-Iberian theory is a modern figment, that the Basques were always shut in by alien races, and that their affinity is still to seek. His main contention has met with some acceptance; but the great current of ethnographical speculation still flows in the direction indicated by Humboldt, though it breaks up into a number of distinct channels. The anthropological researches of Broca, Thurnam and Davis, Huxley, Busk, Virchow, Tubino, and others have proved the existence in Europe of a Neolithic race, small of stature, with long or oval skulls, and accustomed to bury their dead in tombs. Their remains have been found in Belgium and France, in Britain, Germany, and Denmark, as well as in Spain; but they bear a closer resemblance to the Basques than to any other living people. This Neolithic race has consequently been identified with the Basques and the Iberians; and extreme exponents of the theory do not hesitate to speak of the Iberian ancestors of the people of England, recognizing the racial characteristics in the “small swarthy Welshman,” the “small dark Highlander,” and the “Black Celts to the west of the Shannon,” as well as in the typical inhabitants of Aquitania and Brittany. (Compare the interesting résumé of the whole question in Boyd Dawkins’s Early Man in Britain, London, 1880.) Some investigators go even further. Μ. D’Arbois de Jubainville, for example (Les premiers habitants de l’Europe, Paris, 1877), regards the Iberians as the descendants of the Atlantes (i.e., the hypothetical inhabitants of Plato’s great western isle the Atlantis, see Atlantis), and maintains that in Europe they possessed Spain, Gaul, Italy, and the British Isles, penetrated into the Balkan peninsula, and occupied a part of northern Africa, Corsica, and Sardinia. And in reviewing Μ. Jubainville’s work in Revue d’ Anthropologie (1877), Μ. Hovelacque considers that it has been clearly made out that a race with distinctly marked characteristics was at one time in possession of the south of France (or at least of Aquitania), the whole of Spain from the Pyrenees to the straits, the Canary Islands (the Guauchos), a part of northern Africa, and Corsica. Tubino, in his Los aborigènes ibcricos (Madrid, 1876), argues that the builders of the megalithic monuments of Spain and northern Africa, the ancient Iberians, and the modern Basques and Andalusian mountaineers, as well as the Berbers in at least one of their main elements, are all of kindred blood; and in so doing he impugns the theory of Broca and his school.

Besides the works already mentioned, reference may be made to Hoffmann, Die Lberer im l·Vesten und Osten (Leips. 1838), and to Phillips, Ueber das iberische Alphabet (Vienna, 1870), Die Einwanderung der Iberer in die pyren. Halbinsel (Vienna, 1870), and several other works by the same writer.