From the earliest dawn of history the centre of Spanish life, the unit of government, the birthplace of tradition, and the focus of patriotism have been the town. A Spaniard’s _pueblo_ means infinitely more to him than his town means to an Englishman or a Frenchman. No master race has succeeded in welding the Kabyles, Tuaregs (Tuariks), and Berbers into a state, as the Romans did with the mixed Iberians and Celts; and in Spain, to the present day, with its numberless paper constitutions and its feverish political experiments, the pueblo keeps its practical independence of a centralised government, which has federated pueblos into provinces, but has never absorbed or entirely destroyed the primitive germ of local administration. The village granary (_posito_) still stands in the Spanish village, as its counterpart does in the Atlas regions; the town pasture and communal tillage land continue on both sides of the straits to testify to the close relationship of the early Iberians with the Afro-Semitic races, which included the Egyptian or Copt, the Kabyle, the Tuareg, and the Berber. The language of the Iberians has been lost, but enough of it remains on coins of the later Celtiberian period to prove that it had a common root with the Egyptian and the Saharan tongues, which extend from Senegal to Nubia on the hither side of the negro zone. With all this evidence before us we may be forgiven for doubting the correctness of the theory which ascribes a Caucasian origin to the primitive Iberian people. Long before the dawn of recorded history, while mankind was hardly emerging from the neolithic stage, a vast incursion of Celts had come from the north and poured over the western Pyrenees into Spain.[d] THE CELTS AND CELTIBERIANS The second invasion from the north, that of the Celts, falls in the first period of recognised history, so that we know little of how it came about or the conditions preceding it, and can only enumerate the results. It cannot even be determined if the march of the Celts upon Spain was contemporaneous with the violent incursion of Celtism into upper Italy and southern Germany, which in its further advance carried single troops as far as Asia Minor and Greece; at any rate it is probable. The Celts introduced a new culture into the land south of the Pyrenees, which lay off from the main track, since they represent the period which as the advanced iron age followed the age of bronze. Before them agriculture was yet in its beginning; the pure-blooded Iberians for a long time afterwards held to the rough conditions of the preceding era, lived from the products of their goat-herds, on the acorns from the mountains and from the scanty grain they raised by their primitive methods of agriculture. The Celts, indeed, like most conquering nations, considered agriculture unworthy a free man, but compelled their dependents to cultivate their territory regularly and to deliver up a part of its products.