THE INSCRIPTION

    The Espanca stele is a little piece of slate of 40 x 28 x 2 cm that was found near the small town Espanca (Castro Verde, Portugal). It is important to state the fact that it was found without any archaeological context and that, hence, there is no archaeological dating. This stele shows two parallel lines (though not completely preserved) with the same sequence of 27 signs; with the peculiarity that in every line every sign is different (noneis repeated in the same line).The signs in the first line are much well done that those in the second one, from this fact it has been infered that this stele was a writing teaching exercise in which the master wrote the first line and the student copied it in the second line.

    The first 13 signs match with 13 signs of the Phoenician "alephat" and also follow the same relative order as the Phoenician signs do: a, b, g, d, y, k, l, m, n, s, r?, sh, t. In the remaining 14 signs we find some Phoenician signs (but out of their Phoenician sequence), but also others seemingly invented. Very probably this is the sequence of the signs of some Palaeo-Hispanic alphabet, that is, the canonical order of its signs, similar to some ancient inscriptions (as the well known Etruscan alphabets). This order has been partially inherited from the Phoenician "alephat", but it cannot be completely explained still.

    The Spanca stele as drawn by Untermann:

THE INTERPRETATIONS ON THE ESPANCA STELE

    This inscription has been very studied. On it have written Untermann, Lejeune, De Hoz, Correa, Rodríguez Ramos and Adiego among others. All the first interpretations started from the same assumption: that the script of the Espanca stele was a kind of "missing link", that it was the oldest Palaeo-Hispanic script, preceding all the rest. From here, they try to identify the relationship between its signs and the Sudlusitanian ones, and to search what new light could trhow on the origin of the Palaeo-hispanic scripts. Some data, such as the location of the sign that matches 'waw' after that for 'taw' has been considered as an evidence for the role of the Greek alphabet in this origin; but I'm sceptical on this, and consider that the origin is exclusively Phoenician and that, as a matter of fact, the Espanca stele itself shows evidence very hard to bring into line with an hypothetical influence from the Greek alphabet. For some researchers, the script of this stele was of the Sudlusitanian kind (as it was found in the nuclear zone of the Sudlusitanian inscriptions), but for De Hoz considers it to be an example af an hypothetical Tartessian script, different from the Sudlusitanian one and from which the Sudlusitanian derived.

    Nevertheless, we must take into account that the "missing link" assumption is very dubious. On the one hand, it's stadistically very unlikely that this inscription (without archaeological dating) should be oldest that all the other Sudlusitanian inscriptions of the region; on the other hand, the Espanca's alphabet shows signs that don't exist neither in the Phoenician script, nor in the Sudlusitanian, but do in the Meridional Iberian (which is later). What's more: as a matter of fact, the 'r' sign can be found with the same value and form in Phoenician, Sudlusitanian and Meridional Iberian, but not in the Espanca alphabet. Consequently, the evidence strongly suggest that this was an innovative alphabet and hence a late one; even if the order of the signs do could reflect the original order, as the order of the letters in alphabets use to be very conservative.

   Analytical table of the Espanca's stele, according to Rodríguez Ramos ("Introducció a l'estudi de les inscripcions ibèriques")