Zurobara

Zurobara ( grc, italic=yes, Ζουρόβαρα) was a Dacian town located in the northwest of today's Romanian Banat. It was positioned by the Tibiscus (Timiș) river, north of Sarmizegetusa Regia and south of Ziridava.

This town was attested by Ptolemy in his ''Geographia'' (3.8), yet its exact location remains unknown. Zurobara is among the places that are not to be found on the great Roman roads between the Tysis (Tisza) and the Alouta (Olt).

Location

For a long time, it was assumed that Zurobara (also found under the corrupted and inaccurate form ''Zambara'') was located on the site of the Timișoara Fortress, but this was refuted by modern historians. This hypothesis has its origin in a manuscript by the Venetian Domenico Mario Negri, edited and published in Basel by in 1557. In 1829, Friedrich Heinrich Theodor Bischoff and erroneously identified Zurobara with Sombor from today's Vojvodina. More recent calculations overlap Zurobara with the Dacian fortress of Unip, discovered in 2007 25 km from Timișoara.

Etymology

The name ''Zurobara'' (a possible alternate spelling for ''Zuropara'') was interpreted initially as "strong city": the ending ''bara''/''vara'' means "city" (the same as Thracian ''para'') and the first part ''Zuro'' means "strong". ''Zuro'' is also found in the name of Zyraxes, a Dacian king.

In a second line of interpretation, because of Proto-Indo-European ''*e'' > Dacian "a" (cf. PIE ''*dhewa'' > Dacian "dava", PIE ''*ser'' > Dacian "sara"), "bara" is rather derived from root ''*bher'' "rich, abundance" and "zura" from root ''*ser, *sara'' "waters, river". In this case, Zurobara meant "a water abundant city". Indeed, modern renderings show that Zurobara was located in a swampy area surrounded by the Timiș river. Historian proposes a Sanskrit origin of the term in the form of ''surabhara'', formed by the combination of the words ''sura-'' "shine, serenity, sun" and -''bhara'' "to carry", with the approximate translation "bearer of serenity".

Ancient sources

Ptolemy's ''Geographia''

Zurobara is mentioned in Ptolemy's ''Geographia'' (c. 150 AD) in the form Ζουρόβαρα as an important town in western Dacia, at latitude 45° 40' N and longitude 45° 40' E (note that he used a different meridian and some of his calculations were off). Ptolemy completed his work soon after Trajan's Dacian Wars, as a result of which parts of Dacia were incorporated into the Roman Empire as the new Dacia province.

''Tabula Peutingeriana''

Unlike many other Dacian towns mentioned by Ptolemy, Zurobara is missing from ''Tabula Peutingeriana'' (1st–4th centuries AD), an itinerarium showing the ''cursus publicus'', the road network in the Roman Empire.

The Danish philologist and historian Gudmund Schütte believed that the town with similar name Ziridava, also mentioned by Ptolemy and also missing from ''Tabula Peutingeriana'', was the same with Zurobara. This idea is deemed erroneous alongside many other assumed duplications of names by the Romanian historian and archeologist Vasile Pârvan in his work ''Getica''. Pârvan reviewed all localities mentioned in Ptolemy's ''Geographia'', analyzing and verifying all data available to him at the time. He points out that ''Ziri'' and ''Zuro'' (meaning "water") are the roots of two different Geto-Dacian words. Additionally, Ptolemy provided different coordinates for the two towns; some medieval maps created based on his ''Geographia'' depict two distinct towns.

See also

* Dacian davae
* List of ancient cities in Thrace and Dacia
* Dacia
* Roman Dacia

References

External links

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Dacian towns
Archaeological sites in Romania
Ruins in Romania
Former populated places in the Balkans
Former populated places in Eastern Europe