LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

The Social Being of the Aromâni... 259
Belgrade they endowed the national theatre and the ethnographic Museum,
and in Budapest the Danube bridge built by Baron Sina.
the bisyllabic name ending in “-a”, is a probably thracian or Dacian
feature. It is shared by both the Aromâni and the romanians, notably
those of the Maramureş in the north of romania, whose diplomas of
nobility go back into the late Mediaeval period. there are very specific
ethnoarchaeological connections between the Maramureş and the Vlahs of
Greece: for example in details of weaving technology, which significantly
enough is the province of women, the authentic curators of cultural tradition
and social being. the history of south-east european latinity abounds in
their bi-syllabic names: Iorga, preda, Iuga, Dumba, Sina, Dida [vide infra],
tranta, Constantin noica, and many more.
the region of Sinai and the red Sea also comes into the history of
these wide-ranging latin-speakers, the Bessae and Dacians, Vlahs and
romanians [whose shepherds also reached the Caucasus]. recent fieldwork
among the Jebeliyah Bedouin serving Saint Katherine’s monastery on
Sinai has resolved some questions too complex to summarize here about
their identity and social being38 , but which link them to a “land called
Vlah”. they were sent there by Justinian, a latin-speaker from near niš, as
toughened soldiers to guard the monastery.
the antiquity of the onomastic bi-syllable among thracian peoples is
attested by a latin inscription, dating probably to the reign of trajan, which
was found in a quarry by the caravan station at umm Mweh, at the 63rd kilometre on the route to Mons porphyrius through the Wadi hammamat,
between Koptos [quft] on the nile bend, and quseir [leukos limen] on the
red Sea. red porphyry from Gebel-abu-Dukhan [Mons Porphyritis] was
the costliest building stone of antiquity, and the quarries in the desert are
conventionally thought to have been worked by condemned men, although
it may also have been a lucrative career choice, rather like work on an oil
rig today. the transport ramp from the red Sea debouched on the Wadi at
670 metres, about 1.5 kms from the main camp. the workers’ settlement
was on a saddle at 1040 metres, and the main quarries lay at 1,100–1,200
metres. the rather large inscription found here reads:
DIDA DAMANAI FILIVS NATIONI VOLQV
EQVES. ALAE. VOCONTIORUM.TURMA MATURI
AP[sic]MATUM. FECI. STATIONI. MESES. QVINQVE
PRO SALVTEM IMPERATORE.FELICITER
Which may be translated:
38 NANdriŞ, j.G., “The jebeliyeh of Mount sinai and the land of Vlah”. Quaderni
di Studi Arabi, 8, (1990) : 45-80 & Figs 1-16 [Venezia, Università degli Studi ].