Dava (Dacian)
Dacian fortified settlement
Dava (Latinate plural davae) was a Geto-Dacian name for a city, town or fortress. Generally, the name indicated a tribal center or an important settlement, usually fortified. Some of the Dacian settlements and the fortresses employed the Murus Dacicus traditional construction technique.
Most of these towns are attested by Ptolemy, and therefore date from at least the 1st century CE.
The dava towns can be found as south as the cities of Sandanski and Plovdiv in present-day Bulgaria. Strabo specified that the Dacians ("Daci") are the Getae. The Dacians, Getae and their kings were always considered as Thracians by the ancients (Dio Cassius, Trogus Pompeius, Appian, Strabo, Herodotus and Pliny the Elder), and were both said to speak the same Thracian language.
Etymology
Many city names of the Dacians were composed of an initial lexical element (often the tribe name) affixed to -dava, -daua, -deva, -deba, -daba or -dova (<PIE *dʰeh₁-, "to set, place"). Therefore, dava "town" derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European *dhewa "settlement". A non-Indo European, Kartvelian solution has also been briefly mentioned, but dismissed as a random occurrence (Tomaschek 1893, p. 139) e.g., see comparison with modern Georgian დაბა (daba), "town, village".
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