The Earliest States of Eastern Europe

Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences

For citation: Surikov, Igor E. The Earliest Greek Geographers on the Pontus Euxinus and its Environs // Drevneishie gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy (The Earliest States of Eastern Europe). 2023: The Black Sea Region in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Problems of Historical Geography / Editor of the volume A.V. Podossinov. Мoscow: GAUGN-Press, 2023. S. 13–49.

DOI: 10.32608/1560-1382-2023-44-13-49

Abstract: Anaximander of Miletus, Hecataeus of Miletus and Scylax of Caryanda, representatives of the Archaic Ionian scholarship, were the earliest Greek geographers (6^th century B.C.). The philosopher Anaximander drew the first map (still very schematic one); the historian Hecataeus improved this map towards more detailed elaboration and also wrote the first periegesis (“Description of the Earth”); the seafarer Scylax was the author of the first periplus (although at such an early stage of development of Greek prose literature the genres of periegesis and periplus still had little difference between each other). The article deals with extant data of these writers on the Black Sea and adjacent regions. To be true, there is no such information in Anaximander’s fragments, and rather little in Scylax’s ones (mainly on the area of the Straits); but Hecataeus’ fragments contain it in abundance. That author’s geographical treatise was a virtually exhaustive description of lands known at his time, surely including coasts of the Black Sea and the nearby Azov Sea. Hecataeus measured the size of the Black Sea (at the map rather than “in nature”). It is he who is likely to have for the first time used the famous and very popular in antiquity image of the Pontus as a Scythian bow. Of interest is the question where in the Black Sea region the scholar drew the border between Europe and Asia; the article gives arguments in favour of the opinion that for him the border was not the Don River, as later in Herodotus, but the Kuban River. Meanwhile, the territory that is now the Taman Peninsula (it was an island in antiquity) belonged to Asia according to Hecataeus. In the “Description of the Earth”, there is the first in the narrative tradition evidence on Phanagoria – one of the most significant Greek colonies at the territory of Russia, later the second in importance center of the Bosporan Kingdom. Amazons are localized by Hecataeus near the Thermodon River rather than in the Northern Black Sea Region, as Herodotus and Hellanicus later did.

Keywords:

geography, Anaximander, Hecataeus, Scylax, maps, periegesis, periplus, the Black Sea, the Straits

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