Map of Europe based on Strabo's geography, showing the Cassiterides just off the northwest tip of Iberia

Cassiterides, meaning Tin Islands (from the Greek word for tin: Κασσίτερος/Kassiteros), are in ancient geography the name of islands regarded as situated somewhere near the west coasts of Europe.

[edit] Ancient geography

Herodotus (430 BC) had dimly heard of the Cassiterides. Later writers — Posidonius, Diodorus, Strabo^[1] and others — call them smallish islands off (some way off, Strabo says) the north-west coast of Spain, which contained tin mines, or according to Strabo tin and lead mines. A passage in Diodorus derives the name rather from their nearness to the tin districts of north-west Spain. Ptolemy and Dionysios Periegetes mentioned them, the former as 10 small islands in northwest Spain far off the coast arranged symbolically as a ring, and the latter in connection with the Hesperides.

At a time when geographical knowledge of the west was still scanty and the secrets of the tin-trade were still successfully guarded by the seamen of Gades and others who dealt in the metal, the Greeks knew only that tin came to them by sea from the far west, and the idea of tin-producing islands easily arose. Later, when the west was better explored, it was found that tin actually came from two regions, north-west Spain and Cornwall. Neither of these could be called small islands or described as off the north-west coast of Spain, and so the Greek and Roman geographers did not identify either as the Cassiterides. Instead, they became a third, ill-understood source of tin, conceived of as distinct from Spain or Britain. Modern writers have made many attempts to identify them. Small islands off the coast of north-west Spain, the headlands of that same coast, the Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, the British Isles as a whole, have all in turn been suggested, but none suits the conditions. Neither the Spanish islands nor the Isles of Scilly contain tin, at least in serious quantities. It seems most probable, therefore, that the name Cassiterides represents the first vague knowledge of the Greeks that tin was found overseas somewhere in or off western Europe.

Gavin de Beer has suggested^[2] that Roger Dion solved the puzzle^[3] by bringing to bear a chance remark in Avienus' late poem Ora maritima, based on early sources: the tin isles were in an arm of the sea within sight of wide plains and rich mines of tin and lead, and opposite two islands, a further one, Hibernia, and a nearer, Britannia. "Before the estuary of the Loire became silted up in late Roman times, the Bay of Biscay led into a wide gulf, now represented by the lower reaches of the river Brivé and the marshes of the Brière, between Paimboeuf and St. Nazaire, in which were a number of islands. The islands and shores of this gulf, now joined together by silt, are crowded with Bronze Age foundries that worked tin and lead; Penestin^[4] and the tin headland are just north of them; and there can be no doubt that the famous tin islands were there". De Beer confirms the location from Strabo: the Cassiterides are ten islands in the sea, north of the land of the Artabrians in the northwest corner of Hispania.

Strabo says that a Publius Crassus was the first Roman to visit the Tin Islands and write a firsthand report. This Crassus is thought to be either the Publius Licinius Crassus (consul 97 BC) who was a governor in Spain in the 90s,^[5] or his grandson by the same name, who in 57–56 BC commanded Julius Caesar's forces in Armorica (Brittany),^[6] which places him near the mouth of the Loire

[edit] See also

• Tin mining in Britain

[edit] References

[edit] Primary sources

• Herodotus, Histories 3.115
• Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library V. 21, 22, 38
• Strabo, Geography 2.5.15, 3.2.9, 3.5.11
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History iv. 119, Vii. 197, xxxiv. 156-158

[edit] Secondary sources

• T. R. Holmes, Ancient Britain (1907), appendix, identifies the Cassiterides with the British Isles.

[edit] Notes

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.