Iberians

The Iberians (Latin: Hibērī, from Greek: Ιβηρία) were a set of peoples that Greek and Roman sources (among others, Hecataeus of Miletus, Avienus, Herodotus and Strabo) identified with that name in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula, at least from the 6th century BC. The Roman sources also use the term Hispani to refer to the Iberians.

The term Iberian, as used by the ancient authors, had two distinct meanings. One, more general, referred to all the populations of the Iberian peninsula without regard to ethnic differences (Pre-Indo-European, Celts and non-Celtic Indo-Europeans, such as the Lusitanians). The other, more restricted ethnic sense, refers to the people living in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula, which by the 6th century BC had absorbed cultural influences from the Phoenicians and the Greeks. This non-Indo-European cultural group spoke the Iberian language from the 7th to the 1st century BC.

Other possibly related peoples often termed Iberian are the Turdetani, who were descendants of the Bronze age Tartessos culture (although it is not certain if the Turdetani were Iberians in the ethnic and linguistic sense) and the Vascones, that possibly were more related to the Aquitani than to the Iberians. The rest of the peninsula, in the northern, central, northwestern, western and southwestern areas, was inhabited by Celts or Celtiberians groups and the possibly Pre-Celtic or Para-Celtic Indo-European Lusitanians, Vettones, and the Turdetani that also could have been Indo-European or even Celtic.