The god’s epiclesis indicates that the founders of the cult sought to distinguish between Apollo Iatros and the established aspects of Apollo in their metropoleis. As early as in the sixth century BC, Apollo Iatros played a prominent role in the pantheons of all these cities. The cult of Apollo Iatros existed only in the Ionian colonies of the Western and the Northern Black Sea coasts, in Apollonia Pontica, Histria, Tyras, Olbia, and on the Bosporus. A key possibility, which shall be discussed, is that when asked about distant regions by geographers and traders, Inner Asian peoples may have made use of the signposts which they themselves used to describe the very ends of the earth. Indeed, in support of this, we find similar descriptions for the inhabitants of remote lands within the mediaeval and living epic narratives of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples. But what can we make of legendary and distant beings such as the one-eyed Arimaspians, gold-digging ants, regions full of feathers and dog-headed men? In this paper I will look to uncannily similar descriptions made by the geographers of ancient and mediaeval India and China towards their north and west respectively, which point towards notions that such wonders had their origins in the folklore of the nomadic cultures of Inner Asia. Classical conceptions of geography, even before Herodotus, present us with a wealth of bizarre tribes and monstrosities in relation to the remote lands beyond the Greco-Scythian settlements around the Pontus Euxinus and to the regions north of India.
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