Tartessos

The earliest surviving mention of Tartessos is in Hecataeus in the sixth century BC. Herodotus tells of a king, Arganthonios, who welcomed the first Greeks to reach Iberia, Phocaeans from Asia Minor; he is said to have ruled more than a hundred years, and his name has been read as "the man of silver". In the fourth century BC Ephorus described "a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands".

The harbour city is semi-mythical, and where it lay was already unclear to the ancients. Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, reported a river "running down into the sea by two mouths and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name", called Baetis in his own day and now the Guadalquivir. By the end of the millennium the name had dropped out of use; Pliny the Elder wrongly identified Carteia as the Tartessos named by earlier Greek writers.

Alluvial tin was panned in Tartessian streams from an early date, and by the late Bronze Age silver extraction in Huelva province had reached industrial proportions, with vast dumps of metallurgical residue at Riotinto. Mining and smelting came before the Phoenicians, whose presence in Iberia dates from the eighth century BC and who built their own harbour nearby at Gadir, present-day Cádiz. Their arrival, and that of the Greeks after them, opened a wider market and set off an orientalising phase in Tartessian material culture, roughly 750 to 550 BC.

How the culture began is disputed. One account has local populations of the southwestern Bronze Age evolving towards it and reaching a climax on contact with the coastal Phoenician trading posts; another treats it as the product of Phoenician acculturation alone. In the centre of modern Huelva, two adjacent lots yielded some 90,000 sherds of indigenous, Phoenician and Greek wares dated from the tenth to the early eighth centuries BC, earlier than finds from other Phoenician colonies.

Silver production around Huelva fell at the end of the seventh century BC. At the battle of Alalia off Corsica in 535 BC the Greeks were defeated by a Carthaginian and Etruscan coalition, leaving Tartessos without an important trading ally, and no written reference to it survives from after that date. Phoenician imports fell away sharply through the second half of the sixth century and the princely tombs of the Guadalquivir valley ceased. Most sites were abandoned in the fifth century BC.

No explanation is settled. The proposals on record include destruction by Carthage or by Gadir, an attack from the peoples of the meseta, the collapse of the tin monopoly once Massalia could reach British tin overland and Gadir by sea, and the exhaustion of the ore veins. Esther Rodríguez has argued instead for a run of floods, citing a flood level identified in the courtyard at Casas del Turuñuelo immediately before the building's ritual closure and abandonment, though she notes the case still needs testing.

The discoveries Adolf Schulten published in 1922 moved the study of Tartessos from philologists and antiquarians to archaeologists. The gold treasure of El Carambolo came to light at Camas, west of Seville, in September 1958, and hundreds of objects were recovered from the La Joya necropolis at Huelva; J. M. Luzón was the first to identify Tartessos with modern Huelva, and many archaeologists now place the lost city there.

Schulten also claimed in 1922 that Tartessos was the European source of the Atlantis legend. In 2011 a team led by Richard Freund said it had strong evidence for a location in the Doñana National Park, reading the site of Cancho Roano as a memorial city rebuilt in the image of Atlantis. Spanish scientists said Freund was sensationalising their work; the anthropologist Juan Villarías-Robles called his claims "fanciful".

Some 97 inscriptions survive in the Southwest script, a semi-syllabic system recording a language still unclassified for lack of data; dated to the seventh and sixth centuries BC, they are the oldest known indigenous texts of Iberia, found in southwestern Spain and southern Portugal. Excavation at the Turuñuelo site in Guareña, Badajoz, began in 2015, and the site was declared bien de interés cultural in May 2022. Two carved stone busts found there in 2023 are thought to be the first facial representations of Tartessian goddesses, with fragments of at least three more recovered, one of them taken for a warrior because part of his helmet survives.