Last week, the director of culture of the Government of Aragon, Pedro Olloqui, accompanied by the director of the Museum of Zaragoza, Isidro Aguilera, inaugurated in the Pyrenean house that the latter institution has in the José Antonio Labordeta Park in Zaragoza the recommended exhibition "Before Latin. Pre-Roman languages in Aragon (II-I centuries B.C.)". In it, in an extensive showcase with three pedestals, there are about thirty Materials - some original, others reproductions - that review the extent to which three pre-Latin languages, Celtiberian, Iberian and Basque, were spoken in Aragon before the great globalization that led to the expansion of Latin. These languages, however, "do not seem to have been an insurmountable barrier", as the sample brochure rightly states. It is known that, in the current territory of the Cinco Villas de Aragón, in localities close to the Roman city of Los Bañales de Uncastillo -such as Ejea de los Caballeros, Sofuentes or Valpalmas- there are, on inscriptions from the Roman Imperial period, names that refer to what now, rather than paleo-Basque, has come to be called "Basquelanguage ". This Catalog, moreover, has been expanded thanks to new epigraphic findings in El Forau de la Tuta, in Artieda de Aragón.

If these testimonies are put in relation with those that, similar, are attested on the other side of the border that separates us from the foral community of Navarre, a wide zone is drawn -that would begin to the west of Pamplona, in Mendigorría, and would end in the north of Aragón, in Artieda and even, something more towards the Somontano de Barbastro, in La Puebla de Castro- where there would exist, as a bottom of the sack of the Aquitanian population, in the Basque language, individuals with Basque names, in Artieda and, even, something more towards the Somontano de Barbastro, in La Puebla de Castro- where there would exist, as bottom of sack of the Aquitanian population, of Basque language , individuals with names in that language as suggestive as politicized. Little is said about the Basque language in the exhibition that has now been inaugurated in Zaragoza. First, because it stops in the second and first centuries B.C. and, with the exception of some Basque names of the horsemen of Ejea de los Caballeros who swelled the Salluitana troop, the Basque evidence in Aragon is already later than the first century A.D. Second, because, quantitatively, there are hardly more than five testimonies. However, the search engines in use list about twenty inscriptions in Celtiberian and Iberian in the province of Zaragoza, five in Iberian in Huesca and about sixty in Iberian and twenty in Celtiberian in Teruel.

In Navarre, however, the finding in Irulegi of a bronze manita from the 1st century B.C. with four lines of text of which two words seem to refer to the Basque language has become irrefutable test that Basque was the most widely spoken language there since Antiquity. However, the numbers have not been taken into account, since of the twenty or so Paleo-Hispanic inscriptions preserved in Navarre, only three refer to the Basque language, a few more if we take into account those after the change of Era. In times of passion and manipulation of scientific evidence, it is to be celebrated that the Museum of Zaragoza, letting the written documents speak, has wanted to emphasize that Aragon -as well as Navarre and the entire Ebro Valley, as I learned at the University of Zaragoza from my teacher Francisco Beltrán- was a trifinio, a multicultural and multilingual paradigmatic space to understand the Ancient History of our country, as exciting as passionately misrepresented on many occasions.