Dacian fortified settlement From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dava (Latinatepluraldavae) was a Geto-Dacian name for a city, town or fortress.[1][2] Generally, the name indicated a tribal center or an important settlement, usually fortified. Some of the Dacian settlements and the fortresses employed the Murus Dacicus traditional construction technique.
Many city names of the Dacians were composed of an initial lexical element (often the tribe name) affixed to -dava, -daua, -deva, -deba, -daba or -dova (<PIE*dʰeh₁-, "to set, place").[3][pageneeded] Therefore, dava 'town' derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European *dhewa 'settlement'.[4] A non-Indo European, Kartvelian solution has also been briefly mentioned, but dismissed as a random occurrence (Tomaschek 1893, p.139) e.g., see comparison with *daba, 'town, village'.[5]
Below is a list of Dacian towns which include various forms of dava in their name:
Onomastic range of the Dacian towns with the -dava ending, covering Dacia, Moesia, Thrace and Dalmatia
Acidava[6] (Acidaua), a fortress town close to the Danube.[7] Located in today's Enoșești, Olt County, Romania
Pulpudeva, originally named Eumolpias by the Dacians. Philip II of Macedon conquered the area in 342–341 BC and renamed the city Philippoupolis (Greek: Φιλιππούπολις), of which the later Dacian name for the city, Pulpu-deva, is a reconstructed translation. Today's city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria.
Thermidava, placed by Ptolemy on the Lissus-Naissus route. The toponym is most probably a misreading of a settlement which most scholars in contemporary research locate near present-day Banat, Serbia.[15]
Georgiev, Vladimir I. (1981). Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages (3rded.). Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. p.120. ... the toponyms with dava (deva) are typical of Dacia, rarely found in Moesia, and not found in Thrace
Lepper, F. A. (1988). Trajan's Column: A New Edition of the Cichorius Plates. Alan Sutton. p.138. ISBN9780862994679. Stuart Jones noted the Dacian – sounding place – name ' Thermidava ' on the Lissus Naissus road: but see Miller col . 557 , for the evidence on this. The place was most probably called ' Theranda ' and there is no evidence for any settlement there of pro-Roman Dacians now, nor is it very likely. (..) Most scholars , however , have supposed , as did Cichorius , that we are now north of the Danube , somewhere in the Banat area where the local inhabitants are frightened that they may lose their recently acquired 'liberty'.
