In Iberian times, Tivissa was an important community, and the name itself may be of Iberian origin.
Ammianus Marcellinus, Tyrannius Rufinus, and Zosimus report that Bacurius was "king of Iberians", but Gelasius of Caesarea does not call him king, but merely scion of the kings of Iberia.
:"They say that Tartessus is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths, and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name. The river, which is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, those of a later day called Baetis, and there are some who think that Tartessus was the ancient name of Carpia, a city of the Iberians."
The site excavations began in 1915 when purely by accident the Iberian stele at Tona was unearthed; in 1944, as a result of torrential rains, a first settlement level was documented, with structures from the Iberian period, and a possible second level with buried human remains with stones situated chronologically from around the 6th and 7th centuries BC.
It was during his reign that the style of the rulers of Trebizond changed; until then, they claimed the traditional title of the Byzantine emperors, "Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans", but from John II on they changed it to "Emperor and Autocrat of all the East, the Iberians, and the Transmarine Provinces", although Iberia had been lost in the reign of Andronikos I Gidos.
The four great branches of the Mediterranean stock were the Libyans or Berbers, the Ligurians, the Pelasgians and the Iberians.
Bronze Age, Iberian, and Roman artifacts have been found on the slopes of the mountain, but the origins of the castle date to the 9th century at the time of Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula.