Were the Dacians named for wolves?
Dacians were Indo-European peoples of the Carpathian region later called Dacia. Greeks often wrote Getae; Romans said Daci. By the late first century AD, most inhabitants of lands now in Romania were known to Rome under that name—and some linguists hear a wolf in the word.
The Dacians lived around the Carpathians and west of the Black Sea, chiefly in today's Romania and Moldova but reaching into Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, and are often treated as a branch of the Thracians. Herodotus was the first to call them Getae, and Greek writers kept that label, while Caesar, Strabo and Pliny the Elder spoke of Dacians. The two names were used interchangeably, sometimes confusedly; Dio Cassius noted that the people called themselves Daci. Strabo recorded an older form, Daoi, and suggested it echoed a name once given to slaves.
The wolf theory has a long pedigree. Phrygian had a word daos for wolf, also the name of a deity, and Dimitar Dechev proposed a Phrygian link in a work finally published in 1957; Roman auxiliaries raised in the region were even called Phrygi. Paul Kretschmer tied daos to a root meaning to press or strangle, evoking a wolf's neck bite, and the Dacian battle standard, the Draco, bore a wolf's head. Other Indo-European peoples such as the Lycians and the Dahae of the Caspian are thought to have had wolf-based names too.
Mircea Eliade built a mythology on this, suggesting the Dacians saw themselves as wolves, descended from a wolf god or ancestor, or named after young outlaws who lived like wolves during a year-long warrior initiation, much as Hittite law called fugitives wolves. Not everyone is persuaded. Alexandru Vulpe judged the shift from daos to dakos phonetically unlikely and noted the Draco was not unique to Dacians, dismissing the idea as folk etymology; Ioan Russu preferred a root meaning to set or place, related to dava, settlement.
The people themselves likely formed as Indo-European newcomers mixed with Danubian farmers during the Bronze Age, producing proto-Thracians who by the Iron Age had become Geto-Dacians. By the end of the first century AD, Rome applied the name Daci to almost everyone in what is now Romania.
Source: Dacians
