Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, the traditional division of the landmass of Eurasia into two continents, Europe and Asia, followed Ptolemy, with the boundary following the Turkish Straits, the Black Sea, the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov and the Don ( ancient Tanais ).
32.
Polybius relates : " . . . on his return thence ( from the north ), he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe from Tanais . " Some authors consider this leg a second voyage, as it does not seem likely he would pass by Marseilles without refitting and refreshing the crew.
33.
A joint Russian-German team has recently been excavating at the site of Tanais, with the aim of revealing the heart of the city, the agora, and defining the extent of Hellenistic influence on the urbanism of the Bosporan Greek city, as well as studying defensive responses to the surrounding nomadic cultures.
34.
The cavalry prospered under this command, showing itself equal to learning new tactics necessary against Scythian nomads and to counter-insurgency measures such as those deployed in the spring of 328 BC . The army set out from Balkh in five columns to spread through the valleys between the Oxus and Tanais rivers to pacify Sogdiana.
35.
In AD 330 Tanais was devastated by the Goths, but the site was occupied continuously up to the second half of the 5th century AD . Increasingly, the channel silted up, probably the result of deforestation, and the center of active life shifted, perhaps to the small city of Azov, halfway to Rostov.
36.
It played an important role in the course of the early Greek colonization of the Black Sea region, and was founded probably soon after Berezan and Histria, it is anyway much older than the first settlements and colonies in the Cimmerian Bosporus ( Strait of Kerch ) or Tanais that were founded between 580 and 60 BC.
37.
He says [ 12th chapter of his " Meteorics " ]'the distribution of land and sea in particular regions does not endure throughout all time, but it becomes sea in those parts where it was land, and again it becomes land where it was sea, and there is reason for thinking that these changes take place according to a certain system, and within a certain period .'The concluding observation is as follows :'As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais, nor the Nile, can have flowed for ever.
38.
:" From the Tanais ( River Don ) westwards to the Rhine, which takes its rise in the Alps, and runs northward, till it falls into that branch of the ocean which surrounds Bryttannia, and southward from the Tanais to the Donua or Danube, whose source is near that of the Rhine, and which runs to the northward of Greece, till it empties itself into the Euxine, and north even to that part of the ocean which is called the Kven Sea ( Cwen sea ), there are many nations; and the whole of this extensive country is called Germania ."
39.
:" From the Tanais ( River Don ) westwards to the Rhine, which takes its rise in the Alps, and runs northward, till it falls into that branch of the ocean which surrounds Bryttannia, and southward from the Tanais to the Donua or Danube, whose source is near that of the Rhine, and which runs to the northward of Greece, till it empties itself into the Euxine, and north even to that part of the ocean which is called the Kven Sea ( Cwen sea ), there are many nations; and the whole of this extensive country is called Germania ."
40.
Alexander derived his concept of ` Asia'from the teaching of Aristotle, for whom ` the inhabited earth'was surrounded by ` the Great sea'Ocean, and was divided into three areas ` Europe, Libya and Asia .'Thus the earth was not round but flat, and ` Asia'was limited on the west by the Tanais ( Don ), the inland sea and the Nile, and on the east by ` India'and ` the Great Sea'. . . he was mistaken in supposing that from the ridge of the Paropamisadae ( Hindu Kush ) one would see ` the outer sea'and that ` India'was a small peninsula running east into that sea.
