Hispanic ethnicities and territories in Ptolemy’s Geography

Abstract

Iberian Peninsula, in Ptolemy’s Geography, is of an unparalleled richness in our documentation, since it counts more than sixty names of peoples, of which nearly a third are unprecedented. However, it does not reflect the ethnic panorama of the Hispanic provinces at the time of its author, or even of an identifiable earlier date. By studying its internal logic and by seeking to identify and date its sources, we show here that Ptolemy’s ethnography reflects the existence of a kind of Roman vulgate, on which his description is based, and which shows that the Romans used the usual names of peoples, often of indigenous origin, to name the populations and regions administered and integrated in their frameworks. If the elements of this vulgate are however surprisingly disparate, many represent ethnonyms identified by the Romans during the period of conquest, and who continued their history in the provincial frameworks or only, sometimes, in those of historiography.