Region
Campi Deserti
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Campi Deserti, the deserted plains, is written across the map in the lands beyond the Euphrates and below the Taurus mountains. Older research took it for the Carmanian desert of the geographer Ptolemy, the salt waste of eastern Iran. Later research links it instead with the Caucasus: the map seems to have pushed Iberia and Albania southwards for lack of space, and these empty plains probably travelled with them. They would then be the Colchian wastes that the Roman writer Pliny placed beyond Albania, and medieval world maps set the same deserted plains where the Amazons were said to have lived.