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The Dacians (/ˈdeɪʃənz/; Latin: Daci [ˈdaːkiː]; Greek: Δάκοι,[2] Δάοι,[2] Δάκαι[3]) were the ancient Indo-European inhabitants of the cultural region of Dacia, located in the area near the Carpathian Mountains and west of the Black Sea. They are often considered a subgroup of the Thracians.[4] This area includes mainly the present-day countries of Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of Ukraine,[5] Eastern Serbia, Northern Bulgaria, Slovakia,[6] Hungary and Southern Poland.[5] The Dacians and the related Getae[7] spoke the Dacian language, which has a debated relationship with the neighbouring Thracian language and may be a subgroup of it.[8][9] Dacians were somewhat culturally influenced by the neighbouring Scythians and by the Celtic invaders of the 4th century BC.
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Name and etymology
Name
The Dacians were known as Geta (plural Getae) in Ancient Greek writings[citation needed], and as Dacus (plural Daci) or Getae in Roman documents,[10] but also as Dagae and Gaete as depicted on the late Roman map Tabula Peutingeriana. It was Herodotus who first used the ethnonym Getae in his Histories.[11] In Greek and Latin, in the writings of Julius Caesar, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder, the people became known as 'the Dacians'.[12] Getae and Dacians were interchangeable terms, or used with some confusion by the Greeks.[13][14] Latin poets often used the name Getae.[15] Vergil called them Getae four times, and Daci once, Lucian Getae three times and Daci twice, Horace named them Getae twice and Daci five times, while Juvenal one time Getae and two times Daci.[16][17][15] In AD 113, Hadrian used the poetic term Getae for the Dacians.[18] Modern historians prefer to use the name Geto-Dacians.[12] Strabo describes the Getae and Dacians as distinct but cognate tribes. This distinction refers to the regions they occupied.[19] Strabo and Pliny the Elder also state that Getae and Dacians spoke the same language.[19][20]
By contrast, the name of Dacians, whatever the origin of the name, was used by the more western tribes who adjoined the Pannonians and therefore first became known to the Romans.[21] According to Strabo's Geographica, the original name of the Dacians was Δάοι "Daoi".[2] The name Daoi (one of the ancient Geto-Dacian tribes) was certainly adopted by foreign observers to designate all the inhabitants of the countries north of Danube that had not yet been conquered by Greece or Rome.[12][12]
The ethnographic name Daci is found under various forms within ancient sources. Greeks used the forms Δάκοι "Dakoi" (Strabo, Dio Cassius, and Dioscorides) and Δάοι "Daoi" (singular Daos).[22][2][23][a][24] The form Δάοι "Daoi" was frequently used according to Stephan of Byzantium.[17]
Latins used the forms Davus, Dacus, and a derived form Dacisci (Vopiscus and inscriptions).[25][26][27][17]
There are similarities between the ethnonyms of the Dacians and those of Dahae (Greek Δάσαι Δάοι, Δάαι, Δαι, Δάσαι Dáoi, Dáai, Dai, Dasai; Latin Dahae, Daci), an Indo-European people located east of the Caspian Sea, until the 1st millennium BC. Scholars have suggested that there were links between the two peoples since ancient times.[28][29][30][17] The historian David Gordon White has, moreover, stated that the "Dacians ... appear to be related to the Dahae".[31] (Likewise White and other scholars also believe that the names Dacii and Dahae may also have a shared etymology – see the section following for further details.)
