Is Ptolemy’s Serbinon an Ancient Serbian Town?

Abstract

The last three decades in Serbia have witnessed the revival of the romantic, pseudoscientific, so-called ‘national’ history stream, whose latest claim is that Serbs are the indigenous inhabitants of the Danube Basin and the Balkans. Indeed, it is contended that they are Proto-Indoeuropeans in their Proto-Homeland, and that the Serbian language is the ancestor of all Indo-European languages. Bereft of scientific arguments and based on kling-klang etymologies, these pseudohistorians become pseudoetymologists as well, claiming that Ptolemy’s reference to the town Serbinon in Pannonia proves the Serbian existence in the Danube Basin and the Balkans already in antiquity. This ‘Proto-Serbian’ etymology, however, is thoroughly refuted by serious scientific and etymological evidence, which reveals that Serbinon is in fact a Pannonian Illyrian oeconym, *Sérbinom, meaning approximately ‘the location of a water source, a gorge with rushing water, water hollow’ or ‘the gorgelike entrance into a pit or a cave, abyss’, or, better yet, ‘the location of a spring or (?) river spring or – thermal spring’. The oeconym itself is built from the Indo-European root *serbh- ‘sip, swallow; drop, drip; craw; gorgelike entrance into a pit or a cave, abyss’ and the Illyrian oeconym suffix -inom as in *Altinom (*Altinon, Altinum) and elsewhere. According to the coordinates given in Ptolemy’s Geography, this oeconym is to be located approximately in the area of the Hungarian town Villánykövesd or of the Croatian towns Cabuna or Gradina, both near Virovitica close to the Croatian border with Hungary.