From the early hominins of Atapuerca and the painted ceilings of Altamira through the Cardial farmers, Los Millares and El Argar, the Phoenician foundation of Gadir, the silver kingdom of Tartessos, the Greek colony of Emporion, and the Iberian and Celtiberian peoples to Hamilcar Barca's landing at Gades and Hannibal's crossing of the Ebro on the eve of the Second Punic War. Slide across the millennia to read the major events that shaped Iberia before Rome.
In the limestone karst of the Sierra de Atapuerca, bands of Homo antecessor butcher game and one another, leaving the earliest hominin remains so far known in Western Europe.
From the early hominins of Atapuerca and the painted ceilings of Altamira through the Cardial farmers, Los Millares and El Argar, the Phoenician foundation of Gadir, the silver kingdom of Tartessos, the Greek colony of Emporion, and the Iberian and Celtiberian peoples to Hamilcar Barca's landing at Gades and Hannibal's crossing of the Ebro on the eve of the Second Punic War. Slide across the millennia to read the major events that shaped Iberia before Rome.
In the limestone karst of the Sierra de Atapuerca, bands of Homo antecessor butcher game and one another, leaving the earliest hominin remains so far known in Western Europe.
In the Cantabrian cave of Altamira, Aurignacian and later Magdalenian artists begin a programme of painted ceilings, culminating in the great bison polychromes that would astonish nineteenth-century Europe.
Maritime colonists of the Cardial Ware culture beach their boats on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia, bringing wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and shell-impressed pottery to a peninsula still dominated by Mesolithic foragers.
On a bluff above the Andarax river in Almería, the fortified settlement of Los Millares rises with concentric walls, bastions, and a great cemetery of tholos tombs — the type-site of Copper Age south-eastern Iberia.
Across the arid sierras of Murcia and Almería, the El Argar people build hilltop towns of stone, bury their dead in jars beneath house floors, and forge bronze weapons of unprecedented quality for Bronze Age Iberia.
Tyrian traders, drawn by the silver of Tartessos and the tin of the Atlantic, plant the colony of Gadir on a string of islands beyond the Pillars of Heracles — the future Cádiz, the oldest continuously inhabited city of Western Europe.
Around the lower Guadalquivir flourishes Tartessos, the half-mythical kingdom of King Arganthonios, exporting silver and tin to the Phoenicians and Greeks and minting the first orientalising art of the West.
On the rocky shore of the Gulf of Roses in north-eastern Iberia, settlers from Phocaean Massalia plant the colony of Emporion — the 'Trading Place' — which will remain the principal Greek foothold in the peninsula for half a millennium.
Across the Mediterranean façade of the peninsula, the Iberian cultures take shape — fortified hilltop oppida, a unique semi-syllabic script, and a refined funerary sculpture exemplified by the limestone bust later christened the Lady of Elche.
Six years after Carthage's defeat in the First Punic War, Hamilcar Barca sails from Africa to Gades with his son-in-law Hasdrubal and his nine-year-old son Hannibal, and begins to forge a Carthaginian dominion in the silver-rich south of the peninsula.
Anxious at the growth of Barcid power, Rome sends envoys to Hasdrubal the Fair and obtains a treaty that fixes the Ebro river as the northern limit of Carthaginian expansion in Iberia.
After an eight-month siege, Hannibal's army takes the Roman ally Saguntum on the Iberian coast and razes it, daring Rome to make good on her threats.
In the spring Hannibal leads some ninety thousand men across the Ebro and into Gaul on the march that will take him over the Alps into Italy. In the summer Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio disembarks his legions at Greek Emporion — and Iberia ceases to be a pre-Roman world.