By the end of the first century AD, all the inhabitants of the lands which now form Romania were known to the Romans as Daci, with the exception of some Celtic and Germanic tribes who infiltrated from the west, and Sarmatian and related people from the east.[14]
Etymology
The name Daci, or "Dacians" is a collective ethnonym.[32] Dio Cassius reported that the Dacians themselves used that name, and the Romans so called them, while the Greeks called them Getae.[33][34][35] Opinions on the origins of the name Daci are divided. Some scholars consider it to originate in the Indo-European *dha-k-, with the stem *dhe- 'to put, to place', while others think that the name Daci originates in *daca 'knife, dagger' or in a word similar to dáos, meaning 'wolf' in the related language of the Phrygians.[36][37]
One hypothesis is that the name Getae originates in Indo-European *guet- 'to utter, to talk'.[38][36] Another hypothesis is that Getae and Daci are the Iranian names of two Iranian-speaking Scythian groups that had been assimilated into the larger Thracian-speaking population of the later "Dacia."[39][40]
Early history of etymological approaches
In the 1st century AD, Strabo suggested that its stem formed a name previously borne by slaves: Greek Daos, Latin Davus (-k- is a known suffix in Indo-European ethnic names).[41] In the 18th century, Grimm proposed the Gothic dags or "day" that would give the meaning of "light, brilliant". Yet dags belongs to the Sanskrit word-root dah-, and a derivation from Dah to Δάσαι "Daci" is difficult.[17] In the 19th century, Tomaschek (1883) proposed the form "Dak", meaning those who understand and can speak, by considering "Dak" as a derivation of the root da ("k" being a suffix); cf. Sanskrit dasa, Bactrian daonha.[42] Tomaschek also proposed the form "Davus", meaning "members of the clan/countryman" cf. Bactrian daqyu, danhu "canton".[42]
Modern theories
Since the 19th century, many scholars have proposed an etymological link between the endonym of the Dacians and wolves.
- A possible connection with the Phrygians was proposed by Dimitar Dechev (in a work not published until 1957).[citation needed] The Phrygian language word daos meant "wolf",[citation needed] and Daos was also a Phrygian deity.[43] In later times, Roman auxiliaries recruited from the Dacian area were also known as Phrygi.[citation needed] Such a connection was supported by material from Hesychius of Alexandria (5th/6th century),[44][45] as well as by the 20th century historian Mircea Eliade.[43]
- The German linguist Paul Kretschmer linked daos to wolves via the root dhau, meaning to press, to gather, or to strangle – i.e. it was believed that wolves would often use a neck bite to kill their prey.[31][46]
- Endonyms linked to wolves have been demonstrated or proposed for other Indo-European tribes, including the Luvians, Lycians, Lucanians, Hyrcanians and, in particular, the Dahae (of the south-east Caspian region),[47][48] who were known in Old Persian as Daos.[43] Scholars such as David Gordon White have explicitly linked the endonyms of the Dacians and the Dahae.[31]
- Hungarian linguist and historian Dr. Viktor Padányi writes "By all indications their name comes from the Sumerian "dag, tag" word meaning two handed axe, battle axe."[49]
- The Draco, a standard flown by the Dacians, also prominently featured a wolf head.
However, according to Romanian historian and archaeologist Alexandru Vulpe, the Dacian etymology explained by daos ("wolf") has little plausibility, as the transformation of daos into dakos is phonetically improbable and the Draco standard was not unique to Dacians. He thus dismisses it as folk etymology.[50]
Another etymology, linked to the Proto-Indo-European language roots *dhe- meaning "to set, place" and dheua → dava ("settlement") and dhe-k → daci is supported by Romanian historian Ioan I. Russu (1967).[51]
Mythological theories
Mircea Eliade attempted, in his book From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan, to give a mythological foundation to an alleged special relation between Dacians and the wolves:[52]
- Dacians might have called themselves "wolves" or "ones the same with wolves",[53][52] suggesting religious significance.[54]
- Dacians draw their name from a god or a legendary ancestor who appeared as a wolf.[54]
- Dacians had taken their name from a group of fugitive immigrants arrived from other regions or from their own young outlaws, who acted similarly to the wolves circling villages and living from looting. As was the case in other societies, those young members of the community went through an initiation, perhaps up to a year, during which they lived as a "wolf".[55][54] Comparatively, Hittite laws referred to fugitive outlaws as "wolves".[56]
