Locating Biblical Tarshish

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Tartessos was the ancient Greek name for the Guadalquivir River, which runs through the heart of Andalusia, from the inland areas of Córdoba and Seville to just north of Cádiz on the Atlantic coast. The region, called Turdetania by the Romans, was likely known to the Phoenicians (and the biblical writers) as Tarshish, which was probably a Semitic form of its local indigenous name.

During the first millennium BCE, Tartessos was home to a powerful local people who controlled access to some of Europe’s richest metal deposits, especially the Rio Tinto mines (about 45 miles north of Huelva) and the abundant pyrite resources spread across Andalusia. Such metals were the main reason for trade between Phoenician entrepreneurs and local Iberian communities, with sites like Huelva and Seville becoming early centers of exchange.

Wealthy burials that combine both traditional and Levantine elements, including “orientalizing” goods and imports, attest to the mixed culture that resulted from such contact. Sanctuaries were at the center of these interactions and provided safe spaces for economic exchange. For instance, at the site of El Carambolo just outside Seville, the Levantine gods Ashtart and a form of Baal, perhaps Melqart, were worshiped not only by Phoenician traders, but also by locals who had assimilated these gods to their own ancestral deities.

Unfortunately, we know little about the social or political organization of Tartessos. It seems likely that local chiefs controlled the area’s abundant resources well into the sixth century BCE, when we know Ionian Greeks came to Iberia seeking the support of Tartessos’s wealthy and proverbially long-lived king, Arganthonios, in the face of the Persian threat (Herodotus, Histories 1.163.1–165.2). Afterward, a crisis affected the region’s coastal settlements and pushed the Tartessic culture inland, to sites such as Cancho Roano and Casas del Turuñuelo, where archaeologists have found monumental buildings and a cosmopolitan material culture that displays Levantine styles and techniques.

After the sixth century, Tartessos and its wealth began to fade into legend, becoming associated in Greek myth with the far reaches of the known world (including stories about Herakles). Traces of its culture and language, however, continued to live on among Iberia’s later inhabitants, the Turdetanians, whom the Romans identified with the Tartessic legacy.