Each individual has a different mission and an adventure in life. Each individual tries to lead their lives as guided by the opportunities they happen to have and in line with their own frame of reference. I am now a middle-aged man living in the Western European country called Spain, away from Turkey, where I was born and grew up. I am also a person whose view of the world has radically changed recently. There is a vital element that has had an influence in the changing of my world view and accompanied it all through this time: exercise. In my twenties I was a person focusing on entertainment and reading, who didn’t take part in any sports activities except playing football on artificial-turf pitches. I really didn’t need to do any exercise ( Everybody needs exercise, but it didn’t matter to me at that time because I didn’t use to put on any weight ). At this moment in my life, however, I have incorporated running and other types of exercise into my life; it is almost impossible for me to have my mind in peace without it. Frankly, it is not easy at all to allot time for exercise among all the rat race and mental effort throughout the day, yet I continue training my body whether it is little or a lot because I don’t want the fitness and health I have acquired with so many years of exercise disappearing in a zilch of time. When I was in Turkey, I had already formed a strong habit of doing exercise. In Spain we have countless big and spacious parks and big empty land without urbanization and I love going for a run without any disturbance in these places at night. 

These solitary moments make me happy and keep me strong. Occasionally I can make out shades with two upright ears at the bottom of trees in the middle of the night. The moment I approach them, I see cute rabbits running away all of a sudden in an awkward manner.  These rabbits are almost everywhere in Madrid and I feel happy seeing these petite creatures during my runs. They are generally small and bear an ash-like brown or grey colour.

This rabbit population in Madrid is nothing new for the country called Spain today, where I am living at the moment. If we put aside the genetic mixture, hybridization and displacement by humans that have happened over time, the race of rabbits living in the capital of Spain today is the same as the one that used to live on the Iberian Peninsula some 2000-3000 years ago. However, the rabbits on the peninsula not only matter because they adorn human environments with their cuteness, but also because they were the inspiration for the naming of Spain.

Although there are various theories on why or how the country we call Spain today came to be called this way, the one that makes sense the most to me is the one related to the rabbits. Ancient Romans called the whole Iberian Peninsula Hispania. Nonetheless, this Latin word most probably derived from an expression in the Phoenician language meaning land of rabbits. The ancient Iberian Peninsula harboured an enormous rabbit population. In his work Geographica, ancient Greek writer Strabo pointed out that ancient Iberian rabbits were so abundant they caused considerable disturbance for people. According to him, people at that time tried mobilizing small, carnivorous mammals called the weasel for action to combat the rabbits. Roman scholar Plinius the Elder specifies in his work Naturalis Historia that Hispania was famous for the rabbits, that due to their abundance they did considerable damage to agriculture and soil with the burrows they dug and that, therefore, wrought substantial economic loss. When I converse with people here, they often tell me that the ancient Iberian Peninsula was  covered with such endless forests a rabbit could cover great distances over trees without falling once, just bouncing on and on for hours.

Phoenicians, a people of the Near East, saw rabbits for the first time when they arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the 9^th  century BCE. Although they had never seen rabbits before, they knew the animal called the hyrax very well. The hyrax is native to the Middle East and Africa. Hence, Phoenicians had seen it for centuries before. Hyraxes look like rabbits, so they called this newly discovered stretch of land I-Shaphan, I-Šāpān , which meant land of hyraxes in their language.  Shaphan was the Phoenician word for the hyrax; I had the meaning of land. In reality, this word cannot be directly observed in any source in the Phoenician language; it is a linguistic reconstruction; nonetheless, if we consider the ancient Iberian fauna and the relevant words in the language of Phoenicians, it is an extremely reasonable explanation.  

Phoenicians are an important people in history because the alphabet they developed was extremely practical in their time and became the first writing system adopted all around the world, though Phoenicians themselves weren’t the inventors of the alphabet. Each symbol represented one sound in this alphabet, so it was easy to read and understand. The genius of the Phoenician alphabet could be appreciated properly if we consider the hundreds of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the cuneiform of Mesopotamia, with its countless signs or logographic Chinese alphabet, requiring years of training to learn. It was easy to carve and write this alphabet on a piece of stone, so a tablet written with the Phoenician alphabet could be transported to any location. The alphabet was also written from right to left constantly, so it was coherent.  Most importantly, since it was easy to learn and understand, it stopped reading and writing from being the privilege of kings, monks and scribes, giving opportunities to common people in terms of accumulation of knowledge and culture. Since Phoenicians were a trading seafaring people, they carried this alphabet to many places in the Near East and Europe with the dense trade network they had established throughout the Mediterranean. In conclusion, the Phoenician alphabet was the precursor of Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets.

According to a different interpretation, the word Spain could be derived from ezpain in Basque, meaning lip, side, border. Our ancient knowledge of geography dictated that Spain was a piece of land just at the border of the known world at that time. Today some place names in Spain are also of Basque origin. But the Basque word we have specified here is used to denote a part of the body ( lips ). This is to say that it isn’t used to geographically denote something. With that being said, I should also stipulate Basque is the oldest extant non-indoeuropean language in Western Europe. The reason for the specification of Basque as the root of the word Spain is probably it is an extremely old and mysterious language.

The existence of Carthage, which was established as a Phoenician colony in northern Africa and subsequently became a threatening imperial power, matters a lot for the historical trajectory of the Iberian Peninsula. A number of settlements on the southern coast of Spain, among which are famous cities of Cádiz and Málaga, were founded and developed by Phoenicians, who were ancestors of Carthaginians. There was mining activity in the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of Phoenicians and Carthaginians , but Phoenicians improved smelting techniques, carried out the mining activity in a more organized manner and created long-distance trading routes. In short, they made the Iberian metals a significant commodity of the Mediterranean trade. Carthaginians took a step further and created big-scale labour organizations, started protecting the metals using military force and put the production directly under the control of the state. In addition, they used the silver produced on the peninsula to finance their armies, just as Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca, notorious enemies of Rome, did with their own armies. The conversion of the peninsula into a military base by Carthaginians created strong motivation and an excuse for Rome to intervene; the absolute victory of Rome over the peninsula kickstarted Latinization. With this Latinization, Spanish began to emerge as a separate language; the language we call Vulgar Latin, undergoing significant changes, laid the groundwork for contemporary Spanish. To give a notable example of those changes, the consonants at word endings became less pronounced or disappeared altogether. Lupus, meaning a wolf in Latin, has become lobo in modern Spanish. In addition, the wide variety of vowels in Latin has diminished, with only five vowels left in Spanish spoken today. The case endings in Classical Latin disappeared and the meaning started to be expressed based on word order and prepositions. Visigoths, who ruled the peninsula after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, also contributed to the Spanish language. For instance, the words guerra ( war ) and robar ( rob ) derive from the Gothic language. Old Castilian, a dialect of Latin spoken by the 9^th and 10^th centuries in the region of Castile in the north-central part of the peninsula, acted as the origin of modern Spanish and paved the way for its formation through the centuries.  It is for this reason that the Spanish language is also called castellano as well as español in Spanish. Finally, Arabic made a great contribution to contemporary Spanish with a great number of lexical items it provided. There are more than 4000 words of Arabic origin in modern Spanish. Among these words, we can mention aceite ( oil ), azúcar ( sugar ), alcalde ( mayor ) and almohada ( pillow ).

According to ancient Greek historian Polybius, the first treaty between Carthaginians and Romans was signed in 508 BC. Polybius states that he had direct access to the treaty in the Roman archives and adds it was signed with an archaic form of Latin, making understanding the treaty difficult even for him. The date of the agreement matters because it demonstrates that Romans and Carthaginians lived in peace with each other for quite a long period of time before they ended up being big enemies ( 3^rd century BC ). Secondly, it reveals the fact that Carthage was an important political power in the Mediterranean at that time and that Rome, a young republic newly established by then, also had enough prestige to be taken seriously for such a major treaty. Nevertheless, Carthage building a formidable colony in the southern and eastern parts of the peninsula in the following periods disturbed Rome and the two powers had to fight each other. Rome became the dominant power in the peninsula following the war and had the power to single-handedly determine its future and subsequent history.

The majority of the Spanish people today are descendants of groups who lived in western Europe in the Paleolithic Era. Later Mediterranean peoples like Romans and Carthaginians, Celts, Berbers and Arabs, various European peoples contributed to the genotype of the Spanish people. Therefore, we could come across dark-skinned or blonde people and people with auburn hair or people with varying degrees of these physical traits mixed when we take a walk in any street in Spain. For me, this aligns with the fact of people living in various parts of Turkey having different phenotypes . We know that the people living in western, eastern and central Turkey have different appearances. Speaking from my experience in Spain up to now, Spain is also a country like Turkey, with great hidden historical wealth and with its people exhibiting distinct phenotypes.