Because it is a plain and because it is bordered by the primary river of central Europe, Banat has had the misfortune to be the easiest route of transfer and as a result it has been historically a cultural crossroads. It is accessible from the North through the Carpathian mountain passes and the Marosch valley. In the southeast corner the Danube passes through the Carpathian Mountains in a very tortuous pass that is known as the Iron Gate , a term more derived from hope than reality. From the earliest times before it was known as Banat this plain was known as the locale of long vanished people. Its key location between east and west has defined its destiny.
Chaos flows around the mountains and overflows the rivers disrupting the pastoral life of the plain.
The peace is temporal, chaos is eternal. The history of Banat is characterized by periods of peace from decades to centuries long sandwiched between very short eras of cataclysmic disruption. The history is very complex and what is described in the following paragraphs is a superficial summary that seeks to capture a sense of history but leaves out many details. The earliest unrecorded history is imagined to be a series of waves of nomadic tribes first settling and then being pushed off the plain by other nomadic tribes that were either greater in number or fearsome in battle. The Romans used Banat as a staging area to launch attacks against the Dacian Empire.