People
Amaxobii Sarmate
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The Amaxobii Sarmatae, the wagon-dwelling Sarmatians, carry a Greek name built from the words for wagon and life. It was never a single tribe but a label for steppe nomads whose homes stood on wheels, the people Herodotus called those who carry their houses with them. The geographer Ptolemy counts them among the Sarmatian peoples, and the entry probably goes back to the early imperial period. Unusually for a people, the name is written in black, placed rather far west, perhaps on the Hungarian plain. Centuries later, Fra Mauro's world map of 1459 still showed them beside a covered wagon on two spoked wheels.