The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was a member of the epigraphic family of paleohispanic scripts located roughly in eastern Spain, concentrated in the northeast, and in Aquitaine of southern France. The script is a type of writing, or graphemic representation, not a type of language. Linguistics does not apply except only incidentally.

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Quick Facts Northeastern Iberian script Levantine, Script type ...

Northeastern Iberian script Levantine
Barkeno, Iberian for Barcelona
Script type	Semisyllabary Some of the characters stand for letters, which are linguistic phonemes. Other characters stand for syllables, which are linguistic morphemes. The list of signs, either alphabetic or syllabic, is called a signary.[1]
Direction	Left-to-right
Languages	Iberian, Basque
Related scripts
Parent systems	Phoenician[2] Paleohispanic Northern paleohispanic Northeastern Iberian script
Child systems	Northeastern standard dual, extended dual, and non-dual Iberian signaries[3]
Sister systems	Celtiberian script

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A classification similar to that of a language family is used analogously for epigraphy, but the branches and stems are not languages. The same writing type might be used for more than one language, and the same language might be written in multiple writing types. This distinction appears in the modern concept of different fonts for the same text.

The name of the script reflects an earlier overuse of the term Iberian, which seemed to appear everywhere and have to do with everything on the Iberian Peninsula. In the areas of languages and scripts contradictory usages began to develop. Iberian at first meant having to do with the Iberian Peninsula. With this understanding linguists named the unknown language of northeastern Spain, infered from a number of sources, Iberian. Some would equivocate that Iberia does include a small section of southern France on the east. The distribution of the script, however, settles the question. There is no way the country of Aquitaine north of the Pyranees can ever be considered Iberia, and yet the script is there, minimally.

The two classic names for the peninsula are quite ancient, or pre-Roman (as the scholars say): Iberia and Hispania. The Greek sources liked Iberia, which, they asserted, was one country with one population, the Iberians. Whether they were inventing a population as a figure of speech to suit the geography or were just uninformed is a question for Greek geography.

The figure of speech is perhaps truer, as they also believed that Iberian derived from the Ebro River of northeastern Spain. The river began in the region of the Celtiberian script and flowed down through the country of the northeastern Iberian script to what the geographers called the inner sea along what vacation-minded moderns call the Azure Coast. Celtiberian is an ancient Greek name intended distinguish the Celtic-speaking population from the Iberian-speaking inhabitants of the lower river. The Romans, on the other hand, though admirers of Greek geography, preferred the native name they encountered on occupation, Hispania, the source of Spain and Spanish.

The modern scholars, about to found a new field that would comprise the study of scripts evidenced in the thousands of inscriptions that had been accumulating, whether on coins, on stones, on pottery or on some other media, were thus presented with two best names: Iberian or Hispanic. An opportunity presented itself when Emil Hübner undertook to catalog the Latin inscriptions of Spain according to the internationlly agreed-upon format; that is, a volume of numbered inscriptions for each nation. His initial work, published in 1869 as Inscriptiones Hispaniae Latinae, "Latin Inscriptions of Spain," with a supplement in 1892, was followed by a work on the Christian inscriptions in 1871 with a supplement in 1900.

Hübner was fortuitously in the right place at the right time with the right interests and credentials, to view and study the pre-Roman inscriptions simultaneously with the Roman. His parallel volume on that topic, Monumenta Linguae Ibericae, "Inscriptions of the Iberian Language," was published in 1893. By lingua Iberica Hübner meant, as he explained in the Praefatio, monumenta antiqua paeninsulae ibericae, "ancient inscriptions of the Iberian Peninsula."^[4] The modern field was thus launched under the name of the peninsula. Iberian also was thus the name of the language spoken on the peninsula. This terminology went on for about a century.

The problem was that Iberian was not spoken everywhere on the peninsula but only in the east of it. The main sources of Iberian were the inscriptions written in what was subsequently called the Iberian script. A fuller study revealed that this script also was used in southern France; i.e., was not Iberian in its first sense.

The response of the linguists was not to use Iberian in the general sense anymore, but to innovate a more specific term, paleohispanic. Hispaniic is not confined to the peninsula; moreover, paleo- or "ancient" calls to mind that the Romans unified the country under their own language, which became Spanish, obliterating both the local languages and the local scripts.

The inscriptions that use the northeastern Iberian script have been found mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula: largely along the coast from Roussillon to Alicante, but also with a deep penetration in the Ebro Valley. The northeastern Iberian inscriptions have been found on different object types (silver and bronze coins, silver and ceramic recipients, lead plaques, mosaics, amphores, stones (steles), spindle-whorls etc.), representing 95% of the total finds (over 2000 items), and nearly all the scripts were written from left to right. The oldest northeastern Iberian script date to the 4th or maybe the 5th century BCE. The modern ones date from the end of the 1st century BCE or maybe the beginning of the 1st century CE.

The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, was the main means of written expression of the Iberian language, but has also been used to write Proto-Basque as seen in the Hand of Irulegi.^[5] The Iberian language is also expressed by the southeastern Iberian script and the Greco-Iberian alphabet.

In recent years four northeastern Iberian abecedaries or signaries have been published: the Castellet de Bernabé signary, the Tos Pelat signary, the Ger signary and the Bolvir signary, all of them belonging to the dual variant of the script.

• Greco-Iberian alphabet
• Iberian scripts
• Paleohispanic scripts
  • Celtiberian script
  • Southeastern Iberian script
  • Tartessian script
• Paleohispanic languages
• Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula