The Aquitani (also Aquitanians; ) were a group of peoples dwelling in the south-west of Gaul, between the Garonne, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic Ocean, during the late Iron Age and the Roman period. Caesar set them apart from the Gauls and the Belgae by their language, institutions and laws, and Strabo held that they resembled the Iberians rather than the Gauls in both language and physique. Their indigenous language, Aquitanian, is recorded almost entirely through personal and divine names in Latin inscriptions. It was closely related to Basque and is generally taken for an early form or close relative of it. Many of the region's divine names show the same Basque affinity, alongside a Celtic layer.
The Aquitani belonged to a cultural area that straddled the western Pyrenees and kept close ties with the peoples of northern Iberia. In the late Iron Age this area stood apart from Celtic Gaul in its material culture, marked by handmade pottery and by a coinage of silver and bronze rather than gold. Politically they were a mosaic of many small peoples and never formed a single state. Their shared identity found its main expression in the coalition raised against Rome in 56 BC, when Caesar's legate Publius Crassus conquered them. Under Augustus the name Aquitania was extended to a much larger, largely Gaulish-speaking province, and the older, ethnic Aquitania was later restored as Novempopulania.
Name The Aquitani are named by Caesar (mid-1st century BC), who at the opening of his account of the Gallic War places them in the part of Gaul reaching from the Garonne to the Pyrenees and to the ocean towards Hispania, and states that they differed from the Gauls and the Belgae in language, institutions and laws.Caesar. Bellum Gallicum, 1:1. Strabo (early 1st century AD) gives the name as Akouitanoí (Ἀκουιτανοί) and reports that they differed from the Gaulish stock in the build of their bodies and in their speech, resembling the Iberians more closely.Strabo. Geōgraphiká, 4:2:1. Pliny (1st century AD) adds further peoples to the Aquitanian list.Pliny. Naturalis Historia, 4:108–109.
In the strict sense used by Caesar, the name denotes the peoples of the roughly triangular territory closed by the Garonne, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, an area sometimes called the "Aquitanian triangle" in modern scholarship. Under Augustus the name was extended to a much wider and largely Gaulish-speaking territory, and in the late 3rd century AD the older, ethnic Aquitania was restored as a distinct province under a new name.
Geography
The Aquitani occupied the south-western corner of Gaul, a roughly triangular territory closed by the Pyrenees to the south, the Garonne to the east and north, and the Atlantic to the west. Ancient authors treated the Garonne as a frontier between distinct cultural worlds, and the distribution of Iron Age coinage and pottery bears this out. The river marks the southern limit of the gold-coin zone of continental Celtic Gaul and of certain La Tène practices, beyond which the Aquitanian and sub-Pyrenean areas followed their own standards.
At the scale of Gaul the river set the Aquitani apart from the Celtic peoples, but a strict regional boundary is unlikely, and limited overlaps occurred without disturbing the wider division. Strabo records one exception, the Bituriges Vivisques, who in Roman times held both banks of the Garonne and were in his account the only people of foreign stock settled on Aquitanian soil.
The region was not culturally uniform, and two zones are usually distinguished. Eastern Aquitania was made up of the Pyrenean valleys draining into the Garonne together with the plain of the Gers, while western Aquitania comprised the basin of the Adour and the marshy, thinly settled country of the Landes. The eastern zone bordered the Roman province of Narbonensis and had been in earlier contact with the Mediterranean world. It was the more strongly Romanised and the more open to Gaulish influence, whereas the western zone remained the more conservative.
Both Caesar and Strabo describe Aquitania as broken up among many peoples, in contrast with the extensive territories of the Gaulish peoples north of the Garonne, such as the Volcae Tectosages, Petrocorii, Nitiobroges, Santones and Arverni. Strabo speaks of more than twenty Aquitanian peoples, most of them small and obscure, and names only a few, among them the Tarbelli, whom he associates with gold mines, the Convenae, the Onesii and the Ausci, the last being in his account the most important of the Aquitani. Pliny's list is the fullest, running to some twenty-eight peoples, and the peoples that submitted to Crassus in 56 BC are only part of the whole, since further peoples appear only in Caesar's operation of 51 BC. Caesar, whose legate rather than himself conducted the campaign in the region, names the peoples drawn into the war of 56 BC, including the Sotiates, the Tarbelli, the Bigerriones, the Elusates, the Tarusates, the Vocates, the Gates, the Sibusates and the Cocosates.
To the south, across the Pyrenees, lay peoples with whom the Aquitani were in close contact. The pre-Roman populations of the southern side of the western Pyrenees comprised peoples such as the Suessetani, the Iacetani and the Ilergetes, the Vascones, and, further west, the Varduli, the Caristii and the Autrigones, whom ancient authors linked variously with the Cantabri or the Vascones.
