Turdetani

The Turdetani occupied the Guadalquivir valley in the south-west and were the most urbanised and literate people of pre-Roman Iberia. Strabo calls them the wisest of the Iberians, credits them with written laws and historical records six thousand years old - which is his source boasting rather than a fact - and notes that they had largely adopted Roman ways before Rome had finished conquering the rest of the peninsula. They were the heirs of Tartessos, the semi-legendary kingdom that had grown rich on the silver of the Sierra Morena and the tin route from the Atlantic, and which traded with Phoenicians from the eighth century BC and disappeared for reasons nobody has established. Their territory carried more silver than anywhere else in the western Mediterranean, which is why Carthage took it, and why Rome fought for it. Because the country was rich, flat and already governed through towns, it was also the easiest part of Hispania to annex: it fell during the Second Punic War and was organised as the province of Baetica, which became the wealthiest and most thoroughly Romanised region in Spain - exporting olive oil to Rome in quantities attested by Monte Testaccio, a hill in Rome made of fifty million broken amphorae, most of them Baetican. The emperors Trajan and Hadrian came from this territory. The Turdetanian language and script vanished within two centuries of the conquest, and the region's later name, Andalusia, comes from the Vandals who passed through much later. Their script is one of two used in pre-Roman Iberia and remains undeciphered in the sense that the language is unknown. Tartessos has been searched for in the Guadalquivir marshes for over a century without being located. Baetica was the first Roman province in Spain to be governed by the Senate rather than the emperor, which is a measure of how settled it was.

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