Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/32

20. But even without this information, only from the probability arising from what we observe in all countries, we might have judged that such would have been the case. The same with regard to the people of Spain, of the original inhabitants, independently of the various foreigners that had settled there, Greeks, Romans, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, or any others, including the Persians, according to Varro, as cited by Pliny. What people were referred to as Persians, it is unnecessary here to conjecture, as our inquiry is only directed to ascertain the character of that large and warlike body of wandering tribes whom the more civilized nations of antiquity found in Spain, as recorded by their writers. These tribes, spoken of by them under different names, were, as far as we can judge, of the same origin in Spain; though not, as Gibbon has said, all the same as those of Gaul and Britain, When, therefore, we read of the people of Spain under so many different names as Gauls, Celts, Scythians, or Iberi, with the compounds Celtiberi, or Celto-Scythians, independently of the local names, or those of individual tribes, we must not imagine them to have been of distinct nationalities. Strabo has expressly informed us, that these were all only general terms: and his observations respecting them are deserving of our careful consideration: (lib. i. cap. 2).

From the above passage we may conclude, that Strabo understood the term Scythians to signify Nomades; and such, literally, seems to be the true meaning of the word, whether applied to the wandering tribes known to the ancients as Scythians, or those known later as Scots, the word Scuite in Gaelic still signifying a wanderer. We have already seen that the word Celt seems to have been applied with the same meaning as a bushranger, or dweller in the woods; and corresponding to these, though certainly a new suggestion, I feel persuaded that the word Iberi had the same signification, and was applied to the same people by the Phœnicians, from whom it came to the Greeks and Romans. The word, which we have in our version translated Hebrew, appears originally to have signified one who had no fixed habitation: , "inhabitants of the desert, nomades." Thus the phrase in Genesis, ch. xiv. 13, in our