History
Iron Age Archaeological work on both slopes of the western Pyrenees has revealed a cultural area distinct from its Gaulish, Iberian and Celtiberian neighbours. In the second Iron Age it is marked by a monetary system based on silver and bronze rather than gold and by a strong predominance of handmade pottery. The same evidence points to long-standing ties across the range. Coins struck at Hispanic mints and bearing Iberian legends circulated in the Aquitanian zone and were buried in local hoards, the largest being that of Barcus in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, whereas Aquitanian coinage did not cross the mountains.
Roman conquest Ancient sources record repeated military co-operation between the Aquitani and the peoples of northern Hispania. In the period of the Sertorian War the Aquitani killed the Roman legate Lucius Valerius Praeconinus and put to flight the proconsul of Transalpine Gaul, events that Caesar later recalled. In 56 BC, during the Gallic Wars, Aquitania was overrun by Caesar's legate Publius Crassus, who advanced from the north through the country of the Pictones and Santones, took the stronghold of the Sotiates, and then campaigned against the Tarusates and neighbouring peoples. In the decisive engagement the Aquitani were supported by their Hispanic neighbours, who sent them auxiliaries and commanders. Caesar did not take part in that campaign, but he conducted an operation in Aquitania in 51 BC. Suetonius later placed the Aquitanian and northern Hispanic regions among those prone to revolt under Augustus.
Roman administration Around 15 BC Augustus enlarged the province of Aquitania by adding to it fourteen Gaulish civitates between the Garonne and the Loire, so that the name came to cover a much larger and largely Gaulish-speaking territory, and the older ethnic Aquitania became only its southern part. Within it, the peoples south of the Garonne, the "Nine Peoples" (Novem Populi), kept a recognised identity. Some thirty small peoples of the region had been grouped into only seven civitates, which shared a council for the imperial cult, of Augustan foundation, at Lugdunum Convenarum (Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges).
The province remained a single unit until the reign of Diocletian, who detached the old Caesarian Aquitania as a separate province under the name Novempopulania, roughly the ethnic Aquitania of Caesar. The old name of the "Nine Peoples" was kept even though the new province contained twelve cities rather than nine. The recognised standing of the Aquitani is documented most fully by the verse inscription from Hasparren (CIL XIII, 412), in which a notable named Verus states that he obtained from the emperor the separation of the Nine Peoples from the Gauls (seiungere Gallos). Jean-Pierre Bost and Georges Fabre date this embassy to the late 3rd century AD, probably under Aurelian or Probus, and read it as a local demand distinct from the wider Diocletianic reform that created the province.
Language
The indigenous speech of the region, known to modern scholarship as Aquitanian, is recorded almost entirely through onomastics. It survives as personal names and divine names embedded in Latin inscriptions of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, together with a handful of place-names transmitted by Greek and Latin authors. No inscription in the language itself is known, and the only pre-Roman inscribed objects found in Aquitania, fragments of inscribed silver vessels from a princely tomb at Vieille-Aubagnan in the Landes, are Iberian products imported from eastern Spain. The local, Basque-related names number roughly 400, within a wider body of about 600 indigenous names that also includes Gaulish material.
These names show close and exclusive correspondences with Basque, both in their roots, as with Cison (compare Basque gizon 'man') and Nescato (compare neska 'girl'), and in features of their sound system. Aquitanian is therefore generally classed as an early form or close relative of Basque, although the precise nature of the relationship remains debated. Recent reconstructions place the common ancestor of the historical Basque dialects not in a period tied to the pre-Roman tribal division but between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, which bears on how directly Aquitanian can be treated as ancestral to Basque.
Alongside the Aquitanian material the inscriptions preserve a Gaulish onomastic layer. Aquitanian names occur throughout the region but grow rarer towards the north and east, whereas Gaulish names concentrate in the eastern districts, near the Garonne and the Gaulish centres of Tolosa, Aginnum and Burdigala. The two traditions met in a bilingual setting that produced mixed couples, changes of naming tradition from one generation to the next, hybrid Gallo-Aquitanian names, and the adaptation of Gaulish names to Aquitanian sound patterns.
Society Caesar treats the peoples south of the Garonne as a single natio set apart from the Gauls and the Belgae by language, institutions and physique. Philippe Gardes argues that this shared Aquitanian identity was in the first place a matter of geographical space and worked mainly as an ideological frame, taking concrete shape only in the coalition raised against Rome in 56 BC. The individual peoples, not the wider grouping, were the effective political units, as shown by peoples acting on their own account, such as the Lactorates, who seem to have sided with Rome, and the Sotiates, to whom Caesar credits two victories over Roman legions before the Gallic War.