People
Abyo Scythae
Abii Scythae
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The Abii Scythae, the Scythian Abii, began as a people of poetry. Homer's Iliad already names the Abii and praises them as an ideal and just people living at the edge of the inhabited world, a picture the geographer Eratosthenes later doubted. The name was probably later attached to real nomads of western Kazakhstan, whom the geographer Ptolemy also places in the far north. Alexander the Great is said to have forbidden them to cross the Syr Darya. True to the Homeric tradition, the Tabula sets them in the far north, in Asia beyond the Sea of Azov.