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by fosk 1234 days ago
Romans used to call the Sahara region on maps with the phrasing "hic sunt leones" (which translated from latin literally means "here lie the lions").
2 comments

if you scroll all the way East on the Tabula Peutengeriana (a medieval copy of an ancient Roman road map) you get to India where "in his locis elephanti nascuntur" meaning "in this place Elephants are born" and a little West of that the same thing for scorpions. Some detail pics in this blog post including the Elephants one, and you can find full size scans of it but I don't want to deep link to them because they're huge.

https://digitalmapsoftheancientworld.com/ancient-maps/tabula...

translated from latin literally means "here are (pl.) lions"