Regio Patalis
Encyclopedia
Regio Patalis is Latin for "the Region of Patala". It took its name from the ancient city of Patala (now Thatta
) at the mouth of the Indus River
. By medieval times its actual location had been lost to the Europeans, and it appeared on late 15th and early 16th century maps and globes in locations ever eastward and southward of India, eventually appearing as a promontory of the antarctic continent, Terra Australis
.
(Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23-79 AD) referring to “the island of Patale, at the mouth of the Indus”, wrote in Historia Naturalis: “Also in India [as well as at Aswan in Egypt] at the well-known port of Patale the sun rises on the right and shadows fall southward”.
The geographer Strabo
(c.64 BC–c.24 AD) had said: “The Indus falls into the southern sea by two mouths, encompassing the country of Patalênê, which resembles the Delta in Egypt”. He noted: “All these [nations] were conquered by Alexander, and last of all he reduced Patalênê, which the Indus forms by splitting into two branches… Patalênê contains a considerable city, Patala, which gives its name to the island”.
The 1507 Martin Waldseemüller map
shows Patala in this location.
In the late 2nd century BC, Agatharchides
of Cnidus recorded merchants from Patala, or as he called it, Potana, coming to the island of Socotra
to trade with Alexandrian merchants. The 2nd century AD author Dionysios Periegetes said in his Orbis Descriptio: “This river [the Indus] has two mouths, and dashes against the island enclosed between them, called in the tongue of the natives, Patalênê”.
Siltation
has caused the Indus to change its course many times since the days of Alexander the Great, and the site of ancient Patala has been subject to much conjecture. Ahmad Hasan Dani
, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Islamabad, concluded: “There has been a vain attempt to identify the city of Patala. If ‘Patala’ is not taken as a proper name but only refers to a city, it can be corrected to ‘Pattana’, that is, [Sanskrit for] a city or port city par excellence, a term applied in a later period to Thatta
[onetime capital of Sindh
], which is ideally situated in the way the Greek historians describe”.
The reason for Pliny mentioning Patala, or as he called it, Patale, was to indicate that it, like the other places mentioned in the same chapter of his Natural History, particularly Syene (Aswan
, in Egypt), was situated on or below the Tropic of Cancer and so shadows there were cast southward in midsummer, thus demonstrating the rotundity of the Earth. Pliny, writing in Latin, used the form, Patale: in accordance with convention, he treats Patala, being for him a Greek-derived noun, as a third declension Latin noun with the genitive form Patalis, as though its nominative case was Patale: hence, Regio Patalis not Regio Patalae.
Syene had been used by Eratosthenes
of Cyrene in c.220 BC as a point of reference to measure the circumference of the Earth (by observing the angle of a shadow cast at Alexandria on the day of the summer solstice—eighty-three degrees—and deducting that from the ninety-degree right angle of the sun over Syene on the same day, from that deducing the acute angle—seven degrees—at the apex of the segment of the Earth’s circumference represented by the known distance from Syene to Alexandria—504 stadia—and then multiplying that distance by the value of that angle and dividing it by the 360 degrees of the whole circumference of the Earth: 252,000 stadia, or 39,690 km, an error of less than one per cent.
published in 1531 shows a large promontory attached to the continent of TERRA AVSTRALIS and extending northward almost to the Tropic of Capricorn: this promontory is named REGIO PATALIS (“Region of Patala”).
Fine’s TERRA AVSTRALIS with its REGIO PATALIS is apparently drawn from the globe of the German cosmographer Johann Schoener produced in Nuremberg in 1523. On this globe the antarctic continent, called TERRA AVSTRALIS RECENTER INVENTA SED NONDUM PLENE COGNITA (“Terra Australis, recently discovered but not yet fully known”) also has a large promontory bearing the name REGIO PATALIS.
Schoener developed his globe from the globe made by Martin Behaim
in Nuremberg in 1492. On Behaim's globe, India potalis is located south of the Equator on the Hoch India (High India, or India Superior) peninsula, the actual Indochina, on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus (Great Gulf, the actual Gulf of Thailand). An inscription on Behaim’s globe explains that Hoch India (India Superior ), was situated so far to the South that the Pole Star was no longer visible: “because this land lies at the antipodes to our land”.
