adjoined the Pannonians and therefore first became known to the Romans. According to Strabo's Geographica, the original name of the Dacians was "Daoi". The name Daoi (one of the ancient Geto-Dacian tribes) was certainly adopted by foreign observers to designate all the inhabitants of the countries north of Danube that had not yet been conquered by Greece or Rome. The ethnographic name Daci is found under various forms within ancient sources. Greeks used the forms "Dakoi" (Strabo, Dio Cassius, and Dioscorides) and "Daoi" (singular Daos). The form "Daoi" was frequently used according to Stephan of Byzantium. Latins used the forms Davus, Dacus, and a derived form Dacisci (Vopiscus and inscriptions). There are similarities between the ethnonyms of the Dacians and those of Dahae (Greek Dáoi, Dáai, Dai, Dasai; Latin Dahae, Daci), an Indo-European people located east of the Caspian Sea, until the 1st millennium BC. Scholars have suggested that there were links between the two peoples since ancient times. The historian David Gordon White has, moreover, stated that the "Dacians ... appear to be related to the Dahae". (Likewise White and other scholars also believe that the names Dacii and Dahae may also have a shared etymology – see the section following for further details.) By the end of the first century AD, all the inhabitants of the lands which now form Romania were known to the Romans as Daci, with the exception of some Celtic and Germanic tribes who infiltrated from the west, and Sarmatian and related people from the east. Mythology Mircea Eliade attempted, in his book From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan, to give a mythological foundation to an alleged special relation between Dacians and the wolves: Dacians might have called themselves "wolves" or "ones the same with wolves", suggesting religious significance. Dacians draw their name from a god or a legendary ancestor who appeared as a wolf. Dacians had taken their name from a group of fugitive immigrants arrived from other regions or from their own young outlaws, who acted similarly to the wolves circling villages and living from looting. As was the case in other societies, those young members of the community went through an initiation, perhaps up to a year, during which they lived as a "wolf". Comparatively, Hittite laws referred to fugitive outlaws as "wolves". The existence of a ritual that provides one with the ability to turn into a wolf. Such a transformation