Region
Albania
Listen to the story
Albania, the ancient kingdom in the eastern Caucasus on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, roughly today's Azerbaijan, has wandered far from home on the Tabula. Together with neighbouring Iberia it sits between Mesopotamia and Persia, below the Taurus range. The Roman writer Pliny placed the Albanians on the plain along the river Cyrus, and the neighbouring Lupones still stand in their proper place on the map. The strip for the Caucasus was so crowded that the mapmaker seems to have moved both kingdoms into the thinly filled land between Euphrates and Tigris, dragging other Caspian regions eastward with them.