The mountain-range between Jaen and Murcia, the Sagra Sierra, was originally the Mons Oros-_peda_, a fact which I notice, because the element -_peda_, occurs with a mere difference of dialect in the ancient name of the mountains of Burgos, Idu-_beda_. So that here, if nowhere else, we have a geographical name common to the northern and southern parts of the peninsula--an Iberic gloss in two distant localities. It was the Iberians of these parts who were the first to receive foreign intermixture, and the last to lose it, the Iberians of the Bætis, or Guadalquiver, favoured above all other nations of the peninsula in soil, in climate, and in situation. Strabo expatiates with enthusiasm almost unbecoming to a geographer, on their wealth, their industry, their commerce, and their civilization; and all this is no more than their physical condition prepares us to expect. Cities to the number of two hundred and upwards, docks, _anachyses_ (or _locks_), lighthouses, canals, salt works, mines, agriculture, woven articles, fisheries, an alphabet, and a literature attest the civilization of the ancient Turdetanians as known to the writers of the reign of Augustus; at which time, however, the country was so Romanized that the Iberic tongue was already superseded by the Latin throughout the whole level country; Cordova and Seville,--the pre-eminently Roman towns of Spain,--having been founded by picked bodies of Romans and natives. Hence, in respect to its date, the Spanish of Andalusia is the oldest daughter of the Latin. But the Romans were as little the first intruders who introduced foreign blood and foreign ideas into Southern Spain as they were the last. Their predecessors were the Phœnicians--sometimes direct from Tyre and Sidon, oftener from the Tyrian colony of Carthage. It was through the accounts of the Phœnicians that the earliest notices of Iberia found their way into Greece; it was through the Phœnicians that the Hellenic poets first heard of the columns of Hercules. It was through the Phœnician--Punic or Tyrian, as the case might be--that the mining and commercial industry of Turdetania was developed. Through them, too, probably (but not certainly) came the alphabet. I say _probably_, because the shape of the letters is Greek or Italian rather than Phœnician. As the Phœnician settlements seem to have been factories rather than colonies, and as their marriages must have been with native women, their influence was moral rather than physical, _i.e._, they introduced new ideas rather than new blood. Their contact with the Turdetanians may be spread over some seven centuries--from about 900 to 200 B.C.