This article is about the History of Timișoara, the largest and most important city in the Romanian Banat. Timișoara is also known by the following names: Hungarian: Temesvár, German: Temeswar / Temeschwar / Temeschburg, Serbo-Croatian: Temišvar / Темишвар, Turkish: Tamışvar / Temeşvar.
Antiquity
right|thumb|300px|Timișoara in a 1685 engraving by Wagner
Archaeological discoveries prove that the area where Timișoara is located today has been inhabited since ancient times. The first identifiable civilization in this area were the Agathyrsi, who could be the namers of the Mureș river. The Getae, who were relatives to the Dacians conquered the territory in 335 BC. From coin finds, it is known that the settlement was inhabited during the Roman settlement of Dacia. While no record of the settlement is known from those times, it is generally agreed that the site was inhabited through the Middle Ages when the city was mentioned for the first time.
Middle Ages
Archaeological finds from a medieval cemetery show that a community of warriors settled in the region west of the present-day town in the second half of the . Almost half of the 41 graves yielded grave goods (including arrow heads, hair rings, earrings and bracelets), suggesting that those who were buried in the cemetery persisted with their pagan rites. The placing of arrow heads into graves is well documented among 10th-century Hungarian warriors in the Carpathian Basin. The position of the arm bones in ten graves may indicate that Christians or people influenced by Christianity were also buried in the cemetery. Various types of rings point at commercial contacts between the local inhabitants and the Balkan Peninsula. The cemetery was abandoned in the first decades of the .
The mid-12th-century Muslim geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi, mentioned a town named "T.n.y.s.b.r" and described it as a prosperous settlement, located to the south of the river "T.y.s.y.a", or Tisza. Historian István Petrovics associates T.n.y.s.b.r with Temesvár, suggesting that Idrisi mislocated it because he had no direct information of the town. Timișoara was named after a fortress: the Hungarian name of the town, Temesvár, refers to a castle (vár) on the river Timiș (Temes). The fortress was first mentioned in the Register of Arad around 1177. The document mentioned two villages, "Sep" and "Vrman", on the royal estates attached to the fortress "Demesiensis". It was most probably made of earth and timber, according to historian Ferenc Sebők. The fortress, which was erected on a swampy land, near a tributary of the Temes, the Bega, was the seat of the ispán, or head of Temes County. In 1241 the city was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Poland, but the walls were rebuilt.