462 MAN I PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



mende. = a. century, is identical with the Ber. timidi hundred, 

 where //' is merely a fern, prefix and midi is for mindi by normal 

 loss of n. In this as in many other instances Basque preserves 

 the archaic form, while in other respects Berber is more faithful 

 to the original Hamito-Iberian mother-tongue. Altogether the 

 undoubted resemblances are far too close and numerous to be 

 explained away as coincidences or later borrowings 1 . No doubt 

 many Berbers took part in the Moslem invasion of Iberia, but 

 Arabic, the dominant speech, alone affected the current languages 

 and the geographical nomenclature, as we see in Gibraltar Jebel- 

 Tarik, i.e. "Tarik's-Hill " although Tarik himself was a Nefusi 

 Berber from Tripolitana; so also Guadalquivir Wad-el- Kebir, the 

 " Great River." 



Besides, the invaders never penetrated to the western Pyrenees, 

 to which the Basque language had already at that time been 

 confined. But that it was not originally a local idiom, but gene- 

 rally diffused over the whole of Iberia and South Gaul, a point as 

 often denied as asserted by the protagonists of the Basque question, 

 is now convincingly proved by Father F. Fita, perhaps the first 

 living authority on this subject. In a paper on the Iberian and 

 Roman inscriptions of Fraga 2 he makes it evident that in pre- 

 Roman times, that is, in the prehistoric age, a language of Basque 

 type was current amongst the aborigines on both sides of the 

 Pyrenees. When Hannibal crossed into Gallia Narbonensis on 

 his march to Italy he came upon a flourishing city Illiberis, a 

 name with which his Iberian allies were familiar, because they had 

 left behind them in their own territory of Baetica (Andalusia) 

 another place of the same name, meaning in their language 

 " Newtown," as it still does in modern Basque 3 . Look at the 



1 See also M. Geze, De quelqnes rapports entre les langues berbere et basque 

 in Mem. Soc. Archcol. du Midi de la France, vol. xni., where a great many 

 words are compared, with the conclusion that in an exceedingly remote epoch 

 a close connection existed for a long period of time between the ancestors of 

 the Basques and Berbers. This memoir was unknown to von der Gabelenz. 



- In Bol. Real Acad. de la Historia, October 1894. 



3 Other identities are: Tc/osa, twice in Spain and on the Garonne ; Cala- 

 gurris on Ebro and Garonne; Ele/nberris, Atiirris, Iluro and Andurensis in 

 Spain ; Elimberris, Adour, Iluzo (Oloron) and Aturenses in south of France. 

 Cf. also Andere (Matres Tolosanae) and andere woman (Bas.). "The evidence 



