Sea or bay
Mare Caspium
Kaspisches Meer
Listen to the story
Mare Caspium, the Caspian Sea, reflects the picture most ancient geographers held: not an inland lake but a gulf of the outer Ocean. That idea reached the Roman world map from the Greek scholar Eratosthenes and lasted through the Middle Ages, although the geographer Ptolemy had shown the sea enclosed. Its northern half, frozen for six months or more each year, stayed almost unknown. The name has faded to its last letters; older copies read it in full. Scholars once linked these remnants to a small island nearby, but the letters are far too large, and in capitals.