Paleohispanic languages in the context of "Cartagena, Spain"

The Iberian language is the language or family of languages of an indigenous western European people (the Iberians), identified by Greek and Roman sources, who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era (before about AD 375). An ancient Iberian culture can be identified as existing between the 7th and 1st centuries BC, at least.

Iberian, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, was extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD. It had been replaced gradually by Latin, following the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic. The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and the latest from the end of the 1st century BCE or possibly the beginning of the 1st century CE.

The Paleohispanic scripts are the ancient writing systems created in the Iberian Peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. They derive from the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, which is a direct adaptation of the Greek alphabet. Some researchers believe that the Greek alphabet may also have played a role in the origin of the other Paleohispanic scripts. Most of these scripts are notable for being semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic.

Paleohispanic scripts are known to have been used from the 5th century BCE—possibly as early as the 7th century, according to some researchers—until the end of the 1st century BCE or the beginning of the 1st century CE. They were the primary scripts used to write the Paleohispanic languages.

Lusitanian (so named after the Lusitani or Lusitanians) was an Indo-European Paleohispanic language. There has been support for either a connection with the ancient Italic languages or Celtic languages. It is known from only six sizeable inscriptions, dated to roughly the first century AD, and numerous names of places (toponyms) and of gods (theonyms). The language was spoken in the territory inhabited by Lusitanian tribes, between the Douro and Tagus rivers, territory that today falls in central Portugal and western Spain.