Written Basque may be 1,000 years older than anyone thought

often tell historians useful things, but even the geekiest archaeologist would admit they are not very exciting to look at. Not so a discovery in Irulegui, in Spain’s Navarre region, last year: a life-size bronze cut-out of a hand, green with age, with a small hole indicating that it was meant to hang, perhaps over a door. It was found in a village destroyed in a war of the 1st century . Such striking hand-shaped designs are unknown in Spanish or neighbouring cultures.Still more important is the short inscription, five words in an intriguing script. Experts recognised it as a version of the writing systems used for the now-extinct Iberian and Celtiberian languages, present on the peninsula before the Roman conquest. But this language was neither of those. The researchers were stunned to find that they could make out the first word—in Basque. “Sorioneku”, meaning “good fortune”, was staring the researchers in the face. A descendant of that word, , is used in the Basque “Happy Birthday” song today.