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Zurobara () was a Dacians town located in the northwest of today's Banat. It was positioned by the Tibiscus (Timiș) river, north of Sarmizegetusa Regia and south of Ziridava.
This town was attested by Ptolemy in his Geographia (3.8), yet its exact location remains unknown. Zurobara is among the places that are not to be found on the great Roman roads between the Tysis (Tisza) and the Alouta (Olt).
In a second line of interpretation, because of Proto-Indo-European *e > Dacian "a" (cf. PIE *dhewa > Dacian "dava", PIE *ser > Dacian "sara"), "bara" is rather derived from root *bher "rich, abundance" and "zura" from root *ser, *sara "waters, river". In this case, Zurobara meant "a water abundant city". Indeed, modern renderings show that Zurobara was located in a swampy area surrounded by the Timiș river. Historian proposes a Sanskrit origin of the term in the form of surabhara, formed by the combination of the words sura- "shine, serenity, sun" and - bhara "to carry", with the approximate translation "bearer of serenity".
The Danish philologist and historian Gudmund Schütte believed that the town with similar name Ziridava, also mentioned by Ptolemy and also missing from Tabula Peutingeriana, was the same with Zurobara. This idea is deemed erroneous alongside many other assumed duplications of names by the Romanian historian and archeologist Vasile Pârvan in his work Getica. Pârvan reviewed all localities mentioned in Ptolemy's Geographia, analyzing and verifying all data available to him at the time. He points out that Ziri and Zuro (meaning "water") are the roots of two different Dacian language words. Additionally, Ptolemy provided different coordinates for the two towns; some medieval maps created based on his Geographia depict two distinct towns.
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