Spain: Words carved on a bronze hand may rewrite history for some
The owners of the hand, dubbed the Hand of Irulegi, are thought to be members of an Iron Age tribe known as the Vascones who lived in Spain's Navarra region.
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Bronze amulet shaped like a hand
Last year, a bronze amulet fashioned like a hand was discovered during an ancient dig in Spain.
However, the restoration of the item recently uncovered unusual phrases thought to be part of the forerunner to the contemporary Basque Language, also known as Euskara.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Spain and Southwest France speak Basque nowadays. It is Europe's only surviving "language isolate," which means it is unrelated to either the Greek-Romano language of the south or the Indo-European Celtic languages of the north and east.
The Pamplona amulet has the word "sorioneku," which is similar to the Basque term zorioneku, which means "lucky." The current opinion holds that it was hanging above the entryway to a mud brick cottage in the 1960s BCE.
The researchers at the Aranzadi Science Society were unable to identify any of the other words on the hand, leading to the theory that it could be from the Basque people's precursor language, before a gradual borrowing of Roman terms contributed to around 40% of the contemporary Basque vocabulary.
It is worth noting that the owners of the hand, dubbed the Hand of Irulegi, are thought to be members of an Iron Age tribe known as the Vascones who lived in Spain's Navarra region.
"This item turns what we assumed about the Basques and writing upside down," says Joaqun Gorrochategui, a philologist at the University of the Basque Country, in a statement issued by the Aranzadi Science Society, which has been excavating the site since 2017.
“We were almost convinced that the Basques were illiterate in ancient times.”
It's possible that Euskara was fully established as a language before the millennium's turn.
The letters on the hand were carved out of small dots rather than straight lines, which was never seen in any writing in the ancient Western World.
Clearly, the Basques have secrets to reveal, and it's no surprise that their language and culture have lasted so long given the potential cultural growth.
