Jaca
Camino Aragonés · Camino Catalán por San Juan de la Peña
HuescaAragón
Here Camino Aragonés and Camino Catalán por San Juan de la Peña converge. It is one of the points where the pilgrim shares the way with those arriving by another route.
Pre-Roman toponym of Iberian or Vasconic origin. The form Iaca appears already in the 1st century BC in the texts of Strabo and Pliny the Elder as the name of the capital civitas of the Iaccetani people (Iacetanos), described by Strabo as one of the Vasconic-Iberian groups of the central Pyrenees. The root iak- or iac- has not been linked with certainty to any modern Vasconic lexical term, but the concentration of Pyrenean toponyms in iaca- and iaco- suggests a homogeneous pre-Roman substrate.
Evolution of the name
- Iaccetania (territorio) pre-Roman / Latinized 1st century BC
- Iaca / Iacca (civitas) Latin 1st centuries BC–4th
- Iacca late Latin 5th–9th centuries
- Iaka / Jaca medieval Aragonese from the 11th century
Reflections, to the letter
The name was not born in the Romanesque the pilgrim comes to admire, but beneath it: digs at the Escuelas Pias uncovered Iberian levels exactly where the cathedral now stands, the site of the Iaka of the Iacetani named by Strabo. That Vasconic town struck bronze ases stamped with the Iberian legend iaka between 150 and 70 BC. To cross the square is to walk on two thousand years of one unbroken name.
Glossary
- Iaccetani
- Pre-Roman people of the central Pyrenees, cited by Strabo, Caesar and Titus Livius as neighbours of Vascones, Suessetani and Ausetani. Their capital was Iaca (present-day Jaca) and their territory extended approximately through the valley of the river Aragón. They minted their own coinage with northeastern Iberian legend between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, with a characteristic figure of a horseman with palm and spear.
- Jacquese chequerwork
- Romanesque ornamental motif consisting of a band of alternating squares, sculpted in stone, that runs along the eaves, imposts and archivolts of Jacquese churches. It is documented for the first time in the cathedral of Jaca around 1063 and from there it propagates along the whole Camino de Santiago during the 11th and 12th centuries, becoming the identifying seal of Hispanic peninsular Romanesque.
- Pre-Roman
- Prior to the Romanisation of the Iberian peninsula (3rd century BC); applied to toponyms, linguistic roots and populations.
- Roman road
- A stone-paved Roman highway, part of the imperial communications network (Via Aquitana, Via Augusta, Iter ab Asturica); many such roads became medieval routes and, later, stretches of the Camino de Santiago.
Sources
- Estrabón — Geografía, III, 4, 10
- Ubieto Arteta, A. — Historia de Aragón
- Buesa Conde, D. — Jaca, dos mil años de historia
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Camino Aragonés