The townspeople however retained considerable freedom as a regional headquarters for the section of the river between the Khabur and modern Abu Kemal. As historian Ross Burns states, in exchange the city's military role was abandoned. Its population, originally based on the Greek settler element, were increasingly outnumbered by people of Semitic stock and by the first century BC, the city was predominantly eastern in character. The Romans called the city by the name "Dura Europus", because the local aristocracy was composed of Macedonian descendants (identifying that the city was ruled by "Europeans" from Macedonia).