Turicum was a Gallo-Roman settlement at the lower end of Lake Zurich, and precursor of the city of Zürich. It was situated within the Roman province of Gallia Belgica (from AD 90 Germania Superior) and near the border to the province of Raetia; there was a tax-collecting point for goods traffic on the waterway Walensee–Obersee-Zürichsee–Limmat–Aare–Rhine. Name The ancient name Turicum, along with the indication of a Roman customhouse, is first attested in the epitaph for Lucius Aelius Urbicus, an infant son of the , ‘head of the toll-station at Zurich’, that was found on Lindenhof hill in 1747 and dates from 185/200 AD. The place name reappears in the Early Middle Ages as Turicum, Turico, Doricum, Torico, Turigo, Turegum, and in its Old High German forms Ziurichi, Zurih, with regularly shifted consonants; it is unanimously seen as a Gaulish formation, *Turikon, though vowel quantities and accentuation have been a matter of debate: Stress on the second syllable in Rumantsch Turitg, Turi, as well as in the partially reshaped Italian form Zurigo, have been taken as evidence establishing originally long -ī-, that would have drawn the accent to the penult in Latin pronunciation; the constituting elements of the toponym have been identified as a Celtic personal name Tūros and a suffix -īko- forming relational adjectives. This analysis has been contested by arguing that the spelling Turegum, widely attested in documents from the 9th century onward, seems to reflect lenition of the intervocalic stop consonant, as well as lowering of short Latin ĭ to ĕ, both common to most Western Romance languages, and that numerous other place names of Celtic origin, as Autricum, Avaricum or Aventicum, are undoubtedly formed with a suffix -ĭko-, and are usually derived from a hydronym; thus the basis of Turicum supposedly being Turos or Tura, should rather be an ancient name of one of the watercourses around Lindenhof hill, either a distributary of the Sihl river, or possibly the Limmat river. The Rumantsch and Italian forms may likely have been taken from medieval written records, with the accent determined by analogy within the borrowing languages, e. g. Turitg after amitg, ‘friend’, which bears its stress on the second syllable, too. The diverging evolution of several place names of Gaulish origin, as Bourges < Bitúriges, Berry < Bituríges; Condes < Cóndate, Condé < Condáte, suggests that shifting accent and unsettled vowel quantity may not have been exceptional. Prehistory