The Iberian scripts are the

Paleohispanic scripts The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the main script. Most of them are unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic, despite having su ...

that were used to represent the extinct

Iberian language The Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era (before about 375 AD). The a ...

. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely

alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

.Ferrer, J., Moncunill, N., Velaza, J., & Anderson, D. (2017)
''Proposal to encode the Palaeohispanic script''
The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and the latest from end of the 1st century BCE or possibly the beginning of the 1st century CE.

Variants

There are two main graphic as well as geographic variants in the family: *

Northeastern Iberian script The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was the main means of written expression of the Iberian language. The language is also expressed by the southeastern Iberian script and the Greco-Iberian alphabet. ...

** Dual variant (4th century BCE and 3rd century BCE) (tentative) ** Non-dual variant (2nd century BCE and 1st century BCE) *

Southeastern Iberian script The southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional Iberian, was one of the means of written expression of the Iberian language, which was written mainly in the northeastern Iberian script and residually by the Greco-Iberian alphabet. Ab ...

In the sense that the Iberian scripts are the scripts created for the Iberians to represent the Iberian language, the

Greco-Iberian alphabet The Greco-Iberian alphabet is a direct adaptation of an Ionic variant of a Greek alphabet to the specifics of the Iberian language, thus this script is an alphabet and lacks the distinctive characteristic of the paleohispanic scripts that present ...

, a separate adaptation of the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

, was also an Iberian script. It was used mainly in

Alicante Alicante ( ca-valencia, Alacant) is a city and municipality in the Valencian Community, Spain. It is the capital of the province of Alicante and a historic Mediterranean port. The population of the city was 337,482 , the second-largest in t ...

and

Murcia Murcia (, , ) is a city in south-eastern Spain, the capital and most populous city of the autonomous community of the Region of Murcia, and the seventh largest city in the country. It has a population of 460,349 inhabitants in 2021 (about one ...

. Likewise, neither the

southwestern script The Southwest Script or Southwestern Script, also known as Tartessian or South Lusitanian, is a Paleohispanic script used to write an unknown language usually identified as Tartessian. Southwest inscriptions have been found mainly in the sout ...

, very similar to southeastern Iberian script but used for the

Tartessian language The Tartessian language is the extinct Paleo-Hispanic language of inscriptions in the Southwestern script found in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, mainly in the south of Portugal (Algarve and southern Alentejo), and the southwest of Spa ...

, nor the

Celtiberian script The Celtiberian script is a Paleohispanic script that was the main writing system of the Celtiberian language, an extinct Continental Celtic language, which was also occasionally written using the Latin alphabet. This script is a direct adapta ...

, a direct adaptation of the

northeastern Iberian script The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was the main means of written expression of the Iberian language. The language is also expressed by the southeastern Iberian script and the Greco-Iberian alphabet. ...

used for the

Celtiberian language Celtiberian or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic is an extinct Indo-European language of the Celtic branch spoken by the Celtiberians in an area of the Iberian Peninsula between the headwaters of the Douro, Tagus, Júcar and Turia rivers and the Eb ...

, are technically Iberian scripts. The northeastern Iberian script is often known simply as the Iberian script, because it is the script of 95% of known Iberian inscriptions. These have been found mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the

Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula (), ** * Aragonese and Occitan: ''Peninsula Iberica'' ** ** * french: Péninsule Ibérique * mwl, Península Eibérica * eu, Iberiar penintsula also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in southwestern Europe, defi ...

, mostly along the coast from

Languedoc-Roussillon Languedoc-Roussillon (; oc, Lengadòc-Rosselhon ; ca, Llenguadoc-Rosselló) is a former administrative region of France. On 1 January 2016, it joined with the region of Midi-Pyrénées to become Occitania. It comprised five departments, and ...

, but with a deep penetration on the

Ebro , name_etymology = , image = Zaragoza shel.JPG , image_size = , image_caption = The Ebro River in Zaragoza , map = SpainEbroBasin.png , map_size = , map_caption = The Ebro ...

valley. The southeastern Iberian script is poorly attested, and there are some gaps in the records: There are no positively identified symbols for /gu/, /do/, and /m/, for example. Unlike the

the decipherment of the southeastern Iberian script is not still closed, because there are a significant group of signs without consensus value. The southeastern inscriptions have been found mainly in the southeastern quadrant of Iberia: Eastern

Andalusia Andalusia (, ; es, Andalucía ) is the southernmost Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Peninsular Spain. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomous community in the country. It is officially recognised as a ...

