# Eight in Ten

*The stratigraphy of river and village names. English edition: https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-din-zece/en/ · Română: https://mariuscomper.uk/opt-din-zece/*

Romania's ten longest rivers: eight had their names written down before AD 600, centuries before any present-day village is mentioned. Of the next 140 rivers I could assess, six. Water remembers longer than land.

## Water remembers longer than land

A great river is known to everyone on its banks, whatever language they speak there. Its name passes from one people to the next like a tool too useful to throw away. A brook and a village belong to the people beside them, and whoever comes next names them again. So when you line up the 150 rivers on this map by length and colour each name by the stratum it comes from, the gold gathers on the left.

| # | River | km | First written form, or etymon | Stratum |
| ---: | --- | ---: | --- | --- |
| 1 | Dunărea | 1,075 | Ἴστρος; Danuvius (430 BC) | ancient |
| 2 | Mureș | 761 | Μάρισος; Marisia (AD 18) | ancient |
| 3 | Prut | 742 | Πορατα / Πυρετός (430 BC) | ancient |
| 4 | Olt | 615 | Ἄλουτας; Aluta (AD 150) | ancient |
| 5 | Siret | 559 | Τιάραντος; Ἱέρασος (430 BC) | ancient |
| 6 | Someș | 465 | Samus (Samum) (AD 200) | ancient |
| 7 | Ialomița | 417 | Slavic ilov- “clay” | Slavic |
| 8 | Argeș | 350 | Ὀρδησσός (430 BC) | ancient |
| 9 | Jiu | 339 | open question | disputed |
| 10 | Buzău | 302 | Μουσαῖος (AD 372) | ancient |

Lengths are those of the Romanian Water Cadastre Atlas, as given by the Wikipedia list of rivers by length; for rivers under 144 kilometres, the length is computed from OpenStreetMap geometry. The Tisza, 966 kilometres long in all, has only 65 on Romanian territory and lands in 41st place.

The criterion favours big rivers: a brook with an equally old name may never have reached a Greek geographer's pen, so the gold counts attestations, and the true age of the small names stays open. Continuity is no straight line either: between the last ancient text and the first medieval charter, the names lived in Slavic mouths, then Hungarian ones, and each language shaped them by its own rules; Olt sits closer to Jordanes's Aluta than to Ptolemy's Alutas, Someș continues Samus with a shifted vowel, and Mureș comes from Marisos either directly or through Hungarian Maros.

**What the two exceptions say.** The Ialomița carries a Slavic name, from the word for clay, and is the only river in the top ten with a certain christening after 600. Some look for it in Herodotus's Naparis, but the match is a guess. The Jiu has no ancient form to continue: Ptolemy maps a Rhabon roughly in its place, and Jordanes a Gilpil, but neither yields the form Jiu by the known rules of the language. An old name, very probably, but an unwritten one.

**What the six further down say.** Beyond the top ten, ancient attestation is rare and, each time, comes with an explanation. The Timiș and the Crișul Alb are big lowland rivers, noted by Ptolemy and Jordanes. The Tisza is huge, it simply passes briefly through Romania. The Bârzava survives in the one sentence left of Trajan's own book on the Dacian wars: “inde Berzobim, deinde Aizi processimus”. The Ampoi kept the name of the Roman gold town, Ampelum, after the town itself became Zlatna, which is gold again, in Slavic. The Motru is linked to Ptolemy's Amutrium, an old identification that still cannot be checked.

## Six strata

Each stratum has a recognisable pattern and a region where it thickens. The number on each line is what can be counted with a declared rule, over the 18,214 GeoNames places and the 150 rivers on the map.

- **Attested in Antiquity, before AD 600: 14 rivers.** Names written by Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy, Jordanes, in a martyr's passion and on a fort inscription. Nearly all belong to big rivers.
- **Slavic, 6th to 10th centuries: 270 patterned names (239 places, 31 rivers).** The middle and small rivers, then the villages: Bistrița, Dâmbovița, Târnava, Prahova, Craiova, Târgoviște. The suffixes -ov, -ova, -ovăț and -ăuți are Slavic. Petrovici showed that h for g, as in Dorohoi and Horodiștea, betrays an East Slavic dialect, and Vâlcea a Bulgarian one.
- **Turkic (Pechenegs, Cumans), 11th to 13th centuries: 64 patterned names (53 places, 11 rivers).** The rivers in -ui and -lui, from the Bahlui to the Călmățui, the Teleorman, “the mad forest”, Caracal, the Bărăgan. The surname Coman, which was the Cumans' own name, went on to make Romanian villages in -ești.
- **Through Hungarian, after 1000: 148 patterned names (134 places, 14 rivers).** This layer includes Romanian forms taken from Hungarian or built in parallel: Oradea from Várad, Timișoara from Temesvár; at Cluj, Kolozsvár stands alongside the older Clus/Cluș series, whose origin remains disputed. The saints in Sân- render Szent-, and of the 98 names in Sân- nearly all lie inside the Carpathian arc. Miercurea Ciuc and Baia Mare are translations.
- **German, after 1150: 813 places with a parallel German name.** The Saxons and Swabians rarely supplied the Romanian form of a name; more often they left a third name, living beside the other two: Hermannstadt beside Sibiu and Nagyszeben, Kronstadt beside Brașov and Brassó.
- **Romanian, 14th to 20th centuries: 5,855 classified places.** 2,631 villages in -ești, then -eni and -ani, Valea, Poiana, Lunca, Gura, Dealu. The stratum that fills the map, often built with older materials: Curtea de Argeș puts a Latin word on an ancient river name.

11,884 places, nearly two thirds, are left uncoloured: the project’s rules recognise no pattern in their names. “No recognised pattern” describes the counting rule, not the name’s origin. Origins are checked name by name; the core sample keeps the etymon, source and uncertainty visible where research has not closed the discussion.

## Three names for the same place

In Transylvania the strata did not settle one on top of the other; they stayed side by side. Sibiu / Nagyszeben / Hermannstadt: Romanian and Hungarian continue the name of the river Cibin, German names a founder. Bistrița / Beszterce / Bistritz: one Slavic name in three languages. Sebeș / Szászsebes / Mühlbach: Romanian from the Hungarian for “fast”, German “mill brook”. Târnava / Küküllő / Kokel: Slavic (thorn), Old Turkic (sloe), and German takes the Hungarian one. In OpenStreetMap, 4,824 places in Romania have a Hungarian name, 813 have a German one and 757 have all three.

## Method and limits

The map uses the 18,214 populated places in GeoNames for Romania and 150 rivers with geometry from OpenStreetMap, extracted on 6 September 2026. Secașul Mare and Secașul Mic were added through a WaterwayMap/OSM supplement checked on 7 September; for Secașul Mic, the available line covers only the mapped segment. “Attested before AD 600” means that today's name continues a form written in a text or on an inscription from before the Slavs reached the Danube: Herodotus (4.48), Strabo (7.3.13), Pliny the Elder (4.79–80), Ptolemy (3.8), Jordanes (Getica 12.74 and 22.113), the Passion of Saint Sabas the Goth, the inscription CIL III 827 from Cășeiu and Trajan's sentence preserved by Priscian. The Slavic, Turkic, Hungarian and Romanian strata are counted by declared patterns; the etymologies verified name by name live in the core sample, and the 150 assessed rivers and the 89 places in the interactive core sample each have a source: Iordan (1963), Petrovici (1960, 1965), Conea and Donat (1958), Bocșan and Ungureanu (2015), Kiss Lajos (1988), plus the academic and institutional sources listed in the ledger. The parallel Hungarian and German names come from OpenStreetMap tags and measure how complete the map is, and a missing German name may only mean that nobody added it.

This page continues “Who Named Romania” (https://mariuscomper.uk/numele-satelor/en/) and “The Layers of a Word” (https://straturi.mariuscomper.uk/).