People
Sorices
Suaricum
Listen to the story
Sorices, placed by the map on the lower Dnieper in Scythia, reads like plain Latin for 'shrews', a people of shrew-mice. It is almost certainly a slip of transmission, much like the dog-headed people drawn in East Africa, and the badly garbled name probably stands for the Sauromatae, the steppe nomads better known as Sarmatians. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed they descended from Scythians and Amazons. Their position here seems to reflect what late Hellenistic or early imperial geographers knew of the lands above the Black Sea.