ASPALATH

Diocletian the Empreror, according to Constantine Porphyrogennetos, built in Dalmatia a fortress named Ασπαλαθου - Aspalath (note, that in Russian rendering it stupidly, as always, got spelled as 'Аспалаф', although in the original text it's spelled through theta-letter, which is 'th', not 'ph').

As we already know from algorithms described in this blog many times, the starting A allows us to interpret it as the definite article. While the ath-suffix tells us that we are looking at a Zan (Megrelian and Laz) toponymic ath/eth-structure, which has a meaning of  'a country of... '. Or, 'land of the Spali', in our case. By the way, it's a good opportunity to recall the Italian Spaletti surname.

Who the Spali are, has been known well for a long time from Pliny and Jordan in particular. A tribe that associates with Slavs.

The Kartvelian nature of Dalmatia has been explained already. The name of 'spali' consists of Kartvelian morphemes too. It may be an ali-adjective formed out of the 'spa' (სპა) root, that translates as 'army, troops', and that was mentioned as the possible core element for 'Spain' and 'Sparta'.