Tartessian

Tartessian is an extinct and unclassified Paleo-Hispanic language attested in southwestern Iberia, chiefly in southern Portugal and southwestern Spain, mainly through inscriptions on funerary stelae dated to roughly the seventh through fifth centuries BC. Its 95 known inscriptions are written in the Southwest Paleohispanic script, a semi-syllabic writing system combining alphabetic and syllabic signs ultimately derived from Phoenician, and by the 1990s scholars had largely agreed on the sound values of its symbols even though the underlying language remains undeciphered. A proposal that Tartessian is an early Celtic language has attracted attention, but the near-unanimous scholarly view treats this as a case of false decipherment, leaving the language's affiliation genuinely unknown. Tartessian is associated with the semi-legendary civilization of Tartessos, a wealthy pre-Roman culture whose material remains have been recovered across the same southwestern Iberian region.