Vascons: Ancient Basques

Reading about the Kingdom of Navarre, I found some information about he Vascons, the people who appears in some Roman chronicles.

Seems like their warriors were used as mercenaries by both Carthage and Rome.

Anyway, here you have the information available about this topic at Reference.com:

Vascons

The Vascons (Latin : Vascones) were an ancient people who, before the arrival of the Romans, inhabited the region in what is now Spain, north of the Ebro river (present day Navarre). It is likely that they are ancestors of the present-day Basques.

Having suffered defeats at the hands of Pompey and Augustus, they were absorbed into the Roman Empire, under which they may have prospered.

The Vascons were finally forced to retreat from their lands and head northward by the invasion of the Visigoths in the 5th and 6th centuries and to move into what is today Basque country.

From the6th to 7th centuries, the Vascons north crossed over the Pyrenees into the Aquitaine of France where they influenced the Occitan language spoken in that region (Gascon) and gave that region its name : Gascony (French: Gascogne).

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