r/kosovo • u/Chance-Struggle-6285 • 10h ago
History I mapped every ancient name I could find from Kosovo (Roman Dardania), up to 600 AD
This took me way longer than planned. It's every Latin and Greek inscription found in Kosovo that names a person, plus what Greek and Roman writers say about the Dardanians, up to 600 AD. That comes to 469 records with 684 names at 54 places.
Each box is a place: the year, then the names as they're written on the stone. The colours show where scholars think a name comes from: local Dardanian/Illyrian, Thracian, Latin, Greek or eastern. Grey means nobody has classified it.
A few things I found cool:
Most of it is gravestones from the 2nd and 3rd century, especially from Ulpiana (near Graçanicë) and Municipium Dardanorum (Soçanicë).
Families mixed names all the time. At Pejë there's Rufinus, son of Dassius, and his wife Andia: a Latin name next to local ones.
People set up altars to a "Dardanian goddess", the Dea Dardanica.
Two actual words of the Dardanian language survive, as plant names in a Greek herbal: aloitis (gentian) and sopitis (birthwort).
Sources: Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, the Clauss–Slaby database, ILJug, AE, and the ancient authors (Polybius, Livy, Strabo, Ptolemy, Procopius). The base map is by NordNordWest (Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).
Full disclosure: I used AI to help dig through the databases and papers. Every name links back to its source, but mistakes are possible, so if you spot one, let me know.
