or. Baetica was the ancient Roman name of Andalucia (cf. World History Encyclopedia. Other Tartessian enthusiasts imagine it as a contemporary of Atlantis, with which it might have traded. For decades, much research on pre-Roman Iberia has gravitated around the nature of Tartessos as an historical or mythical The biblical Tarshish as Tartessos? The deceased was accompanied (amongst other) by not only two most valuable iron knifes with handles made of ivory and a rare bronze thymaterion, but also by a complete two-wheeled chariot a la mode oriental, made completely out of bronze. 13 May 2021. A great civilization sprang up called Tartessos which exported the valuable metals through Phoenician trading stations along the coast, and everyone grew rich on the trade. The anthropologist Juan Villarías-Robles, who works with the Spanish National Research Council, said "Richard Freund was a newcomer to our project and appeared to be involved in his own very controversial issue concerning King Solomon's search for ivory and gold in Tartessos, the well documented settlement in the Doñana area established in the first millennium BC" and described his claims as 'fanciful'.[31]. These files are public domain. Tartessos sprang up along the River Guadalquivir where there are great deposits of copper and silver - it is known as the Rio Tinto, the red river. This set, weighing 2.39 kg all in all, was found buried in an urn in the Phoenician sanctuary of El Carambolo. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms. For only $5 per month you can become a member and support our mission to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide. The Mediterranean people of the first millennium BCE knew about Tartessos, which, for them, was a legendary place, far away and full of innumerable treasures. Henceforth trade connections, formerly largely in elite goods, assumed an increasingly broad economic role. Read reviews from world’s largest community for readers. Many of those developments are connected more or less to the leaving of the Phoenicians. The mining and other processes connected to the extraction and transportation of the unearthed metals were powered by the local elites and worked by their fellow men, but surely planned, supervised, and instructed by specialized Phoenician settlers. Sanctuaries inspired by the Phoenician architecture have been found in the deposit of Castulo (Linares, Jaén) and in the vicinity of Carmona. Cypriot and Phoenician metalworkers produced 15 million tons of pyrometallurgical residues at the vast dumps of Riotinto. The Tartessian culture existed from the 9th to the 6th centuries BCE in the south-westernmost part of Spain. Tartessos' wealth was described by ancient authors and mentioned multiple times in the Bible, yet the land remained as mythical (but far less well known) as "El Dorado" until archaeologists eventually found traces of the Tartessian culture in the second half of the 20th century CE. Since the classicists of the early 20th century, biblical archaeologists often identify the place-name Tarshish in the Hebrew Bible with Tartessos, though others connect Tarshish to Tarsus in Anatolia or other places as far as India. The Tartessians traded with precious metals, especially with silver. Sinai, God was angry. The oldest known indigenous texts of Iberia, dated from the 7th to 6th centuries BC, are written in Tartessian. Map of Tartessos with Phoenician and Greek colonies, A model of the Tartessian site of Cancho Roano, Extremadura, Spain, José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro (CC BY-NC-SA). Tartessos (Greek: Ταρτησσός) or Tartessus was a semi-mythical harbor city and the surrounding culture on the south coast of the Iberian Peninsula (in modern Andalusia, Spain), at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. [3] Archaeological discoveries in the region have built up a picture of a more widespread culture, identified as Tartessian, that includes some 97 inscriptions in a Tartessian language. Map of Tartessos with Phoenician and Greek coloniesTé y kriptonita (GNU FDL). Thayer and Smith. Tarshish was mentioned in … The villages around the Tartessian gulf, some of them existing for barely 50 years, were given up one after another. "Greek Lexicon entry for Tarsos". While the Phoenicians profitably traded the Spanish metals in overseas regions, thus creating the long-living legend of Tartessos, the indigenous people partnering with them in the mining business benefitted by controlling the mines or by providing food, manpower, and wood. For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks. Download Full PDF Package. In excavations on spatially restricted sites in the center of modern Huelva, sherds of elite painted Greek ceramics of the first half of the 6th century BC have been recovered. (See entry for Jonah in the Jewish Encyclopedia.) The oldest finds in connection with the Phoenicians in Spain were made in the area of the modern port of Huelva, the ancient city of Onoba. Even the Bible has a possible mention of Tartessos. At Cástulo (Jaén), a mosaic of river pebbles from the end of the 6th century BC is the earliest mosaic in Western Europe. Last modified March 25, 2015. Lindner, Norman. The capital of Tartessos lay in the Donana National Park. All the structures defining Tartessian culture faded with the leaving of the Phoenicians and native people returned to a status quo, much resembling pre-Phoenician times. Subsequent discoveries were widely reported: in September 1923 archaeologists discovered a Phoenician necropolisin which human remains were unear… Bibliography Information. Tartessian communities could not handle this waning of their economies' most important pillar, and their elites could not sustain their newly formed hierarchy anymore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Should this be correct, we find multiple mentions: In the Oracle against Tyre the prophet Ezekiel (27, 12) reports that daß silver, iron, lead and tin were delivered from Tarsis to Tyre and then (most probably) sold to Mesopotamia. Tartessos existed too late. ", Maas – Lindemann, G. "Interrelaciones de la cerámica fenicia en el Occidente mediterráneo. According to the 4th century BC Greek geographer and explorer Pytheas, quoted by Strabo in the 1st century AD, the ancestral homeland of the Turduli was located north of Turdetania, the region where the kingdom of Tartessos was located in the Baetis River valley (the present-day Guadalquivir valley) in southern Spain.[5][6]. The layout and the type of constructed living spaces varied from settlement to settlement. They gained possession of luxurious goods from the Far East, which were used not only to increase their own consumerist desires, but more importantly to create a whole new form of redistribution-based hierarchy in south-western Spain. If you have bookmarks or links to our site on your blog or website, please update them. Following Phoenician tradition, the cremated remains of the decayed were stored together with the grave goods in an urn. Huelva contains the largest accumulation of imported elite goods and must have been an important Tartessian center. The enigmatic Lady of Elx, an ancient bust of a woman found in southeastern Spain, has been tied with Atlantis and Tartessos, though the statue displays clear signs of being manufactured by later Iberian cultures. The correlation between the Tartessos of the Iberian Peninsula, mentioned by Greek authors, and the Tarshish of the Hebrew Bible was first suggested in a late lexicon. Tartessos-Tarshish-Atlantis and Other Human Settlements in the Donana National Park Rainer W. Kuhne Tuckermannstr. All this indicates that the farmers were self-sustaining and relatively free from any kind of direct governmental or political control. Yet 90 years ago the archaeologist Adolf Schulten tried unsuccessfully to locate Argantinos city in search of the riches, which he suspected had to be there. Among their trade partners were the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, and the Greeks. Most sites were inexplicably abandoned in the 5th century BC. Their content, wine, was the first oriental commodity to be selected by the native people around the Tartessian gulf in great amounts and went on to become the most famous Phoenician import in all of Spain (at least in the archaeological record). While there are no fine pieces of art known (as neither are tombs) from their Bronze-Age ancestors, the people of Tartessos became pretty handy with different materials and produced wonderful objects in their very own technique. A short summary of this paper. Ancient History Encyclopedia has a new name! According to several historians, the biblical city "Tarsis" was the capital of the kingdom of Tartessos. The last point is the identification of Tartessos with the Tarshish referred to in the Bible, which is considered very plausible, although unproven. (Tinto means "red", and the river runs with a clear copper colour. Herodotus, for example, describes it as beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar). The extent of the extracted metals can only be guessed, but the ancient sources attest incredible abundance. As is proven in multiple cases by the analysis of bones, the people buried alongside each other in a single tumulus belonged exclusively to one family. It is not known whether Tartessus was a city, a river or a nation. The extracted ores were cupellated and cast, mostly in nearby indigenous villages, as excavated castings molds and slags prove. Tartessos-Tarshish-Atlantis and Other Human Settlements in the Donana National Park Rainer W. Kuhne Tuckermannstr. They have been uncovered in excavations of a large building which had seen the slaughter of many animals before being