Researchers have come across a wonderfully intriguing find in the north of Spain: a bronze hand dating back some 2,000 years, all the way back to the Iron Age, with four lines of strange symbols inscribed across its top.
A new study suggests that this ancient epigraph is related to ancient Paleohispanic languages, and may have been part of the language that has developed into Basque in modern day Spain.
The area is known to have been populated by a tribe called the Vascones around the time the hand would’ve been made – a tribe that left behind very little in the way of writing samples, which has led to the assumption that they were pre-literate. This hand shows that might not be the case.
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