1 [Pp. 365-395 in Alejandro G. Sinner and Javier Velaza, eds., Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Please, note that text and location of the figures might differ from the published version. For a copy of the text with the published pagination, please send me an email.] CHAPTER 13 COIN EVIDENCE FOR PALAEOHISPANIC LANGUAGES P. P. RIPOLLÈS AND A. G. SINNER 1. Introduction Numismatists were the first scholars to realize the existence of certain texts written in what they called ‘unknown alphabets’. From the 16 th century, when Antonio Agustín first understood the syllabograms, 1 but especially during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, they catalogued, translated, and tried to assign values to those incomprehensible signs that were to be found on some of the ancient Hispanic coin issues. 2 As part of this tradition of scholarship, Velázquez was able to identify the vowels /a/, /e/, and the consonants /l/ and /r/; 3 Heiss was the first to document syllabic signs, individualizing the signs ba and bi; 4 meanwhile, Delgado was the first academic to determine the vowel /o/ and the sign m. 5 Finally, Zobel de Zangróniz and Pujol i Camps made fundamental contributions, identifying the syllabic signs ka, ke, ko, ku, and to respectively. 6 All these contributions enabled Manuel Gómez Moreno to draw up a correct and practically definitive transcription of the Iberian script in 1922. Thus, the ancient coinages of the Iberian peninsula are of great interest for those that study the Palaeohispanic languages, not only because coin legends form a large corpus of epigraphic documents, but also because of the important role that they have played in the transcription and in our understanding of the Iberian, Celtiberian, and Vasconic languages. Therefore, any volume dedicated to the study of Palaeohispanic languages and inscriptions must contain a chapter devoted not only to those coins that were minted using any of these languages in their legends, but also to those that preceded them. To this purpose we will dedicate the following pages. 2. Languages documented on the coins The Iberian peninsula, due to its peripheral location at the westernmost limit of the Mediterranean, was a priori far away from the cultural centres that fostered the main 1 Velaza forthcoming. 2 Velaza 1999: 1. 3 Velázquez 1752. 4 Heiss 1870. 5 Delgado 1871-1876. 6 Zobel 1880; Pujol i Camps 1887.