Just Yesterday

LA EMPERATRIZ THEODORA

The vase of Llíria (País Valencià).

It’s of Iberian origin and was unearthed in the ancient town of Edeta. It’s dated back to the 2nd-1st century BCE. The drawings depict some animals and humans, some of them are navigating while other is throwing arrows.

There’s an inscription in Iberian script below one of the canoes that reads “gudua deizdea”.

In Euskara gudu / guda means battle, fight, war. Deitu means to call, and deitzea is a declensed form. For any euskaldun is veeeery easy to understand the 2,000 year-old Iberian sentence as “call(ing) to war”. Which - if it was the actual meaning - would make sense, since we see people with a bow and flying arrows in two directions.

Wait, if it’s Iberian what’s Basque even doing here? There’s a theory that proposes that Iberian and Basque belong to the same language family - maybe with other extinct languages - but Basque is the only survivor.

But of course some academics defend this is impossible since:

1) deitu is not an old verb (not ended in -i or -n). However: “To call” can be also dei egin, and there you go the ancient verb with a final -i.

2) gudua is supposed to be of German or Latin origin - whatever origin but Basque. However: nowadays it’s still the exact word for war in many dialects, standard being guda. 3) we can’t decipher ancient languages with modern ones as a starting point, and since languages evolve it’s impossible that nowadays Basque has anything to do with 2,000 year-old Iberian / proto-Basque. However: Spanish - and other Romance languages - use many exact Latin words like fama, forma, rosa, sol, etc. And even exact verb conjugations like canto, amas, etc.

Besides, letters -zs- in deizdea appear in other words like arizda (standard haritz), that evolved to modern Basque -tz- but also to Spanish -st-: one example of this is the first king of Navarre who is known as Iñigo Arista in Spanish and Eneko Aritza in Basque (Eneko the oak tree).

We’re not linguists at all but we do know what we think about all this.