People
Essedones Scythae
Issedones Scythae
Listen to the story
The Essedones Scythae were a Scythian people whom Greek poets and the historian Herodotus already placed at the far northern edge of the known world. Ancient writers counted them among the savages who drank blood and ate their dead. The Hereford map shows them locked away by Alexander the Great behind an iron gate, and the Ebstorf map equates them with Gog and Magog. The Tabula keeps silent about all of this and gives only the name. The scribe even left a gap between two letters to avoid writing across a river, a sign that the rivers were drawn before the labels.