Iruleg’s hand sheds light on the history of the Basque language

As a child, Ruben heard the elders of his small town of Aranguren, 15 kilometers from Pamplona, ​​Spain, tell this story. There would be a castle on top of Iruleg mountain. One day in 2006, a car technician and several neighbors climbed to a height of 893 meters, took a cutter and a shovel under their hands. They dig for a week. Research by professional archaeologists since 2017 has led to an important discovery that requires very little: one word.

The hand-shaped bronze sheet was removed on June 18, 2021. Four lines of inscription on his back. By analyzing these Paleo-Hispanic graphic signs by correspondence, the specialists identified the very first word: “Sorionecu”. They are quick to connect the original part, “sorion” with “zonioneko”, which means “good luck, good omen” in Euscar, the modern Basque language. Acquaintance i^Eh century BC J.-C., thus the hand of Iruleg will be the oldest written evidence of the Basque language, or more precisely of its ancestor, announced the Aranzadi Science Society on November 14. The oldest known text dates back to the 15th century^e century, after 1500 years.

The origins of this language, spoken by some 750,000 speakers on both sides of the western Pyrenees, including 80,000 in France, remain a mystery. Basque is a “linguistic isolation”, it is not like Romance languages ​​(French, Spanish, Italian…) nor Germanic (English, German) or Celtic (Breton, Welsh). The language is among the only non-Indo-European languages ​​on the continent, along with Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian.

People of the Vascones

Patience paid off in Aranguren Valley. The Scientific Society of Aranzad, an institution located in San Sebastián, was created in 1947 and whose missions ranged from botany to exhumations related to the period of the Spanish Civil War, and proceeded in two phases. Since 2007, he has excavated in the area of ​​the castle, then in 2017 he settled the ruins of the nearby village, inhabited in the middle of the Bronze Age (XV).^e– XI^e century BC BC) and the end of the Iron Age (I^Eh century BC AD).

At that time Irulegi was inhabited by Vascones. These indigenous peoples existed since ancient times before the Romans subjugated them during their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.explains Joaquin Gorochateg, professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz campus. “We know very little about them. They are mentioned in some ancient sources, first signed by the Roman politician and historian Sallust. Later in the Imperial Age, some were part of Roman armies sent to Britain or Germany. »