Tag Archives: Ullastret

Wrapping up our tour in Barcelona

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[This is a much-procrastinated final post about my linguistic tour of northern Spain in June.]

A visit to the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya, in the Montjuic area of Barcelona, was the perfect capstone for my trip to Spain. This first-rate museum covers the human history of Catalonia from prehistory through the Visigoths. It is well laid out and the wall labels are consistently informative. (Some are in Catalan only, and some in Catalan, Spanish, and English.) A full visit would take two to four hours, and so can easily be combined with other Montjuic attractions including the Joan Miró museum.

The Museu d’Arqueologia’s collections of Iberian, Greek, and Roman artifacts reinforced what my friend Sue and I had already seen in person at Ullastret and Empúries on the Costa Brava. The museum also explained the active role of Phoenicians in pre-Roman Spain. We learned about Phoenician settlements such as Sa Caleta, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Balearic Island of Ibiza. My previous knowledge of Phoenician activity in Spain was, of course, limited to linguistics. I knew that several Spanish place-names are Phoenician, including España itself (probably from an expression meaning ‘land of rabbits’), Cádiz (‘fortress’), Málaga, Cartagena (after Carthage), Ibiza, and Mahón (the capital of Minorca). In addition, the Phoenician alphabet was the basis of the Iberian alphabet seen in artifacts such as those found at Ullastret.

The slideshow below shows some of my favorite artifacts from the museum.

 

The Iberian ruins of Ullastret

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When I began to plan my linguistic tour of northern Spain, I knew that visiting Ullastret would be a top priority. One of the 101 questions in my book is “What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain?” (this comes after two questions about Basque), and I illustrated it with a reproduction of this Iberian lead plaque, found in Ullastret. I was dying to see it in person.

Iberian lead plaque, from Ullastret, Spain

I’m using “Iberian” here to refer not to the Iberian Peninsula itself, but to a community, with a distinct language and culture, that populated the eastern part of the Peninsula in pre-Roman days. They shared the Peninsula with Greeks (on the northeast coast), Phonecians (in the south), Celts (in the north and center), and Tartassians (in the southwest). Ullastret was the capital of a specific group of Iberians called the Indiketes (see map below). They were known for their extensive contact with the nearby Greek settlements. To quote the wall text from the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret, Fou una zona intensament hel·lenizada, per la presència de les colònies gregues d’Emporion (fundad cap a 600 a.C.) i de Rhode (fundada molt probablement a finals del s. Vè a.C.).

[The middle dot in hel·lenizada shows that the double ll is pronounced as a long l and not like a Spanish ll — which Catalan also has.]

Map of Iberian settlements in Spain (from Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret)

Map of Iberian settlements in Spain (from Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret)

According to our guidebook, one sign of the Indiketes’s Hellenization is the purely decorative groove they added to the main gate of the city:

One side of Ullastret's main gate, with a decorative groove, a sign of Greek influence.

One side of Ullastret’s main gate. Its decorative groove is believed to show Greek influence.

Ullastret was a full-fledged city, with protective walls, streets and houses, temples, water cisterns, and grain silos. The silos were reused as garbage receptacles once the grain had been consumed (or sold to other settlements). This makes them a gold mine for the archaeologists who have studied Ullastret, since garbage is always a prime source of information about a culture.

“My” lead plaque was easy to find. It is part of a display of artifacts showing Iberian writing. Please see the presentation below. You can click on the double-headed diagonal arrow to the left of the LinkedIn “in” logo to see the presentation in full-screen mode.

In conclusion, I have to say that as much as my friend Sue and I enjoyed Ullastret, we both strongly preferred our previous visit to the Castro of Ulaca. The latter ruins are harder to get to, but are more impressive, and the location itself is more beautiful and magical.