Ancient tribe Dacians - Ancestry and origin

The Dacians were an Indo-European people and closely related to the Thracians. They represented the majority population in Transylvania (Transylvania). A separate Dacian ethnic identity was formed around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The ethnogenesis turns out to be a process of separation of a younger Dacian identity on the basis of an older Thracian "total people". Until Roman times the Dacians were not a unified people. Rather, individual Dacian tribal groups entered into alliances that either lasted for a short time or were more permanent.

The Dacians were the strongest opponents of the Romans in the Balkans. Only Emperor Trajan succeeded in subjugating the Dacians in two wars (101-102 and 105-106 AD). The victory of the Romans is celebrated in the friezes of the Trajan Column in Rome. The Romans founded numerous colonies in the newly won province of Dacia. Within a short time the Dacians assimilated among the Romanised population of the Balkans. Dacia belonged to the Roman Empire until 271 AD.

The memory of the cultural heritage of the Dacians lives on among the Romanians to this day. In their identity, the awareness of the Dacian origin of their people is intimately linked to the pride of belonging to the Roman civilisation circle.



Therefore, the followers of the Dacian-Romanesque theory of continuity assume that in modern Romanian at least 160 lexical inheritances consist of Dacian Thracian, the language of the Dacians who were subjugated by the Romans. The corresponding words, e.g. balaur (dragon) or brânza (cheese), are considered the Dacian substrate of the Romanian vocabulary. About 90 of these words are also found in the Albanian language.