The beginnings of the decipherment (more accurate is the term decoding) of the Iberian writing are a curious example of how a correct theoretical base could lead to a wrong result, whereas a clearly wrong one lead to the right answer.

    The correct premise was that Iberian writing was originated from the Phoenician writing. For a long time, coins were almost the only kind of inscription studied and it was with that premise with which numismatists studied their signs (in those times it wasn't known the difference between Meridional, Levantine and Celtiberian).

    In 1752 Luis Joseph Velazquez ⁽¹⁾ wrote that the "unknown Spanish letters belong to the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, and hence, in order to discover their true reading, there is no more sure mean that to compare them with the Phoenician signs and the oldest Greek ones", but soon the low percentage of vocalic signs in the inscriptions led to the conclusion that the system was similar to Phoenician: an "alephat" which only writes the consonantal signs and sporadically the vowels (as do Phoenician and more frequently Aramean or Hebrew with the 'matres lectionis'). With the basis of the few bilingual coin inscriptions and the identification of the coin mints with towns whose name was known by Latin texts, began a process of proposals of readings to the signs of the coins. But as there were much more different signs than the predictable number of alphabetic values (and sometimes also due to the believing that all coins belong to only one writing or to the difficulties about their distinction), we found that several signs have the same transcription (obviously this use to happen in the syllabic signs of a same consonantal group, but they were not aware of this).

    Even so, and though the few inscriptions known, they got some important advances and in the late XIX century some researchers found the correct syllabic transcription of a few signs: such as ba and bi by Heiss ⁽²⁾ (a proposal rejected by his contemporaries); and ko, ke and du by Zobel de Zangroniz ⁽³⁾. That situation was culminated by E. Hübner in his great corpus work Monumenta Linguae Ibericae (Berlin 1893) that put forward the frequency of ka,ke and du. But why they didn't recognize the syllabic nature of some Iberian signs?. Simply because they supposed they were two signs written joined ('litterae ligatae' as said Hübner), something usual in Latin inscriptions, and so considered as an exceptional calligraphical fact.

    But the real decipherment didn't happen until 1925 when M. Gómez -Moreno Martínez (Granada 1870- Madrid 1970) published  "Sobre los iberos: el bronce de Ascoli" where, after  a previous paper in which he put forward his "opinion" that the alleged Iberian occlusive consonant signs actually were syllabic, at last he publishes a tiny signs table and some transcriptions ⁽⁴⁾.

    How did he it? Well, Gómez-Moreno  had at his disposal some significant advantages: the corpus of inscriptions edited by Hübner (1893), the Latin inscription of Ascoli (found in 1908; though probably marginal in the decoding) with a long series of Iberian personal names, and the Alcoy lead plaque (found in 1921) with Iberian text written in Greek alphabet. These two epigraphic novelties allow him to known how sounded the Iberian language, which were its phonemes, and to recognize Iberian lexical elements, especially those usual in personal names. Besides this, in the brief explanation that he wrote in 1943 he stated that his attention had been attracted by the fact that the alleged occlusive consonantal alphabetic signs (t, th, d, etc,) almost never were followed by a vowel sign, something that was usual after the non occlusive consonant signs.

    But I believe that also crucial in his success was that he had a different theoretical basis from which he considered that the Iberian writing was neither an alphabet as Greek, nor an alephat as Phoenician, but originally a second millennium b. C. syllabary that under alphabetical influence became semi-syllabic. The fact was that since 1874, thanks to the works of Smith and Schmidt, the Cypriot inscriptions could be read, and that their writing system was a syllabary and hence the "Pre-Greek" Aegean inscriptions were considered to be also syllabic. Well, as Gómez-Moreno stated later, he had a novelettish conception of the origin of the Palaeo-Hispanic scripts based on the assumption that the Argar culture was originated in the Minoan culture and that thee Argar culture culminated in the second millennium as Tartessos, understood as a great kingdom;(actually his proposals on the origin of the Iberian signs shapes are an absurd hotchpotch in which some signs come from the Phoenician script, other from the Greek, other from the Cypriot writing, other from the Proto-Cananite, other from Egiptian hyeroglyphic, and so on). This was a complete misconception, but one which helped him to identify the semi-syllabic nature of Iberian writing.

