Strabo's Geography, volume II (Scythians and the Black Sea and Caspian lands)
The Greek geographer Strabo's description of the northern nomads, the Sea of Azov and Central Asia, written about 2,000 years ago, in an 1854 English translation.
Strabo, a Greek geographer from Amaseia in Asia Minor, compiled his Geography around 7 BCE to 23 CE, mostly from earlier writers such as Eratosthenes and Theophanes. This corpus copy is volume II of the Bohn's Classical Library translation by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer (1854). The pages relevant here, Book XI, describe the Don, the Greek cities of the Bosporus, the Scythians, Sarmatians and 'waggon-dwellers' of the steppe, and the Sacae and Massagetae of Central Asia. Strabo lived more than a thousand years before the name 'Tartar' reached Europe, so he never uses it; the word appears only once, in an 1854 editor's footnote.
How they knew
Compiled from others
Who “Tartar” means here
Strabo himself never mentions Tartars. The single use of 'Tartars' is in a translator's footnote, where it means the Crimean or Nogai Tatars who later lived around the Sea of Azov and renamed its ancient sites.
Why read it
Background for the steppe before the Tartars: Strabo's nomads who live on meat and milk and in 'waggon-houses' show that later European writers who called the Tartars 'Scythians' were borrowing an ancient template.
Watch out
Context only. Strabo's Scythians, Sarmatians and Sacae are not the medieval Tatars or Mongols, and his information is itself secondhand. The bundle includes publisher's catalogue pages at the back of the volume, which are irrelevant.
Ancient Greek place names 'corrupted by the Tartars'
Editorial contextIn a note on Strabo's temple of Achilles at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, the translators quote the French scholars Du Theil and Peyssonel, who wondered whether the Tatar fort of 'Achou' was the ancient Achilleum, its Greek name worn down in Tatar mouths. It is a small example of how Tatar place names were layered over Greek ones on the Black Sea coast.
Is not the fort of Achou, which is 8 leagues more to the east on the Palus Maeotis, the true Achilleum, the name being corrupted and abridged by the Tartars?
Footnote by the 1854 translators (H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer), quoting Peyssonel via Du Theil