1. The Land of the Rabbits     THREE MILLENNIA AGO, WHEN ROME was still a swamp and Athens was barely strong enough to take on Troy, the Mediterranean world belonged to the Phoenicians, a civilization of master seafarers from the Middle East. Renowned for their mercantile prowess, the Phoenicians drummed up business as far north as Britain and Scandinavia and built trading ports all along the shores of North Africa. It was during one of these construction phases, around 1200 BC, that the Phoenicians landed on the Iberian Peninsula. The Phoenicians started settling the peninsula only around 800 BC. At the time, it was a sparsely populated land of dense forests and open plains teeming with wild boars, deer, wolves, and bears. Among the many novelties the Phoenicians discovered, one small mammal caught their attention. It was similar to a furry, tailless Middle Eastern creature with round ears that they called a hyrax, except this version had long ears and long legs, and multiplied at an astonishing pace.

The Phoenicians were evidently much impressed by these prolific little mammals. They named their new territory after them: I-shepan-ha, literally "land of hyraxes." Centuries later, the Romans Latinized this name to Hispania. And centuries after that, the name morphed into España. In other words, Spain's names originally meant something like "land of the rabbits." *   *   * But the Iberian Peninsula had a long history of settlement long before the Phoenicians arrived. To get an idea of its historical layers, we traveled to the city of Burgos, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Castile and León, in northern Spain. Located in the valley of the río Arlanzón, Burgos is still dominated by the old castillo (castle) built there twelve hundred years ago to defend settlers fleeing marauding Moors.

But there had been people living around Burgos literally a million years before that. From the ramparts of Burgos's Castillo, on top of the hill of San Miguel, we gazed down on a dense maze of tile roofs, a view dominated by the city's splendid Gothic cathedral. In the middle of the town is an enormous, futuristic glass structure, the Museo de la Evolución Humana (Museum of Human Evolution), which houses the finds of impressive archaeological digs carried out about ten miles from Burgos. One site, known as Atapuerca, produced some of the most impressive discoveries in European archaeology in the last thirty years. Some of these discoveries forced historians to rewrite the story of the dawn of humanity. The oldest bones from Atapuerca are those of a man who died 1.2 million years ago. Previously, no one believed that humanity's ancestors had left Africa that early.

Although archaeologists disagree about where the remnants fit in the evolutionary chain, their discovery indisputably makes Spain the European cradle of mankind. In addition to the 1.2-million-year-old Homo antecessor , archaeologists in the Burgos area found some Neanderthal remains dating from 60,000 BC, which would make them among the last of their kind. Recent dating of cave art in northern Spain has shown that it is ten thousand years older than similar finds in France. They say that history is written by the conquerors, but this wasn't the case for the Phoenicians. That is probably because, although they settled in the southern Iberian Peninsula for eight hundred years, the Phoenicians never managed to pass their language on to its inhabitants. The Romans, who landed on the Iberian Peninsula in the third century BC were the first to write down anything about the people who lived there. They recorded observations about the three principal ethnic groups they encountered: the Basques, the Iberians, and the Celts, none of whom had written anything about themselves beyond the names of their dead on gravestones.

Yet some of the words from the languages of pre-Roman Spain did find their way into modern Spanish. The Basque language is believed to have evolved from a language used in Neolithic times. Today's Basque territory straddles the border of France and Spain, yet Spain has so many place names of Basque origin that historians believe that the Basques might once have occupied up to a third of the Iberian Peninsula. Among the civilizations the Romans conquered in Hispania, the Basques alone refused to give up their language. That language, Euskera, is still spoken today in both France and Spain, although it has been heavily influenced by Latin over the centuries. Curiously, the Basques got their own name from the Celts, a tribe that migrated to the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 BC, and dubbed them Vascos , their name in Spanish to this day. The Celts spoke a group of related tongues similar to those spoken by the Celtic populations farther north, in France and Britain. These Celtic languages themselves originated in the same tongue that spawned Latin, a language linguists call Indo-European, spoken about eight thousand years ago in Turkey.

Indo-European spawned Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and Sanskrit (a language of India), which all share some common vocabulary, like papa and mama . In the southern part of the peninsula, the Romans discovered another tribe, called the Iberians. Again, the name came from a Celtic word bier, which meant river. Bier eventually morphed into Ebro, the name of Spain's main river. The Celts labeled the people living across the Ebro from them the Iberians, which just meant "the Riverians." The Iberians, who were probably related to the Berbers in North Africa and had been on the peninsula for several thousand years before the Romans arrived, were the only native population in Iberia who had a written language. Unfortunately, almost no traces of the Iberian language survive and almost nothing is known about it, not even the name Iberians called themselves before the Celts named them. In between the Iberians and Celts, the Romans discovered another group.

The Romans seem to have run out of names by the time they discovered this people and just called them the Celtiberians. Although most of what we know about these ancient civilizations comes from what the Romans wrote about them, the Romans didn't have much to say. This was a stark contrast to Gaul, where Julius Caesar wrote extensively about the Celtic civilization he conquered. Roman generals never recorded more than a few details about the people of the Iberian Peninsula, not to mention their languages. To decode Iberia's languages, historians have had to work from broken plates and tombstone engravings-not the most reliable sources, since ancient engravers wrote phonetically in ill-defined writing systems. Nevertheless, many words from Iberia's original civilizations survived the centuries and are still part of modern Spanish. Galápago (turtle), silo, puerco (pig), toro (bull), álamo (poplar), and salmón (salmon) come from pre-Roman languages. Almost all the ancient words that made it into modern Spanish relate to material and agricultural life.

Barro (mud), charco (puddle), manteca (fat, butter), and perro (dog) come from Celtic words, as do camisa (shirt), cabaña (shed), carro (cart), cerveza (beer), cama (bed), and camino (road). The Basque language, Euskera, gave Spanish izquierdo (left). Basque probably contributed the rolled rr of Spanish: pizarra (slate), chaparro (oak), zamarra (sheepskin jacket), narria (flatbed truck), cencerro (cowbell), and gabarra (barge). All have a Basque origin. *   *   * But the story of Spanish really starts with Rome. The language the Romans brought to Hispania would survive other conquering empires as it evolved into a modern tongue. It would one day travel across the globe where it would grow to become the world's third language, spoken by five hundred million people in two dozen countries. It's amazing, then, to think that the Romans didn't really want to be on the Iberian Peninsula in the first place.

The main reason they went was to defeat their rivals at the time-the Carthaginians, a powerful Phoenician colony based in today's Tunisia, which had grown to control the Mediterranean Sea by that time. The Carthaginians were the catalyst that set the history of the Spanish language history into motion. In the third century BC, the Romans ran up against the Carthaginians while they were trying to consolidate their land power over the Italian peninsula. That sparked the First Punic War of 264241 BC. The Second Punic War started a generation later, in 218 BC, when the Carthaginian prince Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees and the Alps with thirty-eight thousand men, eight thousand horses, and thirty-seven war elephants and attacked the Italian peninsula. While the elephants did not last long, Hannibal was a military genius who defeated one Roman army after the next. But when the Romans figured out that Hannibal was using the Iberian Peninsula as a base to rebuild his troops, they headed there and drove him back to Africa, in 201 BC. The Romans established the province of Hispania in 197 BC.

Hispania was their first overseas colony. (Rome had not yet conquered the land passage, which was the future province of Gaul.) By comparison, Gaul became a part of the empire 150 years later, and Dacia (the future Romania) 150 years after that. Though linguists debate the real effects of this on modern Spanish, one thing is certain: the Latin spoken in Hispania con.