Those of us in Navarra who love the History of the Antiquity of our land are in luck. If 2022 closed with an overflowing social expectation to see the hand of Irulegi, the most mediatic archaeological finding of the recent history of Navarre, 2023 has closed with the open publication of the first scientific conclusions derived from the study of that bronze plate that is already in the heart of all Navarrese. As science should be nowadays, in open access, the journals Fontes Linguae Vasconum, of the Government of Navarra, and Palaeohispanica, of the University of Zaragoza, have given us for Christmas almost 200 pages of reflections on these four lines that, despite their interpretative complexity, have been marking the cultural -and even, sometimes, political- current events of the last year in Navarra.

Already in the weeks immediately following the document's release on presentation , we warned that there were many things that many wanted the hand to say and that, however, it does not say. And this is now confirmed by these programs of study. The sorioneku that became almost a hashtag for the Christmas greeting of 2022 vanishes and everything points to the fact that the word that appears in the text is better a dative, sorioneke. Thus, the hand would be a votive offering to the fortune generated in the military context that led to the destruction of the oppidum of Irulegi. A pious resource to Fortune that has more of a Basque reinterpretatio of a custom learned from Rome than a local religious habit. Moreover, the experts indicate that the relationship between the sorion of that term and its equivalent in the current Basque is only hypothetical and, even, some of the authors of the dossier of Fontes Linguae Vasconum, bring the registration closer to the Iberian than to the Basque and, noting the B separation that, with barely a century and a half of difference, between the text engraved in Irulegi's hand and the one exhibited by some Basque anthroponyms in inscriptions of the Roman Imperial period, they underline the discontinuity between Irulegi's Basque and the current Basque. The exemplary study of the archaeological context of finding provides two other sgraffito ceramics with a Paleo-Hispanic sign and a stylus for writing that removes the Vascones from their supposedly unwritten character, although it raises doubts about the Degree implementation of writing, perhaps only among the elite, in their societies. The shape of the support, a cut hand, brings the symbolism of the piece closer to the Iberian world, from which the signarius would come, adapted from it, in the same way that if the very fact of its engraving, and the invocation to fortune, is clearly Roman and is carried out in a context of tremendous intensification of an already then secular process of Latinization, the employment of the dotting for fill in the text brings the document closer to the Celtiberian world. The hand, therefore, comes to confirm many of the approaches that, in the last decade, had been made about the ancient Vascones and, above all, that character of the Navarrese site as a melting pot of cultures since Antiquity.

However, the hand of Irulegi and its excellent edition do point to a reality that should be taken grade at the start of 2024. The archaeological research , if it is ambitious, open, collaborative and, above all, well financed -as Aranzadi has managed to make the one developed in Irulegi- and, therefore, capable of being sustained over time, always leads to scientific conclusions that improve our knowledge of the past. Irulegi was destroyed in the framework of the Sertorian conflict but it marks a strip of territory, which goes from Andelo to Santa Criz de Eslava, passing through the ancient Pompelo, in which, also with epigraphic evidence, there are several enclaves that, having survived the Sertorian episode as monumental Roman cities, still have much to tell us about the ancient Vascones and how they learned to be Romans. It is now up to the Navarrese institutions to be audacious so that what Irulegi's hand tells us can be confirmed or denied by new findings. It is time to leave the myth behind and let science speak. It is time for real archaeology in Navarre.