Dardani
The Dardani or Dardanians were a Paleo-Balkan people, who lived in a region that was named Dardania after their settlement there. They were among the oldest Balkan peoples, and their society was very complex. The Dardani were the most stable and conservative ethnic element among the peoples of the central Balkans, retaining an enduring presence in the region for several centuries.
Ancient tradition considered the Dardani as an Illyrian people. Strabo, in particular – also mentioning Galabri and Thunatae as Dardanian tribes – describes the Dardani as one of the three strongest Illyrian peoples, the other two being the Ardiaei and Autariatae. As Dardanians had followed their own peculiar geographical, social and political development in Dardania, some ancient sources also distinguish them from those Illyrians dwelling in the central and southern coast of the eastern Adriatic Sea and its hinterland, who had constituted their own socio-political formation, referred to as 'Illyrian kingdom' by ancient authors. The Dardani were also related to their Thracian neighbors. In Roman times, there appear Thracian names in the eastern strip of Dardania, and several Thracian and Dacian placenames also appear there, such as Dardapara and Quemedava, but Illyrian names dominated the rest. Nevertheless, ancient authors have not identified Dardanians with Thracians, and Strabo explicitly makes a clear distinction between them.
The Kingdom of Dardania was attested since the 4th century BC in ancient sources reporting the wars the Dardanians waged against their south-eastern neighbor – Macedon – until the 2nd century BC. The historian Justin, a main source about the history of the Macedonian kings, refers to an 'lllyrian war' between 346 and the end of 343 BC, fought by 'Dardani and other neighbouring peoples' against Philip II of Macedon, who won the conflict. After the Celtic invasion of the Balkans weakened the state of the Macedonians and Paeonians, the political and military role of the Dardanians began to grow in the region. They expanded their state to the area of Paeonia which definitively disappeared from history, and to some territories of the southern Illyrians. The Dardanians strongly pressured Macedon, using every opportunity to attack it. However the Macedonians quickly recovered and consolidated their state, and the Dardanians lost their important political role. The strengthening of the Illyrian state on their western borders also contributed to the restriction of Dardanian warlike actions towards their neighbors.
The Dardani sided with Rome in the Roman-Macedonian Wars, continuing their clashes with Macedon. After the defeat of Macedon in the Third Macedonian War, the fragile Dardanian-Roman alliance weakened, in particular after the Senate's decision not to return to the Dardanian kingdom the territory that had been previously conquered by the Macedonians, notably Paeonia, which the Dardani claimed as their own territory. The Senate only recognized the Dardani the right to trade salt. Thereafter, from sworn enemies of Macedonia, the Dardani became enemies of Rome. Dardanians fought against Roman proconsuls, and were finally defeated probably by Marcus Antonius in 39 BC or by Marcus Licinius Crassus in 29/8 BC. The Romans created the province of Moesia also including the territory of Dardania. After the Roman emperor Domitian divided the province of Moesia into Moesia Superior and Moesia Inferior in 86 AD, the Dardani were located in southern Moesia Superior. A Roman colony was established at Scupi in Dardanian territory under the Flavian dynasty. In the 2nd century AD Dardanians were still notorious as brigands . During the late Imperial period their territory was the homeland of many Roman emperors, notably Constantine the Great and Justinian I.
Inscriptions from the Roman and Byzantine period have been found in Dardania, one in the ancient city of Ulpiana which reads Urbem Dardania and two in Scupi which read Dardanus and Albanoi or Albanopolis''.
Name
The ethnonym of the Dardani has been attested in ancient Greek literature as, and, and in Latin as Dardani. The term used for their territory was . The root Dard- is attested outside the Dardanian region and the Trojan-Dardanian area in several other ancient ethnonyms, personal names, and toponyms: Dardas, an opraetor epiratrum; Δερδιενις, name of Macedonian-Elimiot princes; Δερδια in Thessaly; Δερδενις in Lesbos; in ancient Apulia Dardi, a Daunian tribe, Derdensis a region and Δαρδανον, a Daunian settlement. The suffix -ano in Dard- was common to many Indo-European languages.The names of the two main Dardanian tribes – Galabri/Galabrioi and Thunatae/Thunatai – have been respectively connected to the Messapic Kalabroi/Calabri and Daunioi/Daunii in Apulia, of Palaeo-Balkan provenance.
Etymology
The name Dardan- is traditionally connected to the same root as dardhë, the Albanian word for 'pear', as well as Alb. dardhán, dardán, 'farmer'. The ethnonym Pirustae, which is attested since Roman times for a tribe close to the Dardani or living in Dardania, is considered to be the Latin translation of Dardani, which would confirm the link with the Albanian dardhë.In 1854, Johann Georg von Hahn was the first to propose that the names Dardanoi and Dardania were related to the Albanian word wikt:dardhë. This is suggested by the fact that toponyms related to fruits or animals are not unknown in the region. Albanian typical toponyms formed with the same root as dardhë have been attested: Dardhan-i, Dardhanesh-i, Dardhasi, Dardas, Dardhë-a, Darda, Dardhicë-a. Several modern toponyms are found in various parts of Albania, including Dardha in Berat, Dardha in Korça, Dardha in Librazhd, Dardha in Puka, Dardhas in Pogradec, Dardhaj in Mirdita, and Dardhës in Përmet. Dardha in Puka is recorded as Darda in a 1671 ecclesiastical report and on a 1688 map by a Venetian cartographer. Dardha is also the name of an Albanian tribe in the northern part of the District of Dibra.
Opinions differ on the etymon of the root in Proto-Albanian, and eventually in Proto-Indo-European. On the basis of an alleged connection between Albanian dardhë and Greek ἄχερδος, ἀχράς "wild pear", a common Indo-European root has been tentatively reconstructed by scholars: *ĝʰor-d- "thorn bush"; *ĝʰ∂rdis; *ĝʰerzd⁽ʰ⁾- "thorny, grain, barley". However it has been suggested that this connection is only conceivable assuming an ancient common Balkano-Aegean substrate word for Albanian and Greek. A proposed Indo-European root *dʰeregh- "a thorny plant", with the Proto-Albanian form reconstructed as *dʰorĝʰ-eh₂-, is not clear. More recently for the Albanian dardhë the Proto-Albanian *dardā has been reconstructed, itself a derivative of wikt:derdh "to tip out, pour, spill, secrete, cast " < PAlb *derda. In Old Albanian texts the root is recorded not umlautized: dardh. It continues Proto-Albanian *darda, which is close to onomatopoeic Lithuanian dardĕti "to rattle" Latvian dàrdêt "to creak", Welsh go-dyrddu "to mumble, to gumble". Slavic toponyms with "Kruševo" and other related toponyms particularly found in the area of the ancient Dardani have been proposed as South Slavic translations of Darda- toponyms.
Other roots have been connected to the name Dardan- by some scholars. It has been proposed a possible link to darda "bee", maybe originally with the meaning of "noise", "chatter", compared with Sanskrit dardurá- "frog", "pipe", Lithuanian dardėt́i "to rattle", "chatter", Gkreek δάρδα · μέλισσα "bee", sometimes interpreted as μόλυσμα "stain", δαρδαίνει · μολύνει "to stain", both late antique attestations from Hesychius and with aberrant semantics. Another link has been made with the PIE root *dhereĝh- "to hold", "strong", which would have evolved to dard- in consistency with the phonetic change of voiced palatal velars that are a characteristic trait of Albanian.
The opinion criticising the etymologies based on roots that originally included *g̑h because in the earliest form of Albanian PIE *g̑h turned into *dʑ and correspondingly later into *dz, which should have been spelled in Greek/Latin documents with /z/, /s/, or a similar letter, instead of /d/, is refutable by the attestation of the Proto-Albanoid term diellina "henbane". This term was mentioned as a "Thracian-Dacian" phytonym by the Ancient Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, and it has a clear etymological connection with the Albanian word diell "sun", displaying a characteristic Albanian phonetic change in which the voiced palatal velar *ĝ- turned into the interdental dh or the dental d, passing through intermediate stages represented by the palato-alveolar affricate voiced ȷ́ , dental affricate dz and further through a final stage dð. This phenomenon reflects the uncertainty of the Ancient Greek and Roman authors in transcribing the Proto-Albanian affricates, which were unfamiliar to them. Indeed, many similar examples of Palaeo-Balkan names with alternating spellings in ancient literature using both dentals and sibilants can be connected to an earlier stage of Albanian and furthermore provide strong support for Eric Hamp's thesis about the Proto-Albanoid dialects, spoken in the central-western Balkans including the historical regions of Dardania, Illyria proper, Paeonia, Upper Moesia, western Dacia and western Thrace.
The name in the ancient sources
The name of the Dardani is mentioned for the first time in the Iliad in the name of Dardanus who founded Dardanus on the Aegean coast of Anatolia and his people the Dardanoi, from which the toponym Dardanelles is derived. Other parallel ethnic names in the Balkans and Anatolia, respectively include: Eneti and Enetoi, Bryges and Phryges. These parallels indicate closer links than simply a correlation of names. According to a current explanation, the connection is likely related to the large-scale movement of peoples that occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, when the attacks of the 'Sea Peoples' afflicted some of the established powers around the eastern Mediterranean.In ancient historiography, the Dardani of the Balkans are mentioned as a people in the second century BCE by Polybius who describes their wars against Macedon in the third century BC. Historians of Hellenistic and Roman antiquity who mention the Dardanians are Diodorus Siculus, Marcus Terentius Varro, Strabo, Sallust, Appian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and others. According to a mythological tradition reported by Appian, Dardanos, one of the sons of Illyrius, was the eponymous ancestor of the Dardanoi. In ancient sources the Dardani are mentioned as one of the Illyrian people and/or as a distinct grouping in the region of Dardania. As such, the Dardani were Illyrians from an ethno-linguistic perspective, but they had followed their own peculiar geographical, social and political development in Dardania.
In the late 1st century BCE, in Rome a new ideological discourse was formed. Propagated by poets like Horace and Ovid, it constructed a glorious Trojan past for the Romans, who were claimed to be descendants of Trojan Dardanians. In the years before the Trojan origin story became the official Roman narrative about their origins, the Romans came into conflict in the Balkans with the Dardani. In public discourse this created the problem that the Roman army could be seen as fighting against a people who could be related to the ancestors of the Romans. The image of the historical Dardani in the 1st century BC was that of Illyrian barbarians who raided their Macedonian frontier and had to be dealt with. In this context, the name of a people known as the Moesi appeared in Roman sources. The Moesi are mentioned only in three ancient sources in the period after the death of Emperor Augustus in 14 CE. The name itself was taken from the name of the Mysians in Asia Minor. The choice seems to be related to the fact that the Trojan-era Mysians lived close to the Trojan-era Dardanians. As the name of the Dardani in Roman discourse became linked to the ancestors of the Romans, the actual Dardani began to be covered in Roman literature by other names. After the death of Augustus, their name in connection to the Balkans became a political problem. After the death of Augustus, the new emperor was Tiberius, his stepson and the most senior Roman general in the Balkans. As Tiberius had played a key role in the Roman conquest of the Balkans, as emperor he couldn't be portrayed as the conqueror of Dardanians, whose name had been constructed as the name of the mythical progenitors of the Romans. Thus, the decision to create a new name for Dardania and the Dardani was made. Despite this decision and the administrative use of the names Moesia and Moesi for the Dardani and Dardania, the original use of the name persisted by authors like Appian. The name Dardania was not used for several hundred years after this period in an administrative context. It was only recreated by Emperor Diocletian in the 3rd century CE.