Who are the Dacians?

I said earlier that along with the Cossacks, my new interpretation of the Drylander ethnicity would be influenced also by the Dacians. That begs a question, since they obviously don't exist as a discrete people anymore; who were the Dacians? And that question is more difficult to answer than on might think. The Dacians don't appear to have written very much down on their own, other than a few glosses here and there in Greek or Roman texts, and one single possible text. While the Dacians, also sometimes called the Getae by Greek and Roman writers (although others made a distinction between them) were clearly up there north of Greece centered on what is now Romania and Moldova, and spilling across modern borders into Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine and other bordering modern countries, it's not clear that they'd always been there, since the region has been washed over by invasions over and over again in recorded history, and if they weren't, it's not clear where they came from or who they were most closely related to.

Because it's simpler to assume so, many researchers believe that Dacian formed in situ after the Kurganization of the Old European farmers in the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. I suspect that this may not be true; what we have seen in the recent archaeogenetic data is that people were coming and going and superimposing or replacing each other all through this period. Lacking any better detail, its probably a better null hypothesis that the original Kurganized Balkan people were either replaced or admixed with someone else from the Bell Beaker or Tumulus or Unetice (or all three, perhaps) or even someone else leading up to the formation of historically recognizable ethnic groups in the latest Bronze Age and more particularly in the Greek historical Iron Age and Roman periods. This, unfortunately, leaves us pretty wide open to all kinds of interpretations on who the Dacians were, who they were related to, and who they were influenced by.

We do know from the historical record that they were at least influenced by the Celts, since the Boii tried to invade that territory, and there was a lot of interaction between them. Two Dacian plant names that are known from glosses are also, according to at least one linguist, clearly Celtic in origin. I don't think it likely that the Dacians were Celtic or para-Celtic, but they may have absorbed and been influenced relatively late by Celtic people on the move during the Golden Age of Celtic Europe. But probably no moreso than the Germanic people were. We also know that the Dacians were influenced by steppe peoples to the east; Scythians and Sarmatians, and Sarmatian allies fought with them against Rome in the first centuries AD. This may have been an even deeper relationship, though—a number of people have talked about tantalizing links between "Iranian" nomads of the Iron Age and the Thracians for years, and the Thracians have often been considered close kindred to the Dacians, if not the same people.

However, although that's kind of the null hypothesis—that Thracian and Dacian are either closely related languages and peoples, or even two different dialects of the same language—there are reasons to doubt or at least challenge that assumption, and it's not clear that it's true. They've also been linked at various times to many other paleo-Balkan ethno-linguistic entities; the Phrygians, the Moesians, the Illyrians—but lacking convincing evidence, these ideas all have to remain possible, maybe even probable, but tantalizingly speculative.

There was even a theory a while ago that equated the Getae with the Goths, who during the Migration Period, before the Huns chased them further westward, lived in the steppes to their immediate east. But any connections with any Germanic peoples seem to be relatively late and not part of any Dacian ethnogenesis.

Because the territory of the Dacians is centered on modern day Romania and Moldova, naturally there's been a strong push to identify a Dacian substrate in the Romanian language, along with the assumption that many Romanized Dacians would have been part of the genesis of the Romanian people. However, this entirely reasonable assumption has been stubbornly resistant to proof, and attempts to wring Dacian etymologies out of Romanian words have been challenging. (Not surprisingly, Slavic has an easily identified influence on Romanian, probably dating back to the Migration Era too. 10-15% of the vocabulary, numerous grammatical features, the majority of the place-names and many of the personal names are clearly Slavic in origin.) Curiously, there is pretty decent evidence for some kind of either long-term contact link or possibly an earlier genetic link between Dacian and Baltic languages, which now exist in a small area, but which earlier extended further east, west and south. A number of linguists believe that this evidence is strong enough to call Dacian (and Thracian, if the two were closely related) a southern Baltic branch, or at least para-Baltic.

This of course, touches on another significant hypothesis; the Baltic and Slavic were united at some point between Proto-Indo-European and the development of the various Baltic and Slavic languages. While this theory has broad agreement amongst many, there are plenty of detractors who point out conflicting or contradicting evidence. Some even suggest that Baltic had closer (or at least earlier) ties linguistically with the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic languages than with the Slavic languages, and only adjacency of the two groups has led to their apparent close connections now. Others, of course, suggest that Slavic was a specific branch coeval with Eastern and Western Baltic, and it's just an accident of history that Baltic is nearly extinct except for the relatively geographically confined Lithuanian and Latvian today, while Slavic is widespread. Keep in mind that Slavic is supposed to have existed as a single mutually intelligible Common Slavonic into the early Middle Ages, and only started really breaking up around the 6th century AD.

Anyway, when I suggest that the Drylanders could be seen as similar to Cossacks and Dacians, I don't mean that I'd be borrowing very many specific details of culture or language, since the Dacians are relatively unknown to us in ways that matter. Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the material culture and look of the Dacians could be important. The Romans, talking about the Dacian Wars, mentioned that the Dacian gentry wore corselets of mail or scale, the unique forward curving Dacian variation on the Phrygian cap style helmet (which I could exactly replicate in Hero Forge, but I did my best to find a good analog) but that the more common infantry was unarmored. The Dacians were also well known for their successful and effective guerilla style warfare, which made the conquest of Dacia only ever half completed (the Roman province of Dacia was established, but truculent "Free Dacians" continued to exist beyond its borders.) Other than the helmet, the most iconic element of Dacian warfare was the falx, a huge curved blade, sharp on the inside of the curve, that had a relatively long handle and was often used two-handed. This weapon was so devastating that it actually prompted the Romans to alter their armor, something that happened very infrequently, especially as the result of a single war against a singular people with a singular weapon.

Like the Celts, and frankly like many Indo-European peoples, plaid twill woolen cloth seems to have been in use amongst the Dacians at times, and my Hero Forge Dacian has them as well. The Dacians were also described by both Greeks and Romans as being physically alike the other "northern barbarians"; tall, light skinned, with straight hair, and "ruddy or tawny" coloration and light colored eyes, meaning brown or reddish or blondish hair. This was probably the ancestral condition of the steppe people, and is today still common to modern Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic peoples. The Germanic peoples seem to have the most common occurrence of blondism, but that may be a boosted signal from the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers that the earliest pre-proto-Germanic Corded Ware peoples absorbed. Another alternative is that while blondism was inherently possible within the genetic matrix of the European peoples (including the EEFs from Anatolia that preceded the steppe migration) it wasn't very common until a Bronze Age selective breeding bias event caused it to spread rapidly amongst the northern Corded War derivative cultures. This may be true, although I think it unusual that Homer's description of the Mycenean Greeks is typically Nordic in nature, and the Mycenean Greeks are among the Indo-Europeans that probably are not derived from the Corded Ware, but rather from the closely related Pannonian Yamnaya. In reality, it's neither here nor there, but I personally believe that the WSH genetic cluster already had a pretty high incidence of tallness, light eyes and light hair, and if anything, it's probably become more diluted over time because of intermingling with the darker EEF peoples.

Here's my Hero Forge Dacian, which could represent a Drylander too. Like I said, I had to use an older Bronze Age Mycenean-like helmet as the closest I could find to the distinct Dacian helmet, and I had to use a katana to model a falx. In reality, the handles of the falces should have been longer and the blade more curved, as well as sharp on the inside of the curve rather than the outside. But I didn't have a lot of luck finding anything that looked any better in the Hero Forge library. There's a big chonky sickle in the library that looks OK. If they release a slimmer, updated version of it, it might do the job better.