Zurobara

Zurobara

Zurobara on Dacia's map from a medieval book made after Ptolemy's Geographia (ca. 140 AD).
Location	Romania
History
Cultures	Biephi

Zurobara (Ancient Greek: Ζουρόβαρα) was a Dacian town located in today's Banat region in Romania. It is positioned by the Tibiscus river (Timiș River), north of Zarmizegethusa Regia and south of Ziridava. It was near the Tisza river, in the area of the Dacian tribe of Biephi.

This town was attested by Ptolemy in his Geographia (III; 8; 4), yet its exact location remains unknown. Zurobara is amongst the places, which are not to be found on the great Roman roads between the Tysis and the Aluta,

Zurobara is mentioned in Ptolemy's Geographia (c. 140 AD) in the form Ζουρόβαρα as an important town in western Dacia, at latitude 45° 40' N and longitude 45° 40' 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.

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

The Danish philologist and historian Gudmund Schütte believed that the town with similar name Ziridava, also mentioned by Ptolemy and also missing from Tabula Peutingeriana, was the same with Zurobara. 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.