Sea or bay

Lacus Ses[...

Aralsee? (Miller)

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The label on this oval lake, Lacus Ses, breaks off after a few letters. Lacus is simply Latin for lake, and after the surviving letters there was once room for perhaps two more, now only faint traces. Which water is meant can only be guessed. It might be the Aral Sea, which ancient writers kept confusing with the Caspian until the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century, treated them as two separate waters. Scholars also suspect that the map shows the Caspian twice: this oval as the older idea of an inland sea, and the mushroom-shaped Hyrcanian Sea, open to the northern ocean, as a later view.

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