Cassiterides

Cassiterides
Map of Europe based on Strabo's geography, showing the Cassiterides just off the northwest tip of Iberia
Type	Phantom island

The Cassiterides, meaning Tin Islands (from the Greek word for tin: Κασσίτερος/Kassiteros), are an ancient geographical name of islands that were regarded as situated somewhere near the west coasts of Europe.

Herodotus (430 BC) had only vaguely heard of the Cassiterides, "from which we are said to have our tin," but did not discount the islands as legendary. Later writers — Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus,Strabo and others – call them smallish islands off ("some way off," Strabo says) the northwest coast of the Iberian Peninsula, which contained tin mines or, according to Strabo, tin and lead mines. A passage in Diodorus derives the name rather from their nearness to the tin districts of Northwest Iberia. Ptolemy and Dionysios Periegetes mentioned them – the former as ten small islands in Northwest Iberia far off the coast and arranged symbolically as a ring, and the latter in connection with the mythical Hesperides. The islands are described by Pomponius Mela as rich in lead; they are mentioned last in the same paragraph he wrote about Cadiz and the islands of Lusitania, and placed in Celtici. Following paragraphs describe the Île de Sein and Britain.

Probably written in the first century BC, the verse Circumnavigation of the World, whose anonymous author is called the "Pseudo-Scymnus," places two tin islands in the upper part of the Adriatic Sea and mentioned the marketplace Osor on the island of Cres, where extraordinarily high quality tin could be bought.Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, represents the Cassiterides as fronting Celtiberia.