THE ANCIENT TIMES

VERY LONG TIME AGO

Cucuteni pottery

[Thinker of Hamangia]
The Thinkers of Hamangia

        The research done by Romanian archaeologists has led to the discovery of traces of human presence dating back as early as the Lower Palaeolithic (approximately two million years BC).
        A denser human population, (“the Neanderthal man”) can be proved to have lived about 100,000 years ago; a relatively stable population can only be found beginning with the Neolithic (6-5,000 years BC).
        At the time, the population on the territory of present-day Romania created a remarkable culture, whose proof is the polychrome pottery of the “Cucuteni” culture (comparable to the pottery of other important European cultures of the time in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East) and the statuettes of the “Hamangia” culture (the Thinker of Hamangia is known today to the whole world).

        At the turn of the second millennium (the Bronze age), the Thracian tribes of Indo-European origin settled alongside the population that already lived in the Carpathian-Balkan region.
        In the former half of the first millennium BC, in the Carpathian-Danube-Pontic area - which was the northern part of the large surface inhabited by the Thracian tribes - a northern Thracian group became individualised: it was made up of a mosaic of Getae and Dacian tribes. Strabo, a famous geographer and historian in the age of emperor Augustus, informs that “the Dacians have the same language as the Getae.” Basically, it was the same people, the only difference between the Dacians and the Getae being the area they inhabited.
        In the Antiquity, the Greeks, who first got to encounter the Getae - used this name for the whole population north of the Danube, while the Romans, who first got to encounter the Dacians-extended this name to cover all the other tribes on the present-day territory of Romania.

The Dacian stronghold of Sarmisegetuza

Burebista (82 - around 44 BC), who succeeded to unite the Geto-Dacian tribes for the first time, founded a powerful kingdom that stretched, when the Dacian sovereign offered to support Pompey against Caesar (48 BC).
In the 1st century BC, as the Roman empire was expanding, the Danube river became, along 1,500 Km., the border between the Roman Empire and the Dacian world.

King Decebal

Emperor Trajan

Dacia was at the peak of its power under King Decebal (87-106 AD). After a first confrontation during the reign of Domitian (87-89), two extremely tough wars were necessary (101-102 and 105-106) to the Roman empire, at the peak of its power under Emperor Trajan (98-117) to defeat Decebal and turn most of his kingdom into the Roman province called Dacia.

Trajan’s Column erected in Rome and the Triumphal Monument at Adamclisi (Dobrudja) tell the story of this military effort, which was followed by a systematic and massive colonisation of the new territories that were integrated into the empire.

The Dacians remained, even after the new rule was established, the main ethnic element in Dacia; the province was subjected to a complex Romanization process, its basic element being the staged but definitive adoption of the Latin language.

Trajan's Column

The Triumphal Monument at Adamclisi

The Romanians are today the only descendants of the Eastern Roman stock; the Romanian language is one of the major heirs of the Latin language, together with French, Italian, Spanish.

The natives, be they of Roman or Daco-Roman descent, continued their uninterrupted existence as farmers and shepherds even after the withdrawal, under emperor Aurelian (270-275), of the Roman army and administration, which were moved south of the Danube. The ancestors of the Romanians remained for several centuries in the political, economic, religious and cultural sphere of influence of the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire (after the Roman Empire split in 395 AD).

At the time when the Daco-Roman ethno-cultural symbiosis was achieved and finalised in the 6-7th centuries by the formation of the Romanian people, in the 2-4th centuries, the Daco-Romans adopted Christianity in a Latin garb. Therefore, in the 6-7th centuries, when the formation process of the Romanian people was done, this nation emerged in history as a Christian one. This is why, unlike the neighbouring nations, which have established dates of Christianization (the Bulgarians - 865, the Serbs - 874, the Poles-966, the eastern Slavs - 988, the Hungarians - the year 1000), the Romanians do not have a fixed date of Christianization, as they were the first Christian nation in the region.

        At the turn of the second millennium (the Bronze age), the Thracian tribes of Indo-European origin settled alongside the population that already lived in the Carpathian-Balkan region.
        In the former half of the first millennium BC, in the Carpathian-Danube-Pontic area - which was the northern part of the large surface inhabited by the Thracian tribes - a northern Thracian group became individualised: it was made up of a mosaic of Getae and Dacian tribes. Strabo, a famous geographer and historian in the age of emperor Augustus, informs that “the Dacians have the same language as the Getae.” Basically, it was the same people, the only difference between the Dacians and the Getae being the area they inhabited.
        In the Antiquity, the Greeks, who first got to encounter the Getae - used this name for the whole population north of the Danube, while the Romans, who first got to encounter the Dacians-extended this name to cover all the other tribes on the present-day territory of Romania.

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