Sea or bay
Melas Colpus
Golf von Egina (Miller) · Golf von Saros
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Melas Colpus is a Greek name, the Black Gulf, and colpus was the Greek word for a bay, borrowed into late Latin. The label sits on open water beside the islands of Aegina and Salamis, so its position points to the Gulf of Aegina near Athens. The name itself, though, belonged to the Gulf of Saros in Turkey, known to the historian Herodotus and the geographer Ptolemy as the Black Gulf. The copyist seems to have set it in the wrong place, just as the label for the Aegean Sea drifted. Two damaged letters have been unreadable since at least the eighteenth century.