    The Gómez-Moreno system was accepted mainly out of Spain by researchers as G. Hill ⁽⁵⁾ and J. Ferrandis ⁽⁶⁾, but, partly because of his lack of explanations, in Spain it was only accepted after its re-formulation in 1943 ⁽⁷⁾. This decipherment allowed a better identification of the different pre-Roman writings: it is recognized a distinction between the Iberian inscriptions (in fact the Celtiberian and the Levantine Iberian together) and Southern inscriptions (Sudlusitanian and Meridional Iberian together). Gómez-Moreno decipherment of Iberian was almost complete though some significant advances and corrections have been made by Maluquer de Motes, Untermann and Rodríguez Ramos on Iberian, and by Schmoll and Villar on Celtiberian.

    In 1961 were published two works on the Meridional writing systems. The first was by M. Gómez-Moreno ⁽⁸⁾, the second by U. Schmoll ⁽⁹⁾. Gómez-Moreno's paper was faulty and feeble. He didn't recognize the difference between Sudlusitanian and Meridional writings, he made no attempt of internal analysis, and extrapolated the Levantine sign forms to identify Southern signs values. On the other hand, Schmoll distinguished between Sudlusitanian and Meridional and identified the vowel redundancy of Sudlusitanian writing, that was a crucial data in order to determine the vowel timbre of the syllabic signs. As a matter of fact Schmoll set the bases of the decipherment of both Sudlusitanian and Meridional Iberian writing, though subsequent important advances must be credited to Schmoll's brilliant pupil J. Untermann on Meridional, and to J.A. Correa on Sudlusitanian.

    But in Spain, in the dark Franco period, the national(ist) eminence had to be right, not the foreigner, and Gómez-Moreno system was accepted in Spain, where it wasn't disregarded until 1974. Spanish researchers made harsh criticisms against Schmoll's work, sometimes clearly misunderstood, but sometimes using distortion and dubious taste expressions. Perhaps in those years the opposite position could have caused serious professional troubles, but it's highly regrettable. Nevertheless, past errors use to have consequences: Gómez-Moreno incorrect system had followers and developers during the 80s, especially Fletcher, and it is most unfortunate that the usual lack of interest in epigraphy by Spanish historians and archaeologists have contributed to the selection of Fletcher "system" for a recent intended handbook on Iberian culture (Los iberos Ruiz and Molinos 1993), in spite of the evident fact that Schmoll-Untermann systems "find" in Meridional inscriptions the same Iberian vocabulary than in Levantine.

1. Ensayo sobre los alphabetos de las letras desconocidas, Que se encuentran en las más antiguas Medallas y Monumentos de España, Madrid 1752, p. 25.

2. Description génerale des monnaies antiques de l'Espagne (Paris, 1870).

3. Jacobo Zobel de Zangroniz (Manila 1842-1896): Ensayo histórico de la moneda española desde su origen 1877.

4. The key papers are the following: (1922) "De epigrafía ibérica: el plomo de Alcoy" Rev. de Filología Española 9, 34-66;  (1925) "Sobre los iberos: el bronce de Ascoli" Homenaje a D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal III, 475-499; (1943) "La escritura ibérica y su lenguaje" Bol Real Academia de la Historia  CXII,II, 251-278. These three papers were reprinted with changes in the compilation (1949): Misceláneas. Historia, Arte, Arqueología. I. Antigüedad, Madrid.

5. Notes on the ancient coinage of Hispania Citerior (New York 1931).

6. "Les monnaies hispaniques" in IV Congrès Internationale d'Archéology

7. "La escritura ibérica" Bol. Real Academia de la Historia CXII, 251-278. As Gómez-Moreno complained in 1961 "Over here nobody paid attention to them". Also Caro Baroja stated that he omited to give the name of some well-known university professors who scoffed at the readings of Gómez-Moreno. 

8. "La escritura bástulo-turdetana" RABM LXIX,2, 879-948. In fact, this paper can be understood as an explanation of  the 1943's chart (p. 277) in which he showed the "Tartessian" equivalents to the Iberian signs.

9. Die südlusitanischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden 1961.