page_title: History of Seville
section_title: Prehistory and antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: History of Seville / Prehistory and antiquity
caption_attribution_description: English: treasure of El Carambolo, Seville (Reproduction of Town hall), Tartessos Español: Elemento del tesoro del Carambolo (reproducción del ayuntamiento de Sevilla realizada por Fernando Marmolejo Camargo), civilización tartésica
context_page_description: Seville has been one of the most important cities in the Iberian Peninsula since ancient times; the first settlers of the site have been identified with the Tartessian culture. The destruction of their settlement is attributed to the Carthaginians, giving way to the emergence of the Roman city of Hispalis, built very near the Roman colony of Itálica, which was only 9 km northwest of present-day Seville. Itálica, the birthplace of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian, was founded in 206-205 BC. Itálica is well preserved and gives an impression of how Hispalis may have looked in the later Roman period. Its ruins are now an important tourist attraction. Under the rule of the Visigothic Kingdom, Hispalis housed the royal court on some occasions.
  In al-Andalus the city was first the seat of a kūra, or territory, of the Caliphate of Córdoba, then made capital of the Taifa of Seville, which was incorporated into the Christian Kingdom of Castile under Ferdinand III, who was first to be interred in the cathedral.
context_section_description: The original core of the city, in the neighbourhood of the present-day street, Cuesta del Rosario, dates to the 8th century BC, when Seville was on an island in the Guadalquivir.  Archaeological excavations in 1999 found anthropic remains under the north wall of the Real Alcázar dating to the 8th–7th century BC.
  The town was called Spal or Ispal by the Tartessians, the indigenous pre-Roman Iberian people of Tartessos (the name given to their kingdom by the Greeks); they controlled the Guadalquivir Valley and were important trading partners of the neighbouring Phoenician trading colonies on the coast, which later passed to the Carthaginians. The Tartessian culture was succeeded by that of the Turdetani (so-called by the Romans) and the Turduli.
  Ispal advanced in its civilisation and was culturally enriched by its frequent contact with the
  peaceful Phoenician traders. Commercial colonisation activity in the region changed dramatically in the 6th century BC when the Carthaginians achieved dominance of the western Mediterranean after the fall of the Phoenician city-states of Canaan to the Persian empire. This new phase of colonisation involved the expansion of Punic territory through military conquest; later Greek sources impute the destruction of Tartessos to Carthaginian military assaults on the Seville of the Cuesta del Rosario, assuming it to be Tartessian at the time. Carthaginians had caused the collapse of Tartessos by 530 BC, either by armed conflict or by cutting off Greek trade in support of the Phoenician colony of Gades (present-day Cádiz). Carthage also besieged and took over Gades at this time.
caption: Reproduction of a gold breast piece from the El Carambolo treasure, displayed in the City Hall of Seville
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