I spent some time looking into this from a post about this artifact yesterday. I had the same response to think abut runes when I looked at it as well. For anyone curious, the characters are evidently from one of several Paleohispanic scripts. The origins of those scripts might be Phoenician and/or Greek, some are read from left to right and some from right to left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages