Electrids

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The mythical amber islands of antiquity are called electrids or electrides insulae ( Greek  Ἠλεκτρίδες , from Greek electron = amber ) .

Geographical classification

It is in this group of islands according to Pliny d. Ä. around the West , East and North Frisian Islands or, according to Pomponius Mela and Strabo, around islands at the mouth of the Italian River Po . In historical research, the last-mentioned location details are mostly associated with the fact that in the area of ​​the Venetian-Illyrian coast there was an intensive intermediate trade in amber at the time of antiquity and the authors (or their sources) were of the erroneous assumption that this must also be done there Area of ​​origin of the amber. Pliny, on the other hand, regarded this as a "hoax" ( vanitatis Graecae certissimum documentum ) and reported of the amber island Glaesaria as one of 23 islands known to the Romans (the Glaesarien or Glaesiae "... which the Greeks call electrids because the electrum occurs there ..) . ") in the German Bight. It is difficult to say whether this island is one of today's Frisian Islands. The coastal landscape of the North Sea has changed fundamentally in the past two thousand years, so that during the lifetime of the cited ancient authors there could have been other islands that have been sunk by storm surges or sea transgression. In addition, the size and location of almost all islands in the Wadden Sea have changed significantly since then. The former names meant islands that can no longer be found in this form today, so that an assignment of historical names to a specific island of this island ring in the German Bight is hardly possible.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pliny: Naturalis historia 3, 152.
  2. ↑ Pliny: Naturalis historia 4, 103. Based on the translation by F. Waldmann in Der Bernstein im Altertum. Fellin 1883.
  3. ^ Karl Andrée: Miocene amber in the western Baltic and on the North Sea? - Abalus, the glaesaria or electrids and the eridanus of the ancients. In: Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen 1942, 5, pp. 172–178.