Martin Behaim’s source of knowledge of India Patalis was the Ymago Mundi of Pierre D'Ailly, a revised edition of earlier standard cosmographical works which d’Ailly wrote between 1410 and 1419. D’Ailly wrote: “according to Pliny we find there to be habitation under the Tropic of Capricorn and beyond. For the island called the Regio Pathalis has a well-known port where the Sun’s shadow falls southward, therefore the inhabitants always have the Sun to their North… I say therefore that the southern side of India extends to the Tropic of Capricorn near the region of Pathalis”.
In discussing the habitability of lands under the Torrid Zone and Tropic of Capricorn, D'Ailly drew on the Opus Majus, written around the year 1267 English monk and scholar Roger Bacon
. With regard to the Regio Patalis, Bacon said: “the southern frontier of India reaches the Tropic of Capricorn near the Region of Patale and the neighbouring lands which are washed by a great arm of the sea flowing from the Ocean”. Patala was on or just south of the Tropic of Cancer, not south of the Equator, but somehow Roger Bacon had confused the Tropic of Capricorn with the Tropic of Cancer under which, on the day of the summer solstice, shadows at Patala were cast southward.
D’Ailly's Ymago Mundi served as the standard text book on cosmography during the 15th and early 16th centuries and so made widely current the view that there was a part of India, or of what was later called Indo-China, where the sun’s shadow always fell southward at noon: this part was the Region of Patala. This theory found expression on Martin Behaim
's globe of 1492, where India potalis is located south of the Equator on the Hoch India peninsula on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus, the actual Indochina.
Following Magellan
’s circumnavigation voyage of 1519-1522, Johann Schoener identified South America with the extended India Superior (Indochina) peninsula, and so depicted it on his 1523 globe. He also split the Region of Patala (Regio Patalis) off from this peninsula and transferred it across the ocean to become a promontory of the Terra Australis. In this he was followed by Oronce Fine, whose mappemonde of 1531 shows the large REGIO PATALIS promontory on the continent of TERRA AVSTRALIS.
The REGIO PATALIS is shown on the globe in an armillary clock made by Jean Naze of Lyon in 1560, in a fashion similar to that on Schoener’s globe of 1523 and on Fine’s map of 1531. It is also shown on the Nancy Globe, made c.1535.
The world maps of the school of cartographers centred in and around the Norman port of Dieppe (the Dieppe Maps
, include the Harleian, so-called after its former owner, Edward Harley, made by an unknown cartographer in the mid-1540s, that made by Pierre Desceliers in 1546, and also Guillaume Le Testu
’s Cosmographie Universelle of 1555. On these maps, Fine’s REGIO PATALIS has evolved into the great promontory of Jave la Grande
(Greater Java) which extends, like the Regio Patalis, northward from the Austral continent. This development may have been influenced by the phrase used by the Italian traveler Ludovico di Varthema
in describing Java which, he said, “prope in inmensum patet (extends almost beyond measure)”. Although the word patet (“extends”) has no connection with Patala, the superficial resemblance may have misled them.
Terra Java in the Vallard Atlas of 1547, another product of the Dieppe school, bears the vestigial toponym patallis inscribed on its west coast. “Patal(l)is” is the genitive form of Patala, and therefore simply means “of Patala” without specifying the “what” of Patala—region, land, kingdom, port, or city—indicating that it is no more than a vestige of the original “Regio Patalis”.
The cosmography of the Dieppe mapmakers, particularly as regards the Austral continent, developed from that of Johann Schoener, through the work of Oronce Fine. Albert Anthiaume wrote in 1911: “Whence had the Norman cartographers drawn the idea of this continent [la Terre Australe]? From the bicordiform [two-heart shaped] mappemonde of Oronce Fine (1531), which he in turn had borrowed from Schoener....Most of the Norman cartographers, and particularly Le Testu, knew the works of Oronce Fine”.
