Port
Portum altum
Batumi
Listen to the story
Portus Altus means 'deep harbour', a Latin rendering of the Greek name Bathys Limen, taken from the river Bathys at whose mouth the port lay. The copyist's text runs the words together into a garbled form, probably because small abbreviation marks had faded in his model. Today this is Batumi in Georgia, whose name descends through a Georgian chronicle's Bathomi. The map shows just a name, and the whole coastal stretch from Trapezus seems to have been swung eastward for lack of space. Pottery finds show a settlement, perhaps a Greek colony, by around 700 BC.