River
Flumen Araxes
Listen to the story
A long river line runs across the eastern end of the Tabula, labelled Flumen Araxes: it rises in the Taurus mountains, passes south of the Caspian Sea through Bactria, and is stretched by the mapmaker to the very edge of the known world, where it pours into the eastern ocean. Ancient writers used the name for two rivers, a fact the historian Herodotus already pointed out. The map follows the eastern one, the river the Persian king Cyrus had to cross on his campaign against the Massagetae. Since Alexander's time its names Araxes, Jaxartes and Oxus were constantly muddled, and that confusion seems to be preserved here, perhaps from a very early stage of the map.