The Hispanic peoples of pre-Roman Spain and Portugal employed a curious semi-syllabic writing system whose orthographic signs were derived from Graeco-Phoenician and Aegean sources (Anderson 1975). The script seems to have been brought to the Iberian Peninsula by Eastern Mediterranean seafarers sometime during the middle or early half of the first millennium B.C.

Of interest here are several ancient signs of rare occurrence, namely, and ↑ or found, for example, in inscriptions from southern Portugal and Andalucia. A partial illustration of a text from Portugal which reads and one from Andalucia, the Gador lead tablet, which contains the sequences places the signs in question in brief context.