Region
Fossa Facta Per Servos Scutarum
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Fossa Facta per Servos Scutarum means 'the ditch dug by the slaves of the Scythians'. It is usually placed on the Isthmus of Perekop, the narrow neck of land joining Crimea to the mainland, where a ditch cuts across with a rampart on its southern side. The Greek geographer Strabo and the Roman writer Pliny took it for a channel draining a lake into the sea. The label, though, echoes Herodotus: sons born to Scythian wives and their blinded slaves, while the men were away at war, dug a trench to stop the returning warriors. Whether the map draws the ditch itself or just a smudge is unclear.
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