In his study of Schöner‘s globes, Franz von Wieser, found that the derivation of Fine’s mappemonde from them was “unmistakeable (unverkennbar)”.
Schoener’s idea of the Regio Patalis developed, as explained above, from the earlier globe of Martin Behaim which itself was based on the works of Pierre d’Ailly, Roger Bacon and Pliny the Elder, and not on the accounts of any voyages to the unknown Austral continent, the Terra Australis Incognita.
Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps, which was derived from the ideas of Johann Schoener, can be seen to be a construct of the cosmographical concepts of the early 16th century and not derived from the discovery of the coasts of Australia made by unknown voyagers of that time.
The Flemish cosmographer and map maker Gerard Mercator produced a map of the world in 1538 which, though modelled on that of Fine of 1531, departed from it by showing Fine’s southern continent much smaller, unnamed and bearing the inscription, Terra hic esse certum est sed quãtus quibusque limitibus finitas incertum (“It is certain that there is a land here, but its size and the limits of its boundaries are uncertain”). The outline of Fine’s Regio Patalis, though shown as a promontory of this smaller antarctic continent, is likewise unnamed. From that time on, the outline of the Regio Patalis/Jave la Grande promontory gradually faded from the maps of the world.
Thatta
Thatta is a historic town of 220,000 inhabitants in the Sindh province of Pakistan, near Lake Keenjhar, the largest freshwater lake in the country. Thatta's major monuments especially its necropolis at Makli are listed among the World Heritage Sites. The Shah Jahan Mosque is also listed...
) at the mouth of the Indus River
Indus River
The Indus River is a major river which flows through Pakistan. It also has courses through China and India.Originating in the Tibetan plateau of western China in the vicinity of Lake Mansarovar in Tibet Autonomous Region, the river runs a course through the Ladakh district of Jammu and Kashmir and...
. By medieval times its actual location had been lost to the Europeans, and it appeared on late 15th and early 16th century maps and globes in locations ever eastward and southward of India, eventually appearing as a promontory of the antarctic continent, Terra Australis
Terra Australis
Terra Australis, Terra Australis Ignota or Terra Australis Incognita was a hypothesized continent appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th century...
.
The Regio Patalis in Classical Literature
Pliny the ElderPliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
(Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23-79 AD) referring to “the island of Patale, at the mouth of the Indus”, wrote in Historia Naturalis: “Also in India [as well as at Aswan in Egypt] at the well-known port of Patale the sun rises on the right and shadows fall southward”.
The geographer Strabo
Strabo
Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...
(c.64 BC–c.24 AD) had said: “The Indus falls into the southern sea by two mouths, encompassing the country of Patalênê, which resembles the Delta in Egypt”. He noted: “All these [nations] were conquered by Alexander, and last of all he reduced Patalênê, which the Indus forms by splitting into two branches… Patalênê contains a considerable city, Patala, which gives its name to the island”.
The 1507 Martin Waldseemüller map
Waldseemüller map
The Waldseemüller map, Universalis Cosmographia, is a printed wall map of the world by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507. It is known as the first map to use the name "America". The map is drafted on a modification of Ptolemy's second projection, expanded...
shows Patala in this location.
In the late 2nd century BC, Agatharchides
Agatharchides
Agatharchides of Cnidus was a Greek historian and geographer .-Life:He is believed to have been born at Cnidus, hence his appellation. As Stanley M...
of Cnidus recorded merchants from Patala, or as he called it, Potana, coming to the island of Socotra
Socotra
Socotra , also spelt Soqotra, is a small archipelago of four islands in the Indian Ocean. The largest island, also called Socotra, is about 95% of the landmass of the archipelago. It lies some east of the Horn of Africa and south of the Arabian Peninsula. The island is very isolated and through...
to trade with Alexandrian merchants. The 2nd century AD author Dionysios Periegetes said in his Orbis Descriptio: “This river [the Indus] has two mouths, and dashes against the island enclosed between them, called in the tongue of the natives, Patalênê”.
