Origin of the Basques

The Basques have occupied much the same area of northern Spain and southern France for thousands of years, at one time extending further eastward and northwards into Gascony and the Pyrenees, as attested by archaeological and toponymical evidence. The Basque language, known as Euskara, is generally considered a language isolate. The Basques have long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe. However this assumption has come under increasing criticism as genetic and linguistic studies have become more sophisticated. No firm conclusion has been reached on their origins.

Early attestation

Basque and other pre-Indo-European tribes (in red) at the time of Roman arrival

The key sources for the early history of the Basques are classical writers. Strabo in the 1st century AD reported that the Ouaskonous (Vascones) inhabited the area around the town of Pompelo, and the coastal town of Oiasona in Hispania. He also mentioned other tribes between them and the Cantabrians: the Varduli, Caristii, and Autrigones.^[1] About a century later Ptolemy also listed the coastal Oeasso beside the Pyrénées to the Vascones, together with 15 inland towns, including Pompelon.^[2] Pompelo/Pompelon is easily identified as modern-day Pamplona, Navarre. The border port of Irún, where a Roman harbour and other remains have been uncovered, is the accepted identification of the coastal town mentioned by Strabo and Ptolemy.^[3] Three inscriptions in an early form of Euskara found in eastern Navarre can be associated with the Vascones.^[4]

However the Vascones appear to have been just one tribe within a wider language community. Across the border in what is now France the Aquitani tribes of Gascony spoke a language different from the Celts and were more like the Iberi.^[5] Although no complete inscription in their language survives, a number of personal names were recorded in Latin inscriptions, which attest to Aquitanian being the precursor of modern Euskara.^[6] (This extinct Aquitanian language should not be confused with Occitan, a Romance language spoken in Aquitaine since the beginning of the Middle Ages.)

Place-names

There is toponymic evidence that the Basque language was once spoken over a much wider area than the modern day Basque country. This is specially attested by toponymy, that extends the proto-Basque linguistic area at least to all the Central Pyrenees, Upper Ebro valley, and all Gascony. There is no sign of Basque place-names in what is now the Spanish Basque Country in the early Roman period. So it appears that the language spread into these territories after the collapse of Roman power there.^[7] This theory is known as Late Basquisation.

Linguistic evidence

Euskara appears to be a language from the age of metal. It includes indigenous Basque words relating to agriculture, wheeled vehicles and metallurgy, such as shepherd (artzain), millet (artatxiki - formerly arto), wine (ardo), cart (gurdi), wheel (gurpil from *gurdi-bil, meaning cart-round), smith ([h]arotz), iron (burdina), lead (berun), gold (urre), and silver (zilar or urre-zuri - literally "white gold").^[8] The most common Basque words for tin (eztainu), copper (kobre) and bronze (brontze) are all borrowed from Romance. However it has been demonstrated that Euskara originally had its own words for these metals.^[9]

Genetic evidence

The mid-20th-century discovery that the Basques have an unusually high percentage of blood type O Rh-negative seemed to support the supposition that they were distinctly different from other Europeans.^[10] This made them a popular subject for genetic studies.^[11]

Studies of Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome DNA however have drawn conflicting conclusions. Gonzales and colleagues argued that the presence of a rare subgroup of haplogroup U8 places the ancestry of the Basques in the Upper Palaeolithic.^[12] However the Basques are similar to neighboring populations in their distribution of Y-DNA haplogroups.^[13]

Since some authors have proposed a Basque origin in the Caucasus or North Africa on linguistic grounds, Kristin L. Young and colleagues compared autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) data from Basque individuals living in 27 mountain villages in the provinces of Alava, Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Navarre, with that of neighboring populations in Europe, as well as proposed ancestral populations in North Africa and the Caucasus. They concluded that there was no support from autosomal STR analysis for the hypotheses of a recent common ancestor between the Basques and populations either from the Caucasus or North Africa.^[14]

See also

• Basque people
• Basque language
• Basque Country (historical territory)

References