230s, and by the Goths from the 250s. As the frontiers were to be shortened for defensive purposes, the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Dacia began in the 260s. The province officially ceased to exist under Emperor Aurelian (270–275) who "withdrew the Romans from the cities and countryside of Dacia". Garrisons stationed in Drobeta and Sucidava remained on the northern bank of the river. Origin of the Romanians Romanians speak a language originating from the dialects of the Roman provinces north of the "Jireček Line". This line divided, in Roman times, the predominantly Greek-speaking southern provinces from those where Latin was the principal language of communication. The emergence of Proto-Romanian from Vulgar Latin is first demonstrated by the words "torna, torna, frater" ("turn around, turn around, brother") recorded in connection with an Eastern Roman military action in 587 or 588. The soldier shouting them "in his native tongue" spoke an Eastern Romance dialect of the Balkan Mountains. Grigore Nandris writes that the Romanian vocabulary suggests that the Romanians' ancestors were "reduced to a pastoral life in the mountains and to agricultural pursuits in the foothills of their pasture lands" following the collapse of the Roman rule. A great number of Romanian words of uncertain origin are related to animal husbandry: baci ("chief shepherd"), balegă ("dung"), and brânză ("cheese"), for instance, belong to this group. Many words related to a more settled form of animal husbandry were borrowed from Slavic, including coteţ ("poultry house"), grajd ("stable"), and stână ("fenced pasture"). Romanian has preserved Latin terms for agriculture and the Latin names of certain crops, but a significant part of its agricultural lexis originates from a Slavic-speaking population. The first group includes a ara ("to plough"), a semăna ("to sow"), a culege ("to harvest"), a secera ("to reap"), grâu ("wheat"), in ("flax"), and furcă ("pitchfork"), while a croi ("to cut out"), a plivi ("to weed"), brazdă ("furrow"), cobilă ("plow line"), coasă ("scythe"), lopată ("shovel") and many others are Slavic loanwords. The Romanian religious vocabulary is also divided, with a small number of basic terms preserved from Latin and a significant number of borrowings from Old Church Slavonic. Romanian did not preserve Latin words connected to urbanized society. The Romanians' ethnogenesis cannot be understood based exclusively on written sources, because the earliest records on their ancestors were made by 11th-century Byzantine historians. When referring to the Romance-speaking population of Southeastern Europe, early