Sea or bay
Sinus Aquitanicus
Golf von Biskaya · Bay of Biscay · Golfe de Gascogne
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On the first surviving section of the map, the stretch of Atlantic washing the coast of Aquitania, in south-western Gaul, is labelled Sinus Aquitanicus, the Bay of Biscay. The parchment has a small slit just where one letter stood, and the lost letter is a single I. Older copies still show it, and the Roman writer Pliny knew the bay by the same name. Some early readers garbled it into Aquithicus. The geographer Ptolemy called these waters the Cantabrian or Aquitanian Ocean and made them the western border of Aquitania.