In case anyone is interested, here is a link to what seems to be the original article in El Pais.

And another one, from the Basque edition. My knowledge of Basque is limited, so all I understand is that the good people of El Pais did the right thing and asked some experts. Anybody got any more?
I believe there is a world of difference between an archeological discovery like this and the usual wild claims Larry Trask refers to. In other words, this looks like the real thing. The only aspect of this discovery I am worried about is dating. First estimates tend to be a little off.

Yeah, I didn't mean to compare it to the lunatic stuff; all I meant to say was that Trask had sensitized me to the prevalence of misinformation and nonsense where Basque is involved. As you say, it's the dating that's problematic here, but even if it's only a couple of centuries earlier than the 11th century, it's still great.

I assume that this is the same find: http://adrianmurdoch.typepad.com/bread_and_circuses/2006/06/irunaveleia.html
If so, it does seem as if the dating is reasonably reliable.

Wikipedia article for the site, with various links.

Doesn't the third century seem early to find Christian inscriptions in Basque? I'd always assumed it took a while for Christianity to spread into the Western part of the Empire.

Ah, if only Larry could have seen this. It doesn't seem too implausible.

I am curious (with eyebrows) about this though:

The Egypt expert of the University of Barcelona Montserrat Rius has explained that some Latin inscriptions refer to the ancient Egyptian history and its divinities, and has noted there are also hieroglyphic inscriptions "with a perfect layout" that make experts think they were taught to children.

nw: This lengthier original(?) version, has (with adjustments for the spam filter):

Y qué decir del exótico origen egipcio del preceptor que impartía allí sus amplios conocimientos clásicos, añadiendo t@mbién temas específicos sobre su propia historia, escritura, cultura y creencias. Así nos encontramos con la presencia de escritura jeroglífica clásica, atestiguada por vez primera en un @mbiente tan norteño en el occidente europeo.

So I get a picture more of "show-and-tell" than hieroglyphic class.

Vanya, no, archaeological museums throughout Spain have plenty of Christian artifacts from the third century.

Wonderful! I hope they publish the inscriptions soon.

If you're looking for photos, this article has pulled them together in one place, including (I think) hieroglyphic signs, Calvary, and two shards with Basque.

I would like to believe that this is an authentic discovery but I suspect it is a forgery much like the alleged Phoenecian inscriptions found in Brazil that were supposedly left by the Carthaginian explorer, Hanno on his way back to Carthage from South Africa.

For one thing. The Basque words mentioned in the article look to much like modern Basque words. However the Basque language has certainly changed over the past 2,000 years just as Irish Gaelic, Welsh and Armorican Celtic (Breton) all have (They don't resemble the Celtic of Gallic inscriptions very much).

"Ioshe" for Jesus? The 'sh' sound was unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans and most likely would not have been transliterated that way by anyone usuing the Roman alphabet even if they had an 'sh' sound in their native language. This is pretty much a later English spelling of the sound.

Furthermore, historians tell us that throughout Europe, the Near East and North Africa, Christianity started out in the cities first. The countryside was more consevative and remained pagan for longer periods of time (The same pattern occurred during the Reformation 1500 years later between Protestantism and Catholocism). The Basques have certainly always lived in the more rural parts of Spain and Southern France.

Finally, other sources I've read claim that Spain (Hispania) was one of the most Romanized provinces in the Empire outside of Italy and very pagan until almost the middle of the 4th century A.D. Conversion there to the new religion was very slow because Christianity was associated by most of its citizens with treason against the state just as it was in Rome. The Christianization of Spain actually happened very rapidly during the middle and latter parts of the 4th century.

Nevertheless, we'll wait and see what the experts have to say about it in the months ahead.

Catholocism > should be Catholicism

Above posting was by me.

The Spanish Wikipedia article mentioned above has a different version of the inscription: the much more reasonable iesus, iose ata ta mirian ama (and with a no nasty final [m]). The other words quoted are ones that are remarkable for being identical or almost with modern Basque, implying there are others in the inscriptions that are different (and therefore less interesting to the casual reader, argh!).

Language Hat : « Larry Trask instilled in me a deep suspicion of any and all claims pertaining to Basque »

Stanford professor Merritt Ruhlen asserted that Basque, together with Caucasian languages, Ienissean, Sino-Tibetan and Na-dené, belonged to a same family dubbed “Dené-Caucasian”. Do you know if nowadays this theory is still mentioned and how far it has been proven or refuted?

Ruhlen is completely untrustworthy on such matters.

A comment from Hartza:

I wish it were true... I don't mean it is not: to date I have no more information than you (well, maybe actually yes, but not very much more) but, in any case, these kind of forgeries do not stand the analysis more than six months AND the archeologist team leading the study is one of the most relevant ones in Spain, so...
... wait and see.
Anyway, I would like to underline a couple of things:
First, here we are speaking about TWO different set of items: one related to some christian inscriptions which also included some hieroglyphs. It doesn't seem to be hieroglyphic writing at all, but just a sort of 'show and tell', as someone has hinted before.
In any case, finding some IIIrd century christian inscriptions doesn't mean at all that all the region, or even the north of Hispania were christian at that time...
Second, the inscriptions in Basque belong to a second and different finding in the same city (Iruña Veleia), which also seems to be quite older than the previous one, maybe dating even from the Vth century.
I am not in a position to defend or attack its authenticity, but please remember that the Basque-Aquitane inscriptions studied by Gorrochategui are dated around 1st century aC and include words (like CISON -> GISON, 'man'; UMME -> ume, 'child'; ANDEREA -> andere, 'lady') which continue being almost completely identical in present Basque, 2000 years after... As they belong to the so-called 'nuclear vocabulary'.
True? I don't know, but it could be.
Finally: Up to know, the first written Basque sentence (in fact, just 2 sentences, and quite difficult to interpretate) appears in a 10th century document (the 'Glosas Emilianenses') which happens to be written not in early Castilian (Spanish) but in another romance, now disappeared: navarro-aragonese.
I promise to keep you all informed on these thingies. Keep in touch.
Hartza, proud to be Basque.

Signatus, keep in mind Larry Trask's statement about Ruhlen:

"Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics as a member of the profession. Every single linguist who is acquainted with his work regards him as a crackpot and a charlatan."

Basque is clearly related to the Dravidian languages, and (now that Pictish is extinct)is the westermost relic of the Dravidian diaspora. (Earlier theories that the Algonquian languages were brought to American by Pictish refugees have not found empirical support.)

Re: ""Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics as a member of the profession. Every single linguist who is acquainted with his work regards him as a crackpot and a charlatan." --- Christopher Culver

Christopher,

Remember that English scientists were saying the same thing about Charles Darwin in the 1860's (except for Thomas Huxley rather wisely) but now we know that they are all wrong. I'm not saying that history will record Ruhlen being as great as Darwin, but I've read Merritt Ruhlen and most of his statements and theories are plausible. At most, they might need a little brushing up. For example, he tends to think that all American Indian languages descend from a single Proto-Amerindian language. Yet experts on American Indian anthropology and languages claim that they arrived in two migrations, one 12,000 years ago and one 8,000 years ago. The two groups were not genetically or linguistically related to each other.

Christopher Culver > "Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics as a member of the profession. Every single linguist who is acquainted with his work regards him as a crackpot and a charlatan."

Ok. But isn't it rather surprising then to see that this academic still appears on Standford's website (Department of Anthropological Sciences) as a “Lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology”? Isn't this university supposed to have a good reputation?

Siganus, but notice he's not in a Department of Linguistics.

Ah, he could be seen as a kind of stray cat then. It's nonetheless rather surprising to note that Stanford University doesn't bring him back on the “right track”. Or did they? Maybe they can't...

However, at the Santa Fe Institute, an institution intending to promote “multidisciplinary collaborations”, in a project focusing on the Evolution of Human Languages, he is presented as from Stanford University. And this project apparently endorses the Dene-Caucasian theory: http://ehl.santafe.edu/maps5.htm

Ruhlen sweeps a bunch of languages into the Sino-Tibetan Na-Dene group, including three previously regarded as isolates (Basque, Burushaski, and Yeniseian.) He includes Yukaghir, another isolate, with Finno-Ugric and Gilyak, still another, with Korean and Japanese.

These judgments are all controversial resolutions of difficult, embattled questions. It seems very unlikely that he has done is more than just lumping.

As I understand, LH house policy is unfriendly to all supergroups of this kind, not just Ruhlen's.

I'm sorry to see the Santa Fe Institude involved. It reminds me of a recent physicist's attempt to apply statistical analysis to romanized transcriptions of various languages, with the goal of finidng unknown relationships. As I recall, this method missed the very close relationship between Portuguese and Spanish, leading me to suspect that any positive relationships it found would be bogus.

John Emerson: Pictish is Dravidian? What should I read about this, please?

Dearieme -- "Dravidian origins" is a standing joke of mine here.

I've spent a certain amount of my own time dabbling in far-fetched historical-linguistic theories, but by now I agree with Hat here that almost all of that stuff is bogus. (The Tokharians are a rare exception).

Just a comment about the Breton/Gaulish distinction...most people working with Breton would reject the claims that it's closely related to Continental Celtic. This theory was popular for a time, but even a cursory glimpse at Welsh and Breton shows how closely related they are (and middle Welsh and middle Breton were even closer). So the fact that Breton doesn't look like Gaulish is unsurprising, in that there's a much longer point of separation between them than the Breton/Continental Celtic theory would have allowed...there's at least as much separation time as with P- and Q- Celtic, and there is obviously tremendous divergence between the two groups.

Re: Breton and Gallic (Gaulish):

I believe in the continuity theory myself that Armorica was feebly Romanized and that Celtic has always been spoken there. In fact, this was the prevailing view in Europe for centuries even among linguists. The British origins theory of Breton dates only from the 19th century from what I've read and has never been accepted by most linguists and scholars in France.

One must not forget that the British Celts themselves came from the French and Belgian mainlands before arriving in Britain and spoke nearly the same language as both the Gauls and the Galatians (in Asia Minor). This has been proven partially by the close similarities of some place names and personal names among all three peoples.

Breton is quite clearly Island Celtic.

Wikipedia has a good article on Aquitanian.

I don't quite understand what people have against supersupersupergroups like Dené-Caucasian. It's certainly no more surprising than Indopacific! Do people really prefer having no hypothesis over having any hypothesis? (Trask's allergy is easy to understand, given the fact that he has to deal with real pseudoscience all the time.)

That said, cladistic analyses should be done much, much, much more often in linguistics. When it comes to phylogenetics, the linguists are way behind the biologists.