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H.'s account of the Araxes is a characteristic specimen of his geographical knowledge (and ignorance). He mentions it (1) here, where it rises among the Matieni (cf. 72. 2 n.) and (α) falls with one mouth into the Caspian, (β) loses thirty-nine others in marshes; (2) in iv. 40. 1, flowing east, it forms with the Caspian the north boundary of his Asia; (3) iv. 11. 1 the Scythians are driven across it by the Massagetae into Cimmeria. He is combining four rivers: No. 1 (α) is the Aras, which unites with the Kur and flows into the S.W. Caspian; in H.'s day the Aras flowed into the Caspian direct (Hermes, 1884, p. 169); No. 2, and perhaps No. 1 (β), are a confused account of the two great rivers of Central Asia, the Oxus and the Jaxartes, which flow north-west into the Aral Sea; probably at this period the Oxus also flowed into the Caspian. H. has inverted their direction and combined them, misled by his information (right in itself) that some of the rivers of Central Asia lose themselves in swamps (cf. E. B.11 ii. 735). The East of the world was to H. unknown sandy desert (iii. 98. 2). No. 3 is the Volga. It is quite possible that the ‘marshes and shoals’ may be a confused account of the great Volga delta, and not of the Central Asian rivers, as suggested above. The name Araxes probably survives in ‘Aroxolani’ (Jornandes, c. 74), i.e. ‘the Alani of the Araxes’. ‘Rha,’ Ptolemy's name for the Volga (v. 9), is probably a different word. H.'s confusion may be pardoned when we find Aristotle (350 A, Meteor. i. 13. 15) making the Tanais a branch of the Araxes (which he rightly makes to rise in Mount Paropamisus). So Alexander and his army thought the Jaxartes to be the Tanais (Plin. N. H. vi. 16. 49); Arrian (iii. 30. 7, 8) corrects this mistake, but makes the Jaxartes rise in the Caucasus. Even in our own day the head-waters of the Congo were thought by Livingstone to be the source of the Nile (cf. ii. 33. 1. n.).
τῇ ὀδμῇ. For this primitive form of smoking cf. iv. 75, the vapour baths of the Scythians. Probably some kind of hemp is meant; the Cannabis sativa is indigenous in Central Asia; hashish is still prepared from Cannabis indica.
H., in making the Araxes rise in the same region as the Gyndes, is (quite needlessly) supposed to be misled by a forced analogy between the many mouths of the Araxes and the canalization of the Gyndes; these rivers, though at their nearest point 250 miles apart, and at their sources much more, both do rise in the watershed between Mesopotamia and the Caspian basin. The number ‘forty’ probably is a round number meaning ‘very many’; so ‘Kyrk’ (= forty) is used in Turkish. We may compare without irreverence the ‘forty’ of the O. T. (Gen. viii. 6 et pass.).
H.'s knowledge of the Caspian is one of his geographical triumphs; subsequent writers, except Aristotle, to the time of Ptolemy (second century A. D.) thought that it was a gulf of the Northern Sea, as the Persian Gulf is of the Southern; Alexander (Arr. Anab. vii. 16. 2) was preparing to test this theory when he died. Even after Ptolemy mediaeval cartographers returned to the old blunder (Tozer, A. G. p. 367). μία ἐοῦσα. This was known since Necho's circumnavigation of Africa (iv. 42). The name ‘Atlantic’ occurs first here, but was obviously already familiar. For the ‘pillars of Hercules’ cf. ii. 33. 3 n.
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