- Dacians
Dacians — a group of Thracian tribes. The central area of Dacian settlement was located north of the lower Danube (on the territory of modern Romania and Moldova). The Dacians were known to the Greeks from the 5th century BC. According to Strabo, the Dacians originally called themselves Daoi. Hesychius of Alexandria wrote that daos is the Phrygian word for wolf. Mircea Eliade proposes three hypotheses for the origin of the Dacian ethnic name from the word wolf:
1. Due to the courage and ferocity of young men during the military initiation rite, their ritual epithet — wolves — was transferred to the entire tribe;
2. The ritual name of the incoming conquerors, who formed the military aristocracy, was adopted by the local inhabitants;
3. Based on shamanic practice — the possibility of ritual transformation into a wolf.
It should be noted that the second hypothesis finds development in the version of the penetration into the northern Black Sea region, and then further east into Transylvania, of part of the nomadic Sarmatian tribes that had previously belonged to the tribal union of the Dahae known to historians. This correlates well in time with the appearance north of the Danube of other Sarmatian groups, in particular, the Iazyges, also known since antiquity. In this case, the mechanism of the emergence of the "Dacian" ethnos turns out to be similar to that by which the Bulgarian ethnos was formed in the early Middle Ages. Whatever hypothesis is correct, the Dacians connected the concepts of wolf and war, since their banners bore the image of a wolf.
According to ancient authors, the Thracians are a mixture of steppe Proto-Indo-European tribes with autochthonous Neolithic inhabitants of the Carpathians (Trypillia culture). If so, their haplogroups were most likely the following: R1a (about 30%), R1b (10%), I2a1b (25-30%), E-V13 (10-15%), G2a, J1, J2a, J2b, and T1a. The Dacians were closely related to the Thracians and probably had the same composition of haplogroups. [Maciamo Hay 2008]
VARIANT NAMES: Latin. Daoi, Russian. Daki, Dakhi.
Sources:
Ethnogenesis of the Abkhazians. D.A. Arshba, 2015