Xanthus
Ξάνθος
Xanthus (Ξάνθος), an important river in the W. of Lycia, which is mentioned even in Homer (Hom. Il. 2.877, 5.479), and which, according to Strabo (xiv. p.665), was anciently called Sirbes, that is in Phoenician and Arabic reