Sarmizeget(h)usa

The name of a Dacian township and then a Roman city (on a different site) in western Transylvania (Rumania)

Sarmizegethusa Regia was one of the principal fortresses (and probably the capital) of Decebalus, king of Dacia, who fought against Domitian (AD 85–89) and was conquered by Trajan in two wars (101/2, 105). This stronghold was at Grǎdiştea Muncelului in the Hateg valley, within the heart of the Sebesului Mountains (Transylvanian Alps), about five miles east of the Iron Gates Pass. Constructed upon four terraces rising to a citadel 3,937 feet above sea level, Sarmizegethusa Regia contained a huge calendrical sanctuary, which was employed to calculate an eighty-four year cycle, based on a three-hundred-and-sixty-day year. After the destruction of the place in Trajan's First Dacian War, and its subsequent garrisoning by a Roman legion, it was rebuilt by its inhabitants, but suffered final devastation in the same emperor's Second War, after which a legionary detachment was settled on the site as its garrion.

Subsequently in 108/110, Trajan founded the earliest Roman colony in Dacia, some thirty miles to the southwest, under the name of Colonia Dacica Sarmiget(h)usa, attested by an inscription. Settled by ex-soldiers, the new town became a customs station and the capital of the Roman province of Dacia. When Hadrian subdivided the province (118/19), it served as the capital of Upper Dacia, under the additional names of Ulpia Trajana Augusta. When Marcus Aurelius reunified all Dacian territory as a single unit and military command (168/9), Sarmizegethusa became the seat of its governor-general and the meeting place for the Council of the Three Dacias. Shortly afterward, however (c 170), the town was destroyed by the German tribe of the Marcomanni. Later, under Severus Alexander (222–35), it assumed the title `metropolis,’ indicating its position as the political, cultural and religious center of the country, which it retained throughout the period of Roman occupation. Even after the evacuation of Dacia by Aurelian (271), the life of the former colony continued on a reduced scale, until an attack by the Huns (or perhaps an earthquake) caused its obliteration in the middle of the fifth century.

Trajan's town wall, flanked by two moats, stood between twelve and fifteen feet high. The governor's palace—where excavation continues—was adorned with wall paintings and grouped round two colonnaded courtyards, one of which contained an altar dedicated to Rome and the emperor. The office of the Augustales, the priests of the imperial cult—erected in the mid-second century, and reconstructed in the third—was modelled on the headquarters building of a legionary camp. A stone-paved forum, of which the walls have survived in places to a height of ten feet, was adjoined by a marble-faced basilica at the end of which a flight of steps led up to a heated room which was probably the city's council chamber (curia).

Outside the wall, excavations have revealed shrines of Nemesis, Mithras and the Syrian gods. The total number of temples at the place, of which traces survive, amounts to more than a dozen, including sanctuaries of Aesculapius (with Salus) and Liber Pater (Bacchus) revealed by recent investigations. An inscription—one of a great many that have been found at Roman Sarmizegethusa—invokes Jupiter Optimus, Maximus, Minerva, Mars Pater Gradivus, and probably Juno Regina, as well as other deities; it was found in an amphitheater of second-century date, with seating for 5,000 spectators. A gladiatorial school has also been identified. An imposing private mausoleum of the second century AD belonged to the Aurelii, a leading local family. Roman farms (villae rusticae) in the vicinity have yielded a rich assemblage of finds.