burned. Although this is heavily disputed by most archeologists involved in the project. Tartessos was the model for Plato's Atlantis. Review American Journal of Archaeology - Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia. He had just removed Israel from the physical bondage of slavery in Egypt and the spiritual bondage of idolatry. This tomb illustrates to what extent the elites of Tartessian society profited from the contact to the Phoenicians and that they presented themselves to a great extent in oriental fashion. Some people think that the city called Tarshish in the Old Testament of the Bible refers to that same city. Pre-Roman silver slag is found in the Tartessian cities of Huelva Province. A model of the Tartessian site of Cancho Roano, Extremadura, SpainCarlos Cabanillas (CC BY-SA). [3] Trade in tin was very lucrative in the Bronze Age, since it is an essential component of bronze and is comparatively rare. https://www.worldhistory.org/tartessos/. Tartessian burials now show a mere martial atmosphere and fewer signs of Phoenician imports – instead Greek ceramics began to circulate more widely in south-western Spain. These opulent ore deposits were part of the so-called Iberian Pyrite Belt, a mountain range covering the northern part of the modern province of Andalucía. Tarshish was mentioned in several books of the bible. [20] An earlier generation of archaeologists and historians took a normative approach to the primitive Tartessians' adoption of Punic styles and techniques, as of a less-developed culture adopting better, more highly evolved cultural traits, and finding Eastern parallels for Early Iron Age material culture in the Tartessian sites. Tartessus was the commercial intermediary between the countries of northwestern Europe and the Mediterranean. If you have ever heard of "El Dorado", you know that legends that center on riches, treasures, and adventurous voyages to distant and unknown lands last a long time. ", Gómez Toscano, F. "Huelva en el año 1000 a. C., un puerto cosmopolita entre Mediterráneo y Atlántico. The ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, told us about the … We are now World History Encyclopedia to better reflect the breadth of our non-profit organization's mission. New light on the warrior stelae from Tartessos (Spain) - Volume 80 Issue 307 In 1922, Adolf Schulten gave currency to a view of Tartessos that made it the Western, and wholly European source of the legend of Atlantis. m. between Las Monjas Square and Mendez Nuñez Street, some 90,000 ceramic fragments of indigenous, Phoenician and Greek imported wares were exhumed, out of which 8,009 allowed scope for a type identification. Strabo mentions that even the lead or stone anchors of leaving ships were replaced by silver ones (Geogr. Simcha Jacobovici, involved in the production of a documentary on Freund's work for the National Geographic Channel, stated that the biblical Tarshish (which he believes is the same as Tartessos) was Atlantis, and that "Atlantis was hiding in the Tanach". "Tartessos" is the name given by the Greeks to the first Western civilization they knew, which was inhabiting the southwest of Spain. Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations. [28] Both Atlantis and Tartessos were believed to be advanced societies which collapsed when their cities were lost beneath the waves; supposed further similarities with the legendary society make a connection seem feasible, though virtually nothing is known of Tartessos, not even its precise site. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/tartessos/. "Sobre la colonización agrícola de los siglos VII – VI A.N.E. Occasionally these little dwellings contain hints of Phoenician workshops, outposts of the bigger manufactories in the Phoenician colonies, but none of them is spared from the general influence the colonizers had had on the indigenous people for decades. Tarshish is placed on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea by several biblical passages (Isaiah 23, Jeremiah 10:9, Ezekiel 27:12, Jonah 1:3, 4:2), and more precisely: west of Israel (Genesis 10:4, 1 Chronicles 1:7). Tartessus, ancient region and town of the Guadalquivir River valley in southwestern Spain, probably identical with the Tarshish mentioned in the Bible. The Tartessian language is an extinct pre-Roman language once spoken in southern Iberia and has recently been classified as a Celtic language. Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter! The spread of a silver standard in Assyria increased its attractiveness (the tribute from Phoenician cities was assessed in silver). Chicago Press, 2009, 255-80 found buried in an urn, describes it beyond., like Tartessos, Arganthonios, presumably named for his wealth in )! Llompart and L. Serrano, J. Llompart and L. Serrano, this page was last on. 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