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Vascons


The Vascones (singular Vasco, from Latin gens Vasconum) were a pre-Roman tribe who, on the arrival of the Romans in the 1st century, inhabited a territory that spanned between the upper course of the Ebro river and the southern basin of the western Pyrenees, a region that coincides with present-day Navarre, western Aragon and northeastern La Rioja, in the Iberian Peninsula. The Vascones are often considered ancestors of the present-day Basques to whom they left their name. (Vasco in Spanish, Basco in Portuguese, Basque in French/English)

The description of the territory which the Vascones inhabited during ancient times appears in texts of classical authors, between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD, such as Livy, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy. Although these texts have been studied as sources of reference, some authors have pointed out the apparent lack of uniformity and also the existence of contradictions within the texts, in particular with Strabo.

The oldest document corresponds to Livy (59 BC - AD 17), who in a brief passage of his work about the 76 BC Sertorian War relates how after crossing the Ebro and the city of Calagurris Nasica, they crossed the flatlands of the Vascones, or Vasconum agrum until reaching the border of their immediate neighbors, the Berones. Comparing other sections of this same document, it is deduced that this border was located to the west, while the southern neighbors of the Vascones were the Celtiberians, with their city, Contrebia Leucade.

Pliny the Elder, on his work Natural History, mentioned a text prior to 50 BC that located the Vascones at the western end of the Pyrenees, neighbors of the Varduli and extended to the mountains of Oiarso and into the coasts of the Bay of Biscay, in an area he called Vasconum saltus. The Greek geographer Strabo, in the times of Augustus (63 BC - AD 14) refers to the Vascones (in Ancient Greek: Ούασκώνων) placing their main city, or polis, in Pompaelo and as well Callagurris.


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