Page "History of Spain" Paragraph 14

The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean Sea near Tartessos, modern day Cádiz.

According to John Koch, Cunliffe, Karl, Wodtko and other scholars, Celtic culture may have developed first in far Southern Portugal and Southwestern Spain, approximately 500 years prior to anything recorded in Central Europe.

The Tartessian language from the southwest of the Iberian peninsula, written in a version of the Phoenician script in use around 825 BC, which John T. Koch has claimed to be able to readily translate, has been accepted by a number of philologists and other linguists as the first attested Celtic language, but the linguistic mainstream continues to treat Tartessian as an unclassified ( Pre-Indo-European?

) language, and Koch's view of the evolution of Celtic is not generally accepted.