society known as Junimea, who strongly reacted against amateurism and Romantic nationalist discourse in the works of Romanian intellectuals of his day. In 1893, writing to geographer Simion Mehedinți, Maiorescu spoke against what he defined as "phantasmagoria" in the works of Densușianu, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, and Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol. Part of Densușianu's thesis was adopted by several official historians during the late years of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist regime, serving as inspiration for a new discourse, one autarkic and nationalist in tone. Vasile Pârvan stated: "Nicolae Densusianu wrote his fantastic novel Prehistoric Dacia, full of mythology and absurd philology, which at its appearance (posthumously: 1913) aroused an admiration and a boundless enthusiasm among lay Romanians for archaeology". Alexandru D. Xenopol stated: "The theory of this author that Dacians would have coagulated the first civilization of the humankind shows that we deal with a product of chauvinism, not with a product of science". In other words, Pârvan and Xenopol have rejected his book "as a dilettantish and chauvinist fantasy". Nicolae Iorga chastised him "for his 'more than odd' hypotheses." Eugen Ciurtin stated "a minimal contact with the bibliography of the subject leaves one hopeless: nobody reads him any longer" (meaning no serious scholar has written peer-reviewed articles about Densușianu's Dacia Preistorică for a long time). Others have stated "Densusianu's fancy was too bold which made the historians ignore him". Dan Alexe stated that the book is "mystical delirium", and called its author "an occultist notary without schooling in history and linguistics" and "a clinical case of self-delusion". Florin Țurcanu stated about Densușianu: "tireless creator of phantasmagorias". Notes References Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1997 Eugen Ciurtin, "Dacia, tot mai preistorică", Observatorul Cultural, 9 April 2002, an article critical of Densușianu's aims and methods'' External links Nicolas Densușianu, Dacia Preistorică; on-line English translation by Alexandra Ioana Furdui http://prehistoricdacia.info 1846 births 1911 deaths People from Hunedoara County Austro-Hungarian emigrants to Romania Romanian Austro-Hungarians Romanian essayists Romanian folklorists Romanian Greek-Catholics Romanian translators Romanian writers in French Austro-Hungarian writers Historiography of Dacia 20th-century translators 19th-century translators 19th-century essayists 20th-century essayists