Siltation
Siltation
Siltation is the pollution of water by fine particulate terrestrial clastic material, with a particle size dominated by silt or clay. It refers both to the increased concentration of suspended sediments, and to the increased accumulation of fine sediments on bottoms where they are undesirable...
has caused the Indus to change its course many times since the days of Alexander the Great, and the site of ancient Patala has been subject to much conjecture. Ahmad Hasan Dani
Ahmad Hasan Dani
Professor Ahmad Hasan Dani FRAS, SI, HI , was a Pakistani intellectual, archaeologist, historian, and linguist. He was among the foremost authorities on Central Asian and South Asian archaeology and history. He introduced archaeology as a discipline in higher education in Pakistan and Bangladesh...
, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Islamabad, concluded: “There has been a vain attempt to identify the city of Patala. If ‘Patala’ is not taken as a proper name but only refers to a city, it can be corrected to ‘Pattana’, that is, [Sanskrit for] a city or port city par excellence, a term applied in a later period to Thatta
Thatta
Thatta is a historic town of 220,000 inhabitants in the Sindh province of Pakistan, near Lake Keenjhar, the largest freshwater lake in the country. Thatta's major monuments especially its necropolis at Makli are listed among the World Heritage Sites. The Shah Jahan Mosque is also listed...
[onetime capital of Sindh
Sindh
Sindh historically referred to as Ba'ab-ul-Islam , is one of the four provinces of Pakistan and historically is home to the Sindhi people. It is also locally known as the "Mehran". Though Muslims form the largest religious group in Sindh, a good number of Christians, Zoroastrians and Hindus can...
], which is ideally situated in the way the Greek historians describe”.
The reason for Pliny mentioning Patala, or as he called it, Patale, was to indicate that it, like the other places mentioned in the same chapter of his Natural History, particularly Syene (Aswan
Aswan
Aswan , formerly spelled Assuan, is a city in the south of Egypt, the capital of the Aswan Governorate.It stands on the east bank of the Nile at the first cataract and is a busy market and tourist centre...
, in Egypt), was situated on or below the Tropic of Cancer and so shadows there were cast southward in midsummer, thus demonstrating the rotundity of the Earth. Pliny, writing in Latin, used the form, Patale: in accordance with convention, he treats Patala, being for him a Greek-derived noun, as a third declension Latin noun with the genitive form Patalis, as though its nominative case was Patale: hence, Regio Patalis not Regio Patalae.
Syene had been used by Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, poet, athlete, geographer, astronomer, and music theorist.He was the first person to use the word "geography" and invented the discipline of geography as we understand it...
of Cyrene in c.220 BC as a point of reference to measure the circumference of the Earth (by observing the angle of a shadow cast at Alexandria on the day of the summer solstice—eighty-three degrees—and deducting that from the ninety-degree right angle of the sun over Syene on the same day, from that deducing the acute angle—seven degrees—at the apex of the segment of the Earth’s circumference represented by the known distance from Syene to Alexandria—504 stadia—and then multiplying that distance by the value of that angle and dividing it by the 360 degrees of the whole circumference of the Earth: 252,000 stadia, or 39,690 km, an error of less than one per cent.
The Regio Patalis in Renaissance Cosmography
The map of the world by the French mathematician and cosmographer Oronce FineOronce Finé
Oronce Fine was a French mathematician and cartographer.-Life:...
published in 1531 shows a large promontory attached to the continent of TERRA AVSTRALIS and extending northward almost to the Tropic of Capricorn: this promontory is named REGIO PATALIS (“Region of Patala”).
Fine’s TERRA AVSTRALIS with its REGIO PATALIS is apparently drawn from the globe of the German cosmographer Johann Schoener produced in Nuremberg in 1523. On this globe the antarctic continent, called TERRA AVSTRALIS RECENTER INVENTA SED NONDUM PLENE COGNITA (“Terra Australis, recently discovered but not yet fully known”) also has a large promontory bearing the name REGIO PATALIS.
