Tartessian, Europe’s newest and oldest Celtic language

[Sanguine]

The south-western Iberian Peninsula at the horizon of history. There are at least 90 known Tartessian inscriptions on stone concentrated in southern Portugal, with a wider scatter of fifteen over south-west Spain. (J. Koch, An atlas for Celtic studies (Oxford, 2008))

John Koch suggests that Tartessian is ‘more than a little bit Celtic’ and adds a new twist to the assertion, long since dismissed as invention, that the Gaels (Milesians) originated in the Iberian Peninsula.

The myth and mystery of Tartessos

For Greek and Roman writers, Tartessos was a place of fabulous natural wealth in silver and gold, situated somewhat vaguely in Europe’s extreme south-west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. When Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, wrote around 430 BC, the kingdom of Tartessos had already ceased to exist and belonged to the pre-classical past before the rise of Cyrus the Great and the Persian Empire. The power exerted by the idea of Tartessos on the classical imagination was such that many of the exploits of Hercules—originally set in the eastern Mediterranean—were relocated to the fabled country beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, hence called the Pillars of Hercules. Though there is more than one school of thought on the subject, a long-standing and prevalent view is that the ocean-going, luxury-laden ‘ships of Tarshish’ mentioned repeatedly in the Old Testament—going back to the joint venture of Solomon and Hiram I of Tyre around 950 BC—also refer to Tartessos.

Archaeologically, Tartessos is synonymous with the brief and spectacular ‘orientalising phase’ of the south-western Iberian Peninsula’s First Iron Age, around 750 to 550 BC. At this time the Phoenician colony of Gadir, now Cádiz on Spain’s south Atlantic coast, catalysed a brief incandescent hybrid civilisation in what had been the southern region of the Atlantic Late Bronze Age (around 1250–750 BC). That earlier cultural commonality, defined by bronze swords, spearheads, cauldrons, flesh-forks and spits, stretched from Tartessos to Galicia, Brittany, Britain and Ireland. In the eighth century BC a new élite arose rapidly amongst the native trading partners of the Phoenicians. These Tartessian potentates are known primarily from necropolises of tumulus burials, awash with luxury grave-goods from the eastern Mediterranean, including jewellery, cosmetics, portable images of deities, ornamented chariots, wine and oil....

https://www.historyireland.com/pre-history-archaeology/tartessian-europes-newest-and-oldest-celtic-language/