Albacete Albacete (, also , ; ar, ﭐَلبَسِيط, Al-Basīṭ) is a city and municipality in the Spanish autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Castilla–La Mancha, and capital of the province of Albacete. Lying in the south-ea ...

, and

Valencia Valencia ( va, València) is the capital of the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Valencian Community, Valencia and the Municipalities of Spain, third-most populated municipality in Spain, with 791,413 inhabitants. It is ...

. There is substantial graphic variation in the Iberian glyphs, and over the past several decades many scholars have come to believe that, at least in northeastern Iberian script (and recently also in Celtiberian script) some of this variation is meaningful. It appears that the original simple letters were assigned specifically to the voiced consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, whereas the voiceless consonants /t/ and /k/ were derived from /d/ and /g/ syllables with the addition of a stroke. (This is the so-called ''dual signary'' model: see the image at right). If correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G from C by the addition of a stroke.

Typology

Excepting the

, the Iberian scripts are typologically unusual, in that they were partially

and partially

syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...

: Continuants (

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

sounds like /s/ and

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...

s like /l/, /m/, and vowels) were written with distinct letters, as in Phoenician (or in Greek in the case of the vowels), but the non-continuants (the

stops Stop may refer to: Places *Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States * Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina Facilities * Bus stop * Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck dri ...

/b/, /d/, /t/, /g/, and /k/) were written with ''syllabic'' glyphs that represented both consonant and vowel together, as with Japanese

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most pr ...

. That is, in written Iberian, ''ga'' displayed no resemblance to ''ge,'' and ''bi'' had no connection to ''bo.'' This possibly unique writing system is called a " semi-syllabary". The southeastern script was written right to left, as was the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alpha ...

, whereas the northeastern script reversed this to left to right, as in the

Origins

The Iberian scripts are classified as

for convenience and based on broad similarities, but their relationships to each other and to neighboring contemporaneous scripts, such as Greco-Iberian, are not firmly established. It is generally accepted that they were derived at least partly from the

and/or

, with which they share many similar-looking

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s. Some researchers conclude that the origin of the northern and southern Iberian scripts ultimately lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet; others believe the Greek alphabet also played a role; others still have suggested influences from Old Italic. It appears that either the glyphs themselves were changed, or that they assumed new values. For example, the southern glyph for /e/ derives from Phoenician '' ‘ayin'' or Greek Ο, whereas northern /e/ resembles Phoenician '' he'' or Greek Ε, though the letter arguably had the value of /be/ in southern Iberian. However, it is clear that they had a common origin, and the most commonly accepted hypothesis is that the northeastern script derives from the southeastern script.

Notes

References

* Anderson, James M. (1988) Ancient Languages of the Hispanic Peninsula. * Correa, José Antonio (2004): , ''ELEA'' 4, pp. 75–98. * Correa, José Antonio (1992): , ''AIΩN'' 14, pp. 253–292. * Ferrer i Jané, Joan (2005
''Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores''
''Palaeohispanica'' 5, pp. 957–982. * Gómez-Moreno, Manuel (1922): , 9, pp. 34–66. * Hoz, Javier de (1987): , ''Veleia'' 2–3, pp. 285–298. * Hoz, Javier de (1985): , pp. 443–453. * Maluquer de Motes, Joan (1968): , Barcelona. * Quintanilla, Alberto (1993): , pp. 239–250. * Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2004): , Vitoria-Gasteiz 2004, . * Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2002): , ''Zephyrus'' 55, pp. 231–245. * Untermann, Jürgen : Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, Wiesbaden. (1975): I Die Münzlegenden. (1980): ''II Die iberischen Inschriften aus Sudfrankreicht''. (1990): . (1997): . * Velaza, Javier (2004): , Madrid, pp. 95–114. * Velaza, Javier (1996): , Barcelona.

External links

Los primeros sistemas de escritura en la Península Ibérica (Course program)

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20081006160601/http://www.arqueotavira.com/Mapas/Iberia/Populi.htm Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia (around 200 BCE)
Links to images of inscriptions
*

*

*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iberian Scripts Iberian writing Undeciphered writing systems Celtic languages Paleohispanic languages ru:Иберское письмо