Schoener developed his globe from the globe made by Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim , was a German mariner, artist, cosmographer, astronomer, philosopher, geographer and explorer in service to the King of Portugal.-Biography:The Behaim family had immigrated to Nuremberg because of religious persecution around...
in Nuremberg in 1492. On Behaim's globe, India potalis is located south of the Equator on the Hoch India (High India, or India Superior) peninsula, the actual Indochina, on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus (Great Gulf, the actual Gulf of Thailand). An inscription on Behaim’s globe explains that Hoch India (India Superior ), was situated so far to the South that the Pole Star was no longer visible: “because this land lies at the antipodes to our land”.
Martin Behaim’s source of knowledge of India Patalis was the Ymago Mundi of Pierre D'Ailly, a revised edition of earlier standard cosmographical works which d’Ailly wrote between 1410 and 1419. D’Ailly wrote: “according to Pliny we find there to be habitation under the Tropic of Capricorn and beyond. For the island called the Regio Pathalis has a well-known port where the Sun’s shadow falls southward, therefore the inhabitants always have the Sun to their North… I say therefore that the southern side of India extends to the Tropic of Capricorn near the region of Pathalis”.
In discussing the habitability of lands under the Torrid Zone and Tropic of Capricorn, D'Ailly drew on the Opus Majus, written around the year 1267 English monk and scholar Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
. With regard to the Regio Patalis, Bacon said: “the southern frontier of India reaches the Tropic of Capricorn near the Region of Patale and the neighbouring lands which are washed by a great arm of the sea flowing from the Ocean”. Patala was on or just south of the Tropic of Cancer, not south of the Equator, but somehow Roger Bacon had confused the Tropic of Capricorn with the Tropic of Cancer under which, on the day of the summer solstice, shadows at Patala were cast southward.
D’Ailly's Ymago Mundi served as the standard text book on cosmography during the 15th and early 16th centuries and so made widely current the view that there was a part of India, or of what was later called Indo-China, where the sun’s shadow always fell southward at noon: this part was the Region of Patala. This theory found expression on Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim
Martin Behaim , was a German mariner, artist, cosmographer, astronomer, philosopher, geographer and explorer in service to the King of Portugal.-Biography:The Behaim family had immigrated to Nuremberg because of religious persecution around...
's globe of 1492, where India potalis is located south of the Equator on the Hoch India peninsula on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus, the actual Indochina.
Following Magellan
Magellan
Magellan may refer to:*Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer who led part of the first expedition around the world*Magellan , a progressive rock band*Magellan , a forerunner of the Excite web portal...
’s circumnavigation voyage of 1519-1522, Johann Schoener identified South America with the extended India Superior (Indochina) peninsula, and so depicted it on his 1523 globe. He also split the Region of Patala (Regio Patalis) off from this peninsula and transferred it across the ocean to become a promontory of the Terra Australis. In this he was followed by Oronce Fine, whose mappemonde of 1531 shows the large REGIO PATALIS promontory on the continent of TERRA AVSTRALIS.
The REGIO PATALIS is shown on the globe in an armillary clock made by Jean Naze of Lyon in 1560, in a fashion similar to that on Schoener’s globe of 1523 and on Fine’s map of 1531. It is also shown on the Nancy Globe, made c.1535.
The world maps of the school of cartographers centred in and around the Norman port of Dieppe (the Dieppe Maps
Dieppe maps
The Dieppe maps are a series of world maps produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s and 1560s. They are large hand-produced maps, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Henry II of France and Henry VIII of England...
, include the Harleian, so-called after its former owner, Edward Harley, made by an unknown cartographer in the mid-1540s, that made by Pierre Desceliers in 1546, and also Guillaume Le Testu
Guillaume Le Testu
Guillaume Le Testu, also called Têtu, was a 16th century French corsair, explorer and navigator during the Elizabethan age. He was a successful privateer during the early years of the French Wars of Religion...
