Iberian

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Any member of a prehistoric people of southern and eastern Spain.

They were largely untouched by the migrations of Celtic peoples to northern and central Spain beginning in the 8th century BC. Culturally they were influenced by Greek and Phoenician trading colonies. On the eastern coast, tribes seem to have formed independent city-states; in the south, they formed monarchies. Their economy was based on agriculture, mining, and metallurgy. Their non-Indo-European language continued into Roman times.

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Portugal: Portugal, 12th and 13th centuries

More on "Iberian" from Britannica Concise:

Iberian Peninsula - Peninsula, southwestern Europe, occupied by Spain and Portugal.

Douro River - River in Spain and Portugal.

Cantabria - Historical region, autonomous community (pop., 2001: 535,131), and province, northern Spain.

Ebro River - River, northeastern Spain.

Extremadura - Historical region and autonomous community (pop., 2001: 1,058,503), west-central Spain.

More on "Iberian" from the 32 Volume Encyclopædia Britannica:

Iberian - one of a prehistoric people of southern and eastern Spain who later gave their name to the whole peninsula. The waves of migrating Celtic peoples from the 8th to 6th century BC onward settled heavily in northern and central Spain, penetrated Portugal and Galicia, but left the indigenous Bronze Age Iberian people of the south and east intact. Greek geographers give the name Iberian, probably ...

Iberian Peninsula - peninsula in southwestern Europe, occupied by Spain and Portugal. Its name derives from its ancient inhabitants whom the Greeks called Iberians, probably after the Ebro (Iberus), the peninsula's second longest river (after the Tagus). The Pyrenees form an effective land barrier in the northeast from the rest of Europe, and in the south at Gibraltar the peninsula is separated from North Africa by ...

Celto-Iberian language - extinct Indo-European language of the western part of the Iberian Peninsula. Celto-Iberian was written in the Iberic script (borrowed from speakers of the non-Indo-European Iberian language in eastern and southern Spain) and is known primarily from a small number of coin inscriptions and an even smaller number of inscriptions on stone. Leading scholars believe Celto-Iberian to be an archaic ...

Kartvelian languages - family of languages including Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz that are spoken south of the chief range of the Caucasus.

South America - Until the end of the era of Iberian domination, only the Spanish and Portuguese were admitted to their South American colonies. The rigid exclusion of all other foreigners had but few exceptions, though a small number of non-Iberian Europeans settled as a result of illegal or tolerated immigration. Most of the Spaniards came from Castile and the southern regions. Little is known about the ...

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