A Short History of Spain

uresque and romantic interest tha

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

neither "Spanish" nor was it a "peninsula." At the dawn of history this

been allied to the Libyans, who inhabited the northern coast of Africa. In fact, Iberi in the Libyan tongue meant freeman; and B

isted 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 narrowe

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

rn 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 w

ster 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

very 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

d surmounted the barrier and were mingled with this non-Aryan people, and

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 s

d. Huge blocks of stone, especially in Cantabria and Lusitania (Portugal), standing alone or in circles, tell the story of Druidical

uished 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 n

, 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

e, Syrian in blood, and their home was a narrow strip of coast on the east of the Mediterranean, wh

n time Tyre eclipsed it in splendor, and write

work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate" (I Kings xxvii. 16), their glassware and their wonderful cloths dyed in Tyrian scarlet

d searching every inlet in the Mediterranean, and finally, either through the canal they are said to

lt 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 op

han silver and gold,-an alphabet,-and it is to the Phenicians that we