Celtiberi

The Celtiberians occupied the eastern half of the Spanish meseta and were exactly what the name says: Celtic-speaking peoples who had settled among and mixed with the Iberians, producing a society with Celtic social structure and Iberian material culture and script. They lived in fortified hill towns, practised a form of warrior clientage in which a band swore to die with its chief, and made the finest swords in the western Mediterranean - the gladius hispaniensis, which Rome adopted wholesale and carried for the next four centuries. Their wars with Rome ran, with intervals, from 181 to 133 BC and were notoriously brutal and unpopular in Rome itself; conscription for Spanish service caused riots, and one Roman commander, Lucullus, massacred a town that had surrendered under terms, which was remembered against Rome for a generation. The war ended at Numantia, a Celtiberian town of perhaps eight thousand people that had beaten several consular armies and forced one to sign a treaty Rome then repudiated. Scipio Aemilianus, who had destroyed Carthage, brought sixty thousand men, refused to fight, built a wall seven miles round the town with towers and a ditch, and starved it for eight months. The survivors burned the town and killed themselves; Rome sold the remainder. Numantia became the founding story of Spanish resistance and has been invoked by every Spanish political movement since. The Celtiberians were absorbed into the provinces, and their language died out by the second century AD. Their script was adapted from the Iberian one and is readable, though the language behind it is Celtic and only partly understood. The bronze tablets from Botorrita are the longest surviving texts in any ancient Celtic language. Numantia's site near Soria has been excavated since the nineteenth century and Scipio's siege lines can still be traced.

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