Too many Basques
One of my favourite jokes asks whether the listener has heard of the terrible tragedy in northern Spain when football fans were crushed trying to get out of the single doorway out of the stadium. The moral of the tale is, of course, that one should not have too many Basques in the one exit. (If anyone doesn't get it, there is a well-known English proverb which warns that you should not put too many eggs in one basket - if you drop the basket, you break the lot - and the joke lies in the transposition of "Basques" and "basket", and "eggs" and "exit".)
Whatever the heritage of the Basques - and there are all sorts of claims about their language and culture and fishing rights and so on - the name "Basque" these days is synonymous with a particularly nasty terrorist organisation, which may have had some slight justification back in the days when Franco was trying to suppress Basque culture in the interests of Spanish unity, but today is nothing more than a bunch of criminals using heritage as a cloak for robbery and violence. I wonder if it was some of these criminals who tried to bolster Basque pride with an audacious bit of forgery?
For the past few years Professor Eliseo Gil has been excavating at the Roman town of Veleia without finding anything out of the ordinary - bath house, forum, temple, houses. Then, 18 months ago, he came upon a cache of ostraca - broken pottery on which writing had been painted or scratched. To his astonishment the symbols, a sort of primitive hieroglyphics, were quickly decoded and turned out to be Euskara, the predecessor of modern Basque. When examination showed that the potsherds dated to the 3rd century AD, some seven centuries earlier than the earliest previously known written Euskara, Professor Gil excitedly announced that his excavations were now on a par with those at Pompeii and Basque nationalists - the respectable ones, not the criminals - flocked adoringly around him. Local authorities and private sponsors, including some very well known companies, lavished money on lucky Gil - hundreds of thousands of euros, according to some accounts.
Alas, it now appears that the finds were not only fakes, but were so egregiously fake that the good professor is guilty of almost criminal carelessness. Not only were some of the potsherds stuck together with modern glue - which I suppose we can excuse the professor for not noticing - but the texts included references to Nefertiti, Descartes and a pantheon of non-existent gods. Even worse, one of the ostraca supposedly showed the crucifixion, evidence that the Basques were Christians before Constantine made the religion popular - but the scene includes the letters "RIP", which are only applicable to a dead person.
Martin Almagro, professor of prehistory at Madrid University, is highly scornful. "This is a formula that can only be applied to people who are dead. To say that Jesus Christ is dead would be heresy. I haven't seen anything quite so funny in the whole history of Christianity." Professor Gil has this excuse, that the potsherds are genuine 3rd century, but the hunt is now on to find out who scratched modern nonsense into them and how they were introduced into the dig - or possibly into the lab that was cleaning and processing the pottery found on the dig. Meanwhile work at the excavations has ceased, the sponsors are demanding their money back and Professor Gil is keeping his head well down.
Perhaps we should re-write the proverb to say something about too many sherds in one Basquet.
all sorts of claims Did you know that the Basque language is the oldest in Europe? Or that it was Basques who first discovered America? I make no judgement on the validity of such claims. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
