The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 11: CHAP. 9. (9.)—THE LESSER AND THE GREATER ARMENIA.

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 9. (9.)—THE LESSER AND THE GREATER ARMENIA.

Greater Armenia,160 beginning at the mountains known as the Paryadres,161 is separated, as we have already stated,162 from Cappadocia by the river Euphrates, and, where that river turns off 163 in its course, from Mesopotamia, by the no less famous river Tigris. Both of these rivers take their rise in Armenia, which also forms the commencement of Mesopotamia, a tract of country which lies between these streams; the intervening space between them being occupied by the Arabian Orei.164 It thus extends its frontier as far as Adiabene, at which point it is stopped short by a chain of mountains which takes a cross direction; whereupon the province extends in width to the left, crossing the course of the Araxes,165 as far as the river Cyrus;166 while in length it reaches as far as the Lesser Armenia,167 from which it is separated by the river Absarus, which flows into the Euxine, and by the mountains known as the Paryadres, in which the Absarus takes its rise.