Cassitérides islands

Islands Cassitérides , i.e. Islands of tin , (of the Greek word Κασσίτερος /Kassiteros which means tin), was, in the ancient geography, the name of islands considered as being located some share close to the Western coasts of Europe. Already Herodote (-430) had vaguely heard of them.

Later certain authors like Posidonios, Diodore of Sicily, Strabon and others, indicate them like small islands located off the coast of the North-West of Spain, which contained mines of tin or, as indicates Strabon, tin and the extracted Plomb étaint although a passage in Diodore rather makes derive the name from their proximity at the zones étanifères of the North-West of Spain. Ptolémée and Denys Périégète also mentioned them, the first as being 10 small islands located at north-oust of the Spanish coast, symbolically laid out like a ring, the second author the met in relation to the Hespérides.

Whereas the geographical knowledge of the occident was still lacunar and that the secrecies of the trade of tin were well kept, in particular by the sailors of Cadiz who made of it the trade, the old Greeks knew only that tin reached them by the sea of the remote west, and the idea of an island which produced tin naturally emerged. Later, when the west was explored better, it was noted that tin really came from two areas, in the North-West Spain and in the Cornouailles.

Neither one neither the other could be called small islands or be described as in addition to the coast of the North-West of Spain, and thus Cassitérides were never identified neither by the Greek geographers nor by the Roman geographers. The modern authors perpetuated the error according to which Cassitérides were distinct places and made many attempts to identify them. The small islands off the coast of the western north of Spain, the headlands of this same coast, the Scilly Isles, Cornwall, the British Isles all these places were alternatively suggested. But none is appropriate. Neither the Spanish islands nor Scilly Isles contain tin, at least in serious quantity. Neither Great Britain nor Spain can be qualified like small islands in the North-West of Spain. It seems more probable than Cassitérides represent simply the first vague knowledge of the Greeks than tin came from overseas some share beyond Western Europe.

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