From: tgpedersen
Message: 15896
Date: 2002-10-03
> --- x99lynx@... wrote:I was puzzled by all these river names beginning in *gH-wdH- "pour"
> > Piotr also wrote:
> > <<I'm not defending Pliny's general credibility but
> > just this particular
> > piece of geography. His sources seem to have been
> > quite reliable here. By
> > "clari" he meant "distinguished", i.e. major
> > rivers. As for such rivers,
> > the only surprising omission between the Vistula and
> > the Rhine seems to be t
> > he Oder, but if George is right and Guthalus IS the
> > Oder, then the list is
> > complete. No other name is garbled, so why should
> > Guthalus be an exception?>>
> >
> > What is actually odd about Guthalvs is that nobody
> > else mentions it. If
> > Guthalvs was such a famous river, why did no one
> > else mention it?
>
> *****GK: Rivers were sometimes known by different
> names at different times (or by different names at
> different points of their flow). ******
> >
> > Pliny couldn't have garbled the Rhine or the Elbe,
> > because those rivers were
> > all in Latin writing well before his time. And it
> > is very possible that
> > Pliny is the source of the name of the Vistula --
> > did any one give the name
> > before him?
>
> *****GK: Pomponius Mela in his "De Chorographia" ,
> III.28 (ca. 40 AD)
>
> So maybe, even if he did garble it, it
> > became the name of the
> > river.
> >
> > The real problem here is why Guthalvs did not become
> > the name of a river.
> > There are many possibilities, but here are two.
> > Ptolemy did not use the name
> > so it was trash canned (except by Solinus) or later
> > writers and redacting
> > scribes just did not know where to locate it and it
> > was trash canned.
> >
> > Pliny is not talking about whole rivers but about
> > their emptying into the
> > "Ocean". Since I didn't get any kind of coherent
> > answer to my suggestion
> > that Pliny's list is a mariner's list,
>
> ******GK: I suggest you read Pliny at 37,30ff of the
> NH esp. at 37,45. There you will find the story of a
> gentleman (still living when Pliny was writing) who
> was sent by one of Nero's bureaucrats to explore the
> northern portion of the Amber Road. He did so, all the
> way to the Baltic, whose shores he explored, bringing
> back much of the valuable stuff. From Pannonian
> Carnuntum (a distance of nearly 900 kilometers). So
> forget your mariner's list and your Swedish river.
> Here's a link to a map:
> http://www.ancientroute.com/Amberoad.htm
> Click on map 5. Notice what river is crossed before
> the Vistula. This may be another explanation as to why
> "Guthalus" appears before Vistula in Pliny's list. The
> name quickly disappears, to be replaced by three names
> in Ptolemy (the latest interpretation by K. Goldmann
> is that these three names refer to the three mouths of
> the old Oder), one of which eventually won out as the
> main name of the river.*****
>
>