|
Ictis, or Iktin, is or was an island described as a tin trading centre in the ''Bibliotheca historica'' of the Sicilian-Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC. While Ictis is widely accepted to have been an island somewhere off the southern coast of what is now England, scholars continue to debate its precise location. Candidates include St Michael's Mount and Looe Island off the coast of Cornwall, the Mount Batten peninsula in Devon, and the Isle of Wight further to the east. ==Primary sources== Diodorus Siculus, who flourished between about 60 and about 30 BC, is supposed to have relied for his account of the geography of Britain on a lost work of Pytheas, a Greek geographer from Massalia who made a voyage around the coast of Britain near the end of the fourth century BC, searching for the source of amber. The record of the voyage of Pytheas was lost in antiquity but was known to some later writers, including Timaeus, Posidonius and Pliny the Elder. Their work is contradictory, but from it deductions can be made about what was reported by Pytheas. No other sources concerning the tin trade in the ancient world are known.〔(ICTIS INSVLA ) at roman-britain.org, accessed 7 February 2012〕 Diodorus gives an account that is generally supposed to be a description of the working of Cornish tin at about the time of the voyage of Pytheas. He says: In the Greek text of Diodorus the name appears, in the accusative case, as "Iktin", so that translators have inferred that the nominative form of the name was "Iktis", rendering this into the medieval ''lingua franca'' of Latin (which only rarely used the letter 'k') as "Ictis". However, some commentators doubt that "Ictis" is correct and prefer "Iktin".〔Gavin de Beer, "Iktin", in ''The Geographical Journal'' vol. 126 (June 1960) pp. 160–167, at p. 162〕 In Book IV of his ''Natural History'', Pliny quotes Timaeus and refers to "''insulam Mictim''" (the island of Mictis, or perhaps of Mictim): It has been suggested that "''insulam Mictim''" was a copying error for ''insulam Ictim'', and Diodorus and Pliny probably both relied on the same primary source. However, while it is possible that "Mictim" and "Iktin" are one and the same, it is also possible that they are different places. The word "inwards" can be interpreted as meaning "towards our home", and six days' sail from Britain could take a boat to somewhere on the Atlantic coast of what is now France.〔Barry Cunliffe, "Exchanges with the wider world" in ''Iron age communities in Britain: an account of England, Scotland, and Wales from the seventh century BC until the Roman conquest'' (Routledge, 1978) (p. 471 )〕 Strabo, a contemporary of Diodorus, stated in his ''Geography'' that British tin was shipped from Massalia on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul.〔Strabo's ''Geographica'', Book III, 2.9〕 Julius Caesar, in his ''De Bello Gallico'', says of the Veneti: "This last-named people were by far the most powerful on the coast of Armorica: they had a large fleet plying between their own ports and Britain; they knew more about the handling of ships and the science of navigation than anyone else thereabouts."〔Gaius Julius Caesar, ''Caesar's War Commentaries'' (Kessinger, 2004), (pp. 45–46 )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ictis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|