- The existence of a ritual that provides one with the ability to turn into a wolf.[57] Such a transformation may be related either to lycanthropy itself, a widespread phenomenon, but attested especially in the Balkans-Carpathian region,[56] or a ritual imitation of the behavior and appearance of the wolf.[57] Such a ritual was presumably a military initiation, potentially reserved to a secret brotherhood of warriors (or Männerbünde).[57] To become formidable warriors they would assimilate behavior of the wolf, wearing wolf skins during the ritual.[54] Traces related to wolves as a cult or as totems were found in this area since the Neolithic period, including the Vinča culture artifacts: wolf statues and fairly rudimentary figurines representing dancers with a wolf mask.[58][59] The items could indicate warrior initiation rites, or ceremonies in which young people put on their seasonal wolf masks.[59] The element of unity of beliefs about werewolves and lycanthropy exists in the magical-religious experience of mystical solidarity with the wolf by whatever means used to obtain it. But all have one original myth, a primary event.[60][61]
Origins and ethnogenesis
Evidence of proto-Thracians or proto-Dacians in the prehistoric period depends on the remains of material culture. It is generally proposed that a proto-Dacian or proto-Thracian people developed from a mixture of indigenous peoples and Indo-Europeans from the time of Proto-Indo-European expansion in the Early Bronze Age (3,300–3,000 BC)[62] when the latter, around 1500 BC, conquered the indigenous peoples.[63] The indigenous people were Danubian farmers, and the invading people of the 3rd millennium BC were Kurgan warrior-herders from the Ukrainian and Russian steppes.[64]
Indo-Europeanization was complete by the beginning of the Bronze Age. The people of that time are best described as proto-Thracians, which later developed in the Iron Age into Danubian-Carpathian Geto-Dacians as well as Thracians of the eastern Balkan Peninsula.[65]
Between 15th–12th century BC, the Dacian-Getae culture was influenced by the Bronze Age Tumulus-Urnfield warriors who were on their way through the Balkans to Anatolia.[66]
In the 8th to 7th centuries BC, the migration of the Scythians from the east into the Pontic Steppe pushed westwards and away from the steppes the related Scythic Agathyrsi people who had previously dwelt on the Pontic Steppe around the Lake Maeotis.[67] Following this, the Agathyrsi settled in the territories of present-day Moldova, Transylvania and possibly Oltenia, where they mingled with the indigenous population of Thracian origins.[68][67] When the Agathyrsi were later completely assimilated by the Geto-Thracian populations;,[68] their fortified settlements became the centres of the Getic groups who would later transform into the Dacian culture; an important part of the Dacian people descended from the Agathyrsi.[68] When the La Tène Celts arrived in the 4th century BC, the Dacians were under the influence of the Scythians.[66]
Alexander the Great attacked the Getae in 335 BC on the lower Danube, but by 300 BC they had formed a state founded on a military democracy, and began a period of conquest.[66] More Celts arrived during the 3rd century BC, and in the 1st century BC the people of Boii tried to conquer some of the Dacian territory on the eastern side of the Teiss river. The Dacians drove the Boii south across the Danube and out of their territory, at which point the Boii abandoned any further plans for invasion.[66]
Some Hungarian historians consider the Dacians and Getae the same as the Scythian tribes of the Dahae, Massagetae, also the exonym Daxia one with Dacia.[49][69]
Identity and distribution
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North of the Danube, Dacians occupied[when?] a larger territory than Ptolemaic Dacia,[clarification needed] stretching between Bohemia in the west and the Dnieper cataracts in the east, and up to the Pripyat, Vistula, and Oder rivers in the north and northwest.[70][better source needed] In 53 BC, Julius Caesar stated that the Dacian territory[clarification needed] was on the eastern border of the Hercynian forest.[66] According to Strabo's Geographica, written around AD 20,[71] the Getes (Geto-Dacians) bordered the Suevi who lived in the Hercynian Forest, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the river Duria, the present-day Váh (Waag).[72] Dacians lived on both sides of the Danube.[73] [74] According to Strabo, Moesians also lived on both sides of the Danube.[35] According to Agrippa,[75] Dacia was limited by the Baltic Ocean in the North and by the Vistula in the West.[76] The names of the people and settlements confirm Dacia's borders as described by Agrippa.[75][77] Dacian people also lived south of the Danube.[75]
Linguistic affiliation
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