Vascones

The Vascones occupied the western Pyrenees and the upper Ebro around Pompaelo, and they are the ancestors of the Basques - the only pre-Roman people of western Europe whose language survived the Roman, Visigothic and Arab conquests and is still spoken. Euskara is unrelated to Indo-European or to any other known family, which makes it the last surviving trace of the linguistic map of Europe before the Indo-European languages arrived. Their relationship with Rome was unusually cooperative for a mountain people. They sided with Rome against the Celtiberians, and Pompey founded or refounded their principal town during the Sertorian War in the 70s BC, giving it his own name - Pompaelo, now Pamplona. Vascones served in Roman auxiliary units, adopted Latin for public inscriptions, and were largely spared the wars that broke the Cantabri and Astures a generation later. That accommodation is probably why the language lasted: the territory was governed lightly rather than resettled, and the mountains behind it were not worth the cost of controlling. Roman authority faded in the fifth century without the Vascones having been fully absorbed, and they spent the following centuries resisting Visigothic and then Frankish and Umayyad control from the same ground. The Basque raid that destroyed Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles in 778 became, in French retelling, an attack by Saracens and the founding poem of French literature. The kingdom of Pamplona, later Navarre, grew directly out of this territory. Roman Pamplona has been excavated beneath the modern city and shows a conventional grid and forum. The Vascones were not the only pre-Roman people of the western Pyrenees, and how far modern Basque territory matches theirs is disputed. Euskara has no securely identified relative anywhere, living or dead.

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