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The Magnus Sinus or Sinus Magnus (Latin; , ''o Mégas Kólpos''), also anglicized as the was the form of the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea known to Greek, Roman, Arab, Persian, and Renaissance cartographers before the Age of Discovery. It was then briefly conflated with the Pacific Ocean before disappearing from maps. __NOTOC__ ==History== The gulf and its major port of Cattigara had supposedly been reached by a 1st-century Greek trader named Alexander, who returned safely and left a periplus of his voyage. His account that Cattigara was "some days" sail from Zaba was taken by Marinus of Tyre to mean "numberless" days and by Ptolemy to mean "a few".}} Both Alexander and Marinus's works have been lost, but were claimed as authorities by Ptolemy in his ''Geography''. Ptolemy (and presumably Marinus before him) followed Hipparchus in making the Indian Ocean a landlocked sea, placing Cattigara on its unknown eastern shoreline. The expanse formed between it and the Malay Peninsula (the "Golden Chersonese"), he called the Great Gulf. Ptolemy's ''Geography'' was translated into Arabic by a team of scholars including al-Khwārizmī in the 9th century during the reign of al-Maʿmūn. By that time, Arab merchants such as Soleiman had begun regular commerce with Tang China and, having passed through the Strait of Malacca ''en route'', shown that the Indian Sea communicated with the open ocean. African traders similarly showed that the coastline did not turn sharply east south of Cape Prasum below Zanzibar as Ptolemy held. Al-Khwārizmī's influential ''Book of the Description of the Earth'', therefore, removed Ptolemy's unknown shores from the Indian Ocean. The robustly-described lands east of the Great Gulf, however, were retained as a phantom peninsula (now generally known as the Dragon's Tail). Just after 1295, Maximus Planudes restored Ptolemy's Greek text and maps at Chora Monastery in Constantinople (Istanbul). This was translated into Latin at Florence by Jacobus Angelus around 1406 and quickly spread the work's information and misinformation throughout Western Europe. The maps initially repeated Ptolemy's enclosed Indian Sea. Following word of Bartholomew Dias's circumnavigation of Africa, maps by Martellus and by Martin of Bohemia replaced this with a new form of the Dragon's Tail peninsula, including details from Marco Polo. As early as 1540, continuing exploration led Sebastian Münster to conflate the Great Gulf with the Pacific Ocean west of the Americas, supposing that the 1st-century Alexander had crossed to a port in Peru and safely returned. The idea was repeated by Ortelius and others. (Some modern South American scholars have returned to the idea as recently as the 1990s, but there remains no substantial evidence to support the idea.) The Great Gulf was finally dispensed with in all its forms as more accurate accounts returned from both the East and West Indies. 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「Magnus Sinus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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