North of the mountain barrier enclosing India lay lands about which Western medieval knowledge was equally vague. “Upper Scythia, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Seric Ocean and southward to the Caucasus, includes much habitable land but also much that is sterile: gold and gems abound there, but men avoid them on account of the griffons. Lower Scythia adjoins Hyrcania, so called from the Hyrcanian Forest, where a marvelous bird is found whose plumage glows in the dark. Iranea, or Iran, is next to Scythia on the west: a region of nomads who wander widely because of the sterility of the soil and who are horrible and ferocious (_portentuosi ac truces_), eaters of human flesh and drinkers of human blood.” In about these terms the author of the _De imagine mundi_ and Gervase of Tilbury, borrowing from Isidore,[1319] summed up very nearly all that was known of Central Asia before the great overland journeys of the thirteenth century to which brief reference has already been made.[1320] Several of the maps show large rivers—Araxes, Oxus, Oscorus, and even Acheron, the stream of Tartarus—rising in the Caucasus and flowing northward into the Caspian.[1321] The latter, in accordance with the usual classical tradition, is represented as a gulf of the encircling Ocean Stream. BENJAMIN OF TUDELA ON CENTRAL ASIA Benjamin of Tudela, who himself journeyed at least as far east as Baghdad, had opportunities for gaining information about Central and Northern Asia more favorable than those of his less traveled contemporaries. Samarkand he mentions briefly as a “great city on the confines of Persia” inhabited by 50,000 Jews. “Thence,” he adds, “it is four days’ journey to Tibet, the country in whose forests the musk is found” (Adler’s translation).[1322] He quotes the reports of Persian Jews that four of the lost ten tribes of Israel dwell in the mountains of Naisabur (in eastern Persia). These people were said to be independent and to dwell in a broad tract of land twenty days’ journey in extent, with cities and large villages among the mountains.[1323] Others associated the lost tribes with the abhorrent hordes of Gog and Magog.[1324] Benjamin goes on to tell us that these Jews were in league with the “Kufar-al-Turak, who worship the wind and live in the wilderness and who do not eat bread nor drink wine but live on raw, uncooked meat. They have no noses, and in lieu thereof they have two small holes through which they breathe” (Adler’s translation).[1325] He relates the confused story of wars between these undeniably Turanian tribes of the steppes of Turkestan and the “King of Persia” (the Seljuk Sultan, Sanjar), events which perhaps gave rise to a legend that became widespread in twelfth-century Europe and to which we must now turn. PRESTER JOHN