’s Cosmographie Universelle of 1555. On these maps, Fine’s REGIO PATALIS has evolved into the great promontory of Jave la Grande
Jave la Grande
La grande isle de Java was, according to Marco Polo, the largest island in the world: his Java Minor was the actual island of Sumatra, which takes its name from the city of Samudera situated on its northern coast....
(Greater Java) which extends, like the Regio Patalis, northward from the Austral continent. This development may have been influenced by the phrase used by the Italian traveler Ludovico di Varthema
Ludovico di Varthema
Ludovico di Varthema, also known as Barthema and Vertomannus was an Italian traveller and diarist, known for being the first non-Muslim European to enter Mecca as a pilgrim...
in describing Java which, he said, “prope in inmensum patet (extends almost beyond measure)”. Although the word patet (“extends”) has no connection with Patala, the superficial resemblance may have misled them.
Terra Java in the Vallard Atlas of 1547, another product of the Dieppe school, bears the vestigial toponym patallis inscribed on its west coast. “Patal(l)is” is the genitive form of Patala, and therefore simply means “of Patala” without specifying the “what” of Patala—region, land, kingdom, port, or city—indicating that it is no more than a vestige of the original “Regio Patalis”.
The cosmography of the Dieppe mapmakers, particularly as regards the Austral continent, developed from that of Johann Schoener, through the work of Oronce Fine. Albert Anthiaume wrote in 1911: “Whence had the Norman cartographers drawn the idea of this continent [la Terre Australe]? From the bicordiform [two-heart shaped] mappemonde of Oronce Fine (1531), which he in turn had borrowed from Schoener....Most of the Norman cartographers, and particularly Le Testu, knew the works of Oronce Fine”.
In his study of Schöner‘s globes, Franz von Wieser, found that the derivation of Fine’s mappemonde from them was “unmistakeable (unverkennbar)”.
Schoener’s idea of the Regio Patalis developed, as explained above, from the earlier globe of Martin Behaim which itself was based on the works of Pierre d’Ailly, Roger Bacon and Pliny the Elder, and not on the accounts of any voyages to the unknown Austral continent, the Terra Australis Incognita.
Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps, which was derived from the ideas of Johann Schoener, can be seen to be a construct of the cosmographical concepts of the early 16th century and not derived from the discovery of the coasts of Australia made by unknown voyagers of that time.
The Flemish cosmographer and map maker Gerard Mercator produced a map of the world in 1538 which, though modelled on that of Fine of 1531, departed from it by showing Fine’s southern continent much smaller, unnamed and bearing the inscription, Terra hic esse certum est sed quãtus quibusque limitibus finitas incertum (“It is certain that there is a land here, but its size and the limits of its boundaries are uncertain”). The outline of Fine’s Regio Patalis, though shown as a promontory of this smaller antarctic continent, is likewise unnamed. From that time on, the outline of the Regio Patalis/Jave la Grande promontory gradually faded from the maps of the world.
See also
- ThattaThattaThatta is a historic town of 220,000 inhabitants in the Sindh province of Pakistan, near Lake Keenjhar, the largest freshwater lake in the country. Thatta's major monuments especially its necropolis at Makli are listed among the World Heritage Sites. The Shah Jahan Mosque is also listed...
- Dieppe MapsDieppe mapsThe Dieppe maps are a series of world maps produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s and 1560s. They are large hand-produced maps, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Henry II of France and Henry VIII of England...
- Jave la GrandeJave la GrandeLa grande isle de Java was, according to Marco Polo, the largest island in the world: his Java Minor was the actual island of Sumatra, which takes its name from the city of Samudera situated on its northern coast....
- Theory of Portuguese discovery of AustraliaTheory of Portuguese discovery of AustraliaAlthough most historians hold that the European discovery of Australia began in 1606 with the voyage of the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon on board the Duyfken, a theory exists that a Portuguese expedition arrived in Australia between 1521 and 1524...
- Pliny the ElderPliny the ElderGaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
- StraboStraboStrabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...
- Terra AustralisTerra AustralisTerra Australis, Terra Australis Ignota or Terra Australis Incognita was a hypothesized continent appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th century...