River
Fluvius Cyrus
Kur (Miller) · Mtkvari · Kura (Barrington)
Listen to the story
Indian goods, the Greek geographer Strabo reported, could cross the Caspian Sea, travel up the Fluvius Cyrus and then go four days overland by wagon to the Phasis and down to the Black Sea. The river is the Kura, the largest in the southern Caucasus, rising in the highlands of Ardahan in Turkey and flowing into the Caspian. In antiquity it divided Greater Armenia from Iberia and Caucasian Albania, and on the map it forms the northern border. Strabo also described its twelve mouths, choked with silt, and in the winter of 66 to 65 BC Pompey fought the kings of Iberia and Albania in its valley.