Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey Read Free Book Online Page A

Romans first invaded with the intention of blocking Carthaginian reinforcements in southern Iberia from reaching and helping their famous general, Hannibal, who was fighting the Romans on the Italian peninsula. It was, however, some time later, early in the second century B.C. , that the Romans, having realized that the area had vast precious metal resources, set about conquering it and quelling all resistance from disparate tribal groups in Iberia. 18 The Lusitanians, who hailed from central Portugal, put up the stiffest resistance. One leader, who appeared out of the ranks when his tribe was encircled by Roman legionaries and led his fellow tribesmen out of the trap, became the biggest thorn in the side of the invaders—and one of Portugal’s greatest heroes. Viriato to the Portuguese and Viriathus to the Romans, he took over leadership of the various tribal groups and embarked on a guerrilla campaign of harassment. He later defeated one Roman general after another in pitched battles, to the extent that he was the most successful general ever to fight against them. 19 Rome found that it had a serious crisis on its hands—morale was affected, and legion recruitment rates dropped.
    Eventually, the Romans typically reverted to treachery and bribed three of the hero’s peace emissaries to murder him in his sleep—then refused to cough up the promised reward with the weasel words “Rome doesn’t reward traitors.”
    The Lusitanians turned against the local tribe in the Algarve (variously referred to as the Conii, Konii, or Cynetes), who had decided it was preferable to bend the knee to the Romans and pay their taxes rather than face slavery or oblivion. The Lusitanians regarded them as turncoats and swept down from central Portugal when the Romans were occupied elsewhere, gave them a fearful beating, and reportedly razed the Conii royal capital, Conistorgis, to the ground. The site of this city has never been found but, according to a Roman map, it was not far to the north of Faro, the current capital of the Algarve. We will return to it in a later chapter. Intriguingly, they also had a city where modern-day Silves stands; its name was Cilbes.
    Julius Caesar, arguably the most famous Roman ever, set up his western Iberian base, Pax Julia, near Beja in Portugal’s Alentejo province, just northof the Algarve. There was a huge gold and copper mine close by at São Domingos, and Caesar used the wealth of the area to finance the maintenance of his legion and his initial grab for power as a consul in Rome. If it had not been for this, he would merely be a passing mention on the pages of history today rather than bestriding them. 20 Unfortunately, apart from a few records about the Conii and the mines, I could find no evidence that the Romans inherited or discovered anything from any great earlier civilization.
    Few readers are likely to have heard of the Conii, but evidence is accruing that this was a very old race indeed, one that had occupied the area since way back in the mists of time. It would appear that they had developed a script but, sadly, it was out of general use long before 1000 B.C. It seems to have only been kept alive for the next few hundred years by priests to somewhat crudely incise memorials to the dead on funerary stones. That broken slab with letters on it, in the museum mentioned in Chapter One, is an example. This script does hint at an earlier, more sophisticated civilization having originally developed it, but historians and academics do not generally agree. They have been quick to pigeonhole it under the name of the “Southwest Script” and assert that it could only have developed from Phoenician around 900 B.C. , then died out a few centuries later. I quickly discovered that this was nonsense. It stemmed, I suppose, from a desire to quickly shoehorn it into existing historical dogma, as it possessed the potential to warrant a complete reappraisal of the origins of our Western alphabet. Chapter