On Some Dacian Names from Tyras and Olbia

This article contains a short list of Dacian personal names recorded in two Greek cities of the northern Black Sea region, Tyras and Pontic Olbia. The author provides a linguistic and epigraphic commentary on the names of a clearly Dacian origin (and distinct from Thracian names, as the recent fi ndings indicate) and then proceeds to a historical analysis of these onomastic data. The study shows that almost all the bearers of Dacian names (idionyms or patronyms) in question were magistrates in the imperial period and belonged to a new elite that had recently taken control over Greek cities. For the author, there is more to these names than simply a sign of geographical proximity or ethnic amalgamation, but a distant echo of the Dacian king Burebista’s conquest of the Greek settlements on the western and northwestern stores of the Black Sea in the middle of the 1st century BC. This conquest, mentioned only in one literary source — the work of Dio Chrysostom — telling about the destruction of Olbia by the Getae a century and a half after the events described, should have resulted in the settling of groups of Dacians in the vicinity of coastal Greek cities. Onomastic data evidences miscegenation processes taking place in this region in the imperial times, after a massive Sarmatian invasion, the complexity of which becomes even more pronounced in view of their relevance to the debate over the nature of ethnocultural identity and the question how much the epigraphic material is indicative of the ethnic composition of the local population

Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · History · Linguistics and language evolution