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Syrtites

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Syrtites means “the people of the Syrtis”, the shallow gulfs off the Libyan coast, yet no ancient writer uses the word for any people. Older research took it as the map’s label for Tripolitania, the province named after its three cities of Sabratha, Oea and Leptis Magna and otherwise called Syrtica. As a label for that region, though, it sits much too far east, in the stretch given to Cyrenaica, well away from those three cities. The copyist’s Lesser Syrtis is also drawn too far east, so by the map’s own logic the name may stand exactly where it belongs.

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