[Prehistory - 218 BCE] The First Iberians

Before there was a Spain, there was only the land—a vast, raw peninsula of sun-scorched plains, jagged mountains, and mist-shrouded coasts, jutting out from Europe as if reaching for Africa. For hundreds of thousands of years, this was the domain of Neanderthals, our hardy cousins, who hunted mammoth and horse across a landscape colder and wilder than we can imagine. But their time faded. Around 40,000 years ago, a new people arrived: our direct ancestors, *Homo sapiens*. They were taller, leaner, and they carried with them not just new tools of flint and bone, but a revolutionary spark—the need to create, to record, to give form to the spirit world that surrounded them. Deep within the earth, in the absolute darkness of a cave system in Cantabria, a young girl named Maria Sanz de Sautuola in 1879 looked up at the ceiling by the flickering light of a lamp and cried out, “Look, Papa! Oxen!” What she saw had been hidden for 15,000 years: a breathtaking mural of bison, horses, and deer, so vibrant and full of life they seemed to thunder across the rock. This was Altamira, the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art. Using the natural bulges of the cave wall to create a three-dimensional effect, these Paleolithic artists had blown pigments of ochre and charcoal through hollow bones, creating masterpieces that still speak to us of their intimate connection with the animal world. These were not just pictures; they were likely part of sacred rituals, hunts prayed for, or shamanic journeys into the spirit realm, a testament to a complex inner life thriving in the depths of the Ice Age. For millennia, life remained a nomadic cycle of hunt and gather. But around 5,000 BCE, a slow but profound revolution swept in from the Mediterranean. The ideas of farming and animal husbandry took root in the fertile southern soils. This was the Neolithic Revolution. Life was no longer a constant search for food, but a settled existence tied to the rhythms of sowing and reaping. Villages of circular huts sprouted, and with them came new technologies: stone axes polished to a mirror shine, and pottery, a miracle of clay and fire, used to store grain and water. With settlement came a new awareness of legacy and ancestry. Across the landscape, great stone monuments began to appear—the Megaliths. Towering single stones, or *menhirs*, were erected, and enormous flat slabs were hoisted atop upright stones to create chambered tombs called *dolmens*. These were the first great architectural feats of Iberia, communal projects requiring immense cooperation, built as houses for the dead and gateways to the afterlife. Then came the gleam of metal. Around 3,000 BCE, Iberians discovered that a certain greenish rock, when heated, wept a miraculous new substance: copper. This Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, transformed society. In the arid southeast, near modern Almería, a settlement named Los Millares grew into a true town. Defended by three concentric stone walls and a series of imposing forts, it was home to over a thousand people. This was a society of specialists. While farmers tended their fields outside, artisans within the walls worked at their kilns and forges, smiths hammered out copper daggers and arrowheads, and a ruling class likely directed it all from the central citadel. Their dead were buried in elaborate collective tombs, filled with symbolic pottery and copper weapons, signifying a person’s status even in the next life. Power and technology continued to advance. By 2,200 BCE, the smiths of the El Argar culture, also in the southeast, learned to mix their copper with tin, forging a stronger, deadlier alloy: bronze. Society became even more rigid and militarized. The communal tombs of the past were replaced by individual burials. The elite were interred in large jars, or *pithoi*, placed directly beneath the floors of their rectangular stone houses, accompanied by magnificent bronze swords, polished silver diadems, and finely crafted pottery. The warrior-aristocrat had arrived, his power symbolized by the glint of his sword and the weight of his silver. Around 900 BCE, new peoples began to pour into the peninsula from across the Pyrenees. They were the Celts, Indo-European tribes migrating from central Europe, bringing with them a superior technology: iron. They were fierce warriors, and they settled primarily across the northern and western highlands, in the regions we now know as Galicia, Asturias, and the central *Meseta*. They lived in heavily fortified hilltop settlements called *castros*, circular stone villages offering panoramic views of the surrounding territory. Inside their round stone huts, life was organized around clans and warfare, a culture that would endure for centuries. While the Celts fortified the hills, the coasts were transformed by visitors from the sea. Around 800 BCE, sailors with a mastery of the stars and a thirst for commerce landed on the southern Atlantic shore. They were the Phoenicians, from the distant cities of Tyre and Sidon in modern-day Lebanon. On an island just off the coast, they founded a trading post they called Gadir, which we know today as Cádiz—one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in all of Western Europe. They were not conquerors; they were merchants. And Iberia was a treasure chest. They came seeking the peninsula’s legendary wealth of silver and tin, essential for making bronze. In exchange, they brought wonders: the potter’s wheel, which revolutionized ceramics; new crops like the olive and the grape; and their greatest technology of all, the alphabet, a system of writing that would eventually be adapted by the local peoples. Following the Phoenicians came the Greeks, establishing their own colonies like Emporion (Empúries) on the northeastern coast. They were rivals in trade, bringing their own elegant pottery, wine, and philosophical ideas. Under the influence of these sophisticated eastern cultures, the native tribes of the south and east coalesced into a distinct civilization we call the Iberians. They were a collection of peoples—the Turdetani, the Edetani, the Ilergetes—who learned from the newcomers but forged their own powerful identity. They built their own fortified towns, or *oppida*, ruled by kings and chieftains. They developed a unique, still-undeciphered script and created breathtaking works of art, like the serene and mysterious sculpture known as the Lady of Elche, whose enigmatic expression hints at a complex and spiritual culture. For a time, in the Guadalquivir valley of the southwest, a kingdom of legendary wealth flourished: Tartessos. Mentioned in Greek texts and even the Bible as a source of immense riches, it was the nexus of Phoenician and native trade, a semi-mythical realm of silver and gold. But its brilliance was short-lived. Around 550 BCE, Tartessos vanished from history, its collapse likely tied to the decline of its Phoenician partners, leaving behind tantalizing archaeological clues like the rich graves and ritual sites of a powerful, lost civilization. Into this vacuum of power stepped a new, more formidable force. The city of Carthage, itself a former Phoenician colony in North Africa, had grown into a dominant maritime empire. After its defeat by Rome in the First Punic War, the brilliant Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca turned his eyes to Iberia. He saw not just a land to trade with, but a land to conquer—a source of silver to pay his mercenaries and a pool of fierce Celtiberian warriors to rebuild his army. From 237 BCE, he and his son-in-law Hasdrubal waged a brutal campaign of expansion, founding a new capital, Qart Hadasht (Cartagena), and forcing tribe after tribe into submission. When Hamilcar died, his son took command, a young man who had sworn an oath of eternal hatred toward Rome. His name was Hannibal. By 218 BCE, he had consolidated control over southern Iberia. He had amassed a veteran army of Africans, Iberians, and Celts. And from his base in Spain, he was about to unleash a storm upon the world, marching his forces, including his famous war elephants, across the Alps to strike at the very heart of the Roman Republic. The age of the First Iberians was over; the age of empires had begun.