Ancient Cassiterides

Ancient geography The Cassiterides, meaning Tin Islands (from the Greek word for digest /Kassiteros), are an ancient geographical name of islands that were regarded as situated somewhere near the west soarings of Europe. The traditional assumption, ignoring Strabo, is that Cassiterides refer to Great Britain, based on the significant tin deposits in Cornwall. Herodotus (430 BC) had only dimly hear of the Cassiterides, from which we are said to have our tin, but did not discount the islands as legendary. 3 Later writers Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus,4 Strabo5 and others call them smallish islands off (some way off, Strabo says) the northwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula, which contained tin mines or, according to Strabo, tin and lead mines. A passage in Diodorus derives the name rather from their nearness to the tin districts of Northwest Iberia. Ptolemy and Dionysios Periegetes mentioned them the former as ten small islands in Northwest Iberia far off the coast and arranged sy mbolically as a ring, and the latter in connection with the mythological Hesperides.Probably written in the first century BC, the verse Circumnavigation of the World, whose anonymous author is called the Pseudo-Scymnus, places two tin islands on the upper part of the Adriatic Sea and mentioned the market place Osor on the island of Cres, where extraordinary high-quality tin could be bought. 67 Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, represents the Cassiterides as fronting Celtiberia.At a time when geographical knowledge of the West was even scanty, and when the secrets of the tin-trade were still successfully guarded by the seamen of Gades and others who dealt in the metal, the Greeks knew only that tin came to them by sea from the far West, and the idea of tin-producing islands easily arose. Later, when the West was better explored, it was found that tin actually came from two regions Northwest Iberia and Cornwall.Diodorus reports For there are many mines of tin in the country above Lusitania and on the islets which lie off Iberia out in the ocean and are called because of that fact the Cassiterides. According to Diodorus tin also came from Britannia to Gaul and thence was brought overland to Massilia and Narbo. 8 Neither of these could be called small islands or described as off the Northwest coast of Iberia, and so the Greek and Roman geographers did not identify either as the Cassiterides.Instead, they became a third, ill-understood source of tin, conceived of as distinct from Iberia or Britain. Od najdawniejszych czasow Brytania znana byla ze swych zloz metali. Fenicjanie i Kartaginczycy sprowadzali stad glownie cyne (plumbum album). Jej glowne zloza wystepowaly w starozytnosci, podobnie jak dzis, na wybrzezu Kornwalii i wyspach stanowiacych jej przedluzenie, slynnych Wyspach Cynowych (insulae Cassiterides). W srodkowych rejonach wyspy obficie wystepuje zelazo, ktorego zloza powierzchniowe eksploatowali Brytowie, a z glebokich kopalni wydobywali je Rzymia nie.Rzymianie tez rozpoczeli eksploatacje bogatych pokladow miedzi, ktore wystepuja glownie na terenie dzis. Kornwalii, Cardigenshire i Anglesey w poblizu Llandundo. Gory Walii byly natomiast terenami zlotodajnymi kopano tam tez srebro. Tacyt mowi po prostu Brytania dostarcza zlota, srebra i innych metali, ktore sa nagroda za zwyciestwo. Wyobraznie rzymskich najezdzcow rozbudzaly tez inne legendarne bogactwa wyspy, o ktorych opowiada niezastapiony Tacyt Ocean rodzi perly lecz nieco sine i blade.