Ziridava

Ziridava

Ziridava on Dacia's map from a medieval book made after Ptolemy's Geographia. It is positioned by the Tibiscus river (Timiș River), north of Zurobara and south-east of Porolissum.
Alternate name	Ziridaua
Location	Romania
History
Cultures	Biephi

Ziridava (Ziridaua, Ancient Greek: Ζιρίδαυα) was a Dacian town located between Apulon and Tibiscum, mentioned by Ptolemy in the area of the Dacian tribe of Biephi (today's Romania, Banat region).

Ziridava is mentioned in Ptolemy's Geographia (c. 140) in the form Ziridaua (Ancient Greek: Ζιρίδαυα) as an important town in western Dacia, at latitude 48° N and longitude 46° 30' E (note that he used a different meridian and some of his calculations were off). Ptolemy completed his work soon after Trajan's Dacian Wars, as a result of which parts of Dacia were incorporated into the Roman Empire as the new Dacia province. However, he based his work on older sources like Marinus of Tyre, as Ziridava is believed to have been destroyed during the war.

Unlike many other Dacian towns mentioned by Ptolemy, Ziridava is missing from Tabula Peutingeriana (1st –4th century), an itinerarium showing the cursus publicus, the road network in the Roman Empire.

This prompted the Danish philologist and historian Gudmund Schütte to assume that Ziridava and Zurobara are one and the same. This idea is deemed erroneous alongside many other assumed duplications of names, by the Romanian historian and archaeologist Vasile Pârvan in his work Getica. Pârvan reviewed all localities mentioned in Ptolemy's Geographia, analyzing and verifying all data available to him at the time. He points out that Ziri and Zuro (meaning water) are the roots of two different Geto-Dacian words. Additionally, Ptolemy provided different coordinates for the two towns, some medieval maps created based on his Geographia depict two distinct towns.