Gerrhos
Gerrhos is a place in Scythia essential to interpreting Herodotus' world-map, for it formed one of the corners of the great square that defined Scythia. A more familiar Gerrhos or reed-swamp — from the Alexandrian point of view — lay to the east of the mouth of the Nile. Herodotus drew a meridian between the two Gerrhoi: that in Scythia was considered the source of the Boristhenes Dnieper. In the words of Herodotus :
Livio Catullo Stecchini, the unrivalled historian of earth-measuring, assigned as Gerrhos, the area of swamps to the northeast of Smolensk, today considerably reduced by post-glacial warming and drying of the climate and by the conscious drainage and intrusion of agriculture. Later classical historians and geographers, such as Pomponius Mela mislocated this Gerrhos.
