Historians vs. geographers: divergent uses of the ethnic name Turdetania in the Greek and Roman tradition
Résumé
A new scrutiny of Livy’s Roman History, Cato’s fragments and Appian’s Iberika leads us to assume that the people called Turdetani by the Romans at the beginning of the conquest of Spain was situated in the South of the central Meseta, near Celtiberia. A completely different location, in the lower Guadalquivir valley, is given by Strabo to Turdetania in the third book of his Geography. Though Strabo’s conception appears to be quite isolated when compared with other literary sources, it has been followed by modern scholars who use Turdetania as the name of a late Iron Age cultural complex of Lower Andalusia. The aim of this paper is to understand why ancient historians and geographers did not give the same meaning to this ethnic name, in the moving context of the Roman conquest and of the first attempts to organize Iberian territories in a provincial framework.
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