Sea or bay
Salinae inmensae quae cum luna crescunt et decrescunt
Sebkha Tauorgha (Barrington)
Listen to the story
Salinae inmensae quae cum luna crescunt et decrescunt is not a town but a whole sentence on the map: immense saltpans that grow and shrink with the moon. The Tabula paints them as an inland stretch of water, with no link to the sea, though a tidal rise and fall would really need one. They are usually matched with Sebkha Tauorgha, a coastal salt flat in Libya. The wording probably goes back to the Roman writer Pliny, who tells of African salt that swells with the moon at night, and almost the same words reappear on the thirteenth-century Ebstorf world map.
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