Note 278 — Chapter XVIII · ON THE COMMERCE OF THE SEA OF AZOF.

Dr. Clarke makes also the following observations on the name of this river, which, being of considerable size, runs through the Government of Kharkof, and meets the Don at some distance above Tcherkask, and from which the Greeks, he thinks, took the name of Tanais, which they applied to the Don. He says, “I must request the reader to suppose himself entering the mouth of the Don, and proceeding up the river to the distance of about 99 miles, above its embouchures, and rather more than 46 above the town of Tcherkask. He would here find the Danaetz falling into the Don, by two mouths, separated from each other by a distance of 10 or 12 miles. But the people here have, from time immemorial, entertained a notion that it leaves the Don again before it reaches the sea, and, taking a north-westerly direction, falls into the Palus Mæotis, to the north of all the other mouths of the Don, of which it is, in fact, one. This northernmost mouth of the Don, on account of the river whose waters its channel is supposed peculiarly to contain, is called Danaetz, and to express either its sluggish current, or its exit into the sea, Dead Danaetz. The Greeks, steering from the Crimea towards the mouth of the Don, and, as their custom was, keeping close to the shore, entered first this northernmost mouth of the river. It bore then, as it does now, the name of Danaetz, Idanaetz, or Tanaetz, whence the word Tanais would be easily derived.”—Clarke, i. 257. It must be remarked, however, that a gentleman from Taganrok informs me that the word is distinctly pronounced Donetz, as the Germans write it.