In ancient times, the Romanian territory was inhabited by the Dacian people. Their kingdom stretched through the area surrounding the Carpathian Mountains. The heart of Dacia was in Transylvania where they extracted gold from the mountains. The Dacians came into conflict with the Romans and after two consecutive wars between 101 - 102 and 105 - 106 AD, the Dacian king Decebalus was defeated by the Roman emperor, Trajan, making Dacia a part of the Empire. Even though the Dacians had a culture of their own, the influence that the Roman colonists had was so far-reaching that the language we speak today is predominantly composed of words of Latin origin. This is also why the country is called Romania, and that the birth of the Romanian people is considered to have happened when the Dacians mixed with the Roman colonists.