In 1971, on the outskirts of the municipality of Borobia (Soria, 250 inhabitants), three Roman funerary steles were found representing horsemen armed with spears and shields. They were transferred to the Numantine Museum in Soria. But shortly after, in the same place, a missing part of one of them was found. Surprisingly, the piece was kept in a local agricultural shed. In 2024, this fragment was rediscovered and analyzed by several researchers from the Institute of Heritage and Humanities of the University of Zaragoza. The conclusions of the study of the piece, published by the magazine Spanish Archeology Archive, are that the tombstone may represent Celtiberian warriors (Roman auxiliary troops) and that it was placed on the outskirts of the disappeared the town (fortified city) of Virovia. It is known that this city existed, not because there are writings from the time about it, but because coins from its mint have been found. Until now its location was an enigma. That is, depending on the job The warriors of Borobia. A new Latin opisthograph stele from the province of Soria, Under the current Borobia is the Celtiberian Virovia.
The fragmented stele that has been completed measured about 140 centimeters. It has the shape of a parallelepiped and was worked on both sides. In both, it shows two horsemen, one of them carrying a spear that rests on his shoulder. On one side, an inscription reads: “For Sempronio Aninio, son of Aplonius, Carisio Ambatus paid it with his money” and, on the other, “for Lucius Sempronio Ambatus, son of Aninius, he was in charge of doing it.” According to the authors of the study (doctors Marta Chordá Pérez, Borja Díaz Ariño and Alberto Jiménez Carrera), the tombstone “combines clearly Latin and indigenous elements.”
Some of the coins from the Virovia mint were found within the municipal area of Borobia. “The discovery of several pieces of uirouia (name of the mint), added to the proximity between the ancient and recent place names, allows us to suspect that this city could have really been found in this place.” Furthermore, the researchers add, “in several of the tastings carried out as a result of the archaeological intervention carried out in the Borobia castle (in complete ruin) in 2018, at levels greatly altered by the land adaptation works from the medieval period, some Celtiberian ceramic materials were recovered, which are consistent with the existence of a settlement in ancient times.”
In front of the castle is also located the El Cabezo hill, approximately one hectare. This hill, according to experts, has the “orographic characteristics that make it suitable to have been the site of a small the town Celtiberian.” Pre-Roman people built their settlements in high areas and protected them from their enemies with walls and moats.
Since neither the historians Pliny and Ptolemy, nor the Antonine Itinerary (a kind of Michelin Guide of the time) mention Viriovia, experts believe that the city could have disappeared in the Flavian era (1st and 2nd centuries) and became a Latin municipality. “It would, therefore, be a case similar to other Celtiberian cities located on the southern slope of Moncayo, whose names we know exclusively from their monetary coinage, also dated between the final decades of the second century and the beginning of the first.” Although these towns They disappeared, “their toponyms were fossilized, preserved to the present.”
Warriors on horseback, like those seen on tombstones, can be considered one of the most deeply rooted elements in the visual culture of the native populations of the Duero Valley and the Iberian System. “The majority of the coins minted by the Celtiberian mints between the second half of the 2nd century BC (BC) and the initial decades of the 1st century BC show on their reverses the image of a galloping horseman, normally armed with a spear,” they explain.
The municipality of Borobia has not been the subject of any systematic archaeological exploration to date, although, unfortunately, there are indications of intense clandestine excavation activity in different places. Even so, Celtiberian and Basque coins have been located within the urban area. Of these, several from uirouia stand out, a mint that minted bronze coins in the final decades of the 2nd century BC. C., and which included lance riders.
“The iconography of the horseman played a key role in the construction of the public image of the Hispanic Celtic warrior elites since the end of the Iron Age who, from the 2nd century BC, began to serve more or less regularly as auxiliary troops in the Roman army. It is seductive,” they say, “the idea that the durability of that particular iconography on steles from the beginning of the imperial era could be related precisely to the recruitment of units of auxiliary troops of cavalry in Celtiberia in the time of Augustus or his immediate successors. From the middle of the 1st century AD, the motif of the warrior on horseback, usually armed with a spear and sometimes attacking an enemy lying at his feet and followed by a servant on foot, became very popular in the funerary steles of cavalry soldiers deployed on the limits of the empire.
“The peculiar iconography of the Borobia stelae therefore refers to models linked to military environments.” Since those who commissioned the tombstones and the deceased did not have family ties – their surnames (praenomen, cognomen) do not coincide, experts believe that they are “comrades in arms who commissioned the funeral ceremonies for their dead colleagues.”
“The epigraphic complex recovered in Borobia”, they conclude, “necessarily forces us to ask ourselves about the hypothetical existence of a settlement of a certain size in this place. It is an area of singular strategic importance in Antiquity, since it was located on the route that connected the cities of Bilbilis (Calatayud) and Numantia (Soria), allowing access from the Jalón valley to the headwaters of the Duero and, in addition, it had a notable mineral wealth with evidence of having been exploited since the Iron Age”.