Found in a manuscript of the twelfth century in the Library at Turin. (From Santarem's Atlas.)
(From Nicolai Doni's edition of Ptolemæi Cosmographia, Ulm. 1482)
furnished by the commander of a Greek fleet in that sea, states (Book II. chapters i. and iv.) that the Caspian is a gulf of the Northern Ocean, from which it is possible to sail to India PLINY THE ELDER (Historia Naturalis, Book VI. chapters xiii. and xvii.) states that the north part of Asia is occupied by extensive deserts bounded on the north by the Scythian Sea, that these deserts run out to a headland, Promontorium Scythicum, which is uninhabitable on account of snow. Then there is a land inhabited by man-eating Scythians, then deserts, then Scythians again, then deserts with wild animals to a mountain ridge rising out of the sea, which is called Tabin. The first people that are known beyond this are the Seri. PTOLEMY and his successors again supposed, though perhaps not ignorant of the old statement that Africa had been circumnavigated under Pharaoh Necho, that the Indian Ocean was an inland sea, everywhere surrounded by land, which united southern Africa with the eastern part of Asia, an idea which was first completely abandoned by the chartographers of the fifteenth century after the circumnavigation of Africa by VASCO DA GAMA.
The knowledge of the geography of north Asia remained at this point until MARCO POLO,[290] in the narrative of his remarkable journeys among the peoples of Middle Asia, gave some information regarding the most northerly lands of this quarter of the world also. The chapters which treat of this subject bear the distinctive titles: "On the land of the Tartars living in the north," "On another region to which merchants only travel in waggons drawn by dogs," and "On the region where darkness prevails" (De regione tenebrarum). From the statements in these chapters it follows that hunters and traders already inhabited or wandered about in the present Siberia, and brought thence valuable furs of the black fox, sable, beaver, &c. The northernmost living men were said to be handsome, tall and stout, but very pale for want of the sun. They obeyed no king or chief, but were coarse and uncivilised and lived as beasts[291]. Among the products of the northern countries white bears are mentioned, from which it appears that at that time the hunters had already reached the coast of the Polar Sea. But Marco Polo nowhere says expressly that Asia is bounded on the north by the sea.
All the maps of North Asia which have been published down to the middle of the sixteenth century, are based to a greater or less extent on interpretations of the accounts of Herodotus, Pliny, and Marco Polo. When they do not surround the whole Indian Ocean with land, they give to Asia a much less extent in the north and east than it actually possesses, make the land in this direction completely bounded by sea, and delineate two headlands projecting towards the north from the mainland. To these they give the names Promontorium Scythicum and Tabin, and they besides place in the neighbourhood of the north coast a large island to which they give the name that already occurs in Pliny, Insula Tazata, which reminds us, perhaps by an
