Quote Originally Posted by Watchman View Post
The Tartessans kind of fell apart on their own, so yeah... Also I don't recall them being particularly important in more than a regional, if not strictly local, scale. From what I understand of the relevant geographic dynamics (ie. how the trade routes were wont to run) most of the Iberian peninsula had a rather poor starting position should it have come to competing with more advantageously situated regions. For example, take the "Gallic corridor" linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean with several fortuitiously situated major rivers and their attendant valleys (and rounding it off with some of Europe's best farmland); or the Danube communications complex linking the Baltic, the Adriatic and the Black Sea to both each other and the European interior. Or the major peninsulas of the Mediterranean interior, that is, the Apennine and Balkan ones which straddle the east-west shipping lanes. (The Southern Italy - Sicily - Tunisia region indeed forms a veritable chokepoint.) Or the Aegean-Marmara-Black Sea axis which is basically the convergence/interface point for *several* major continental-level trade routes... there's a reason Constantinopole was so fabulously rich, and why Charlemagne's short-lived empire (arguably just about the only one that could be said to have genuinely conquered the better part of the European subcontinent, if only fleetingly) grew out of the region of old Gallia.
You get the idea.
Bloody Finns, lol.