# Codanus sinus

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{{Short description|Latin name of the Baltic Sea and Kattegat}}
{{More citations needed|date=January 2021}}
thumb|200px|right|Codanus sinus with its many islands
The '''Codanus sinus''' is the [Latin](/source/Latin) name of the [Baltic Sea](/source/Baltic_Sea) and [Kattegat](/source/Kattegat).

[Pomponius Mela](/source/Pomponius_Mela) (3.31, 3.54) and [Pliny the Elder](/source/Pliny_the_Elder) (4.96) describe it as an "enormous bay" lying beyond the [Elbe](/source/Elbe)", with "many small islands", the largest one being [Scandinavia](/source/Scandinavia) (''Codannovia'' in Pomponius Mela).<ref>J.H.F. Bloemers, Sean Gillies, Perry Scalfano, R. Talbert, Tom Elliott, and Jeffrey Becker, 'Codanus? Sinus: a Pleiades place resource', Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places, 2020 <https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/98940> [accessed: 16 June 2020]</ref> It is commonly identified with the Baltic Sea, which is otherwise rendered in Latin as ''Mare Balticum''. Pliny believed that Scandinavia was an island, possibly because its attachment to Europe was too remote and unknown for Pliny to have known about.

The origin of the name is obscure. One rendering of Scandinavia into Latin was "Codanovia", with old Latin tending to lose initial s before another consonant (as in ''nix'', "snow"), and the shortened form Codanus could therefore similarly refer to [Scania](/source/Scania) in southern Sweden.

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Category:Scandinavia
Category:Geography of Germania

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Codanus sinus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codanus_sinus) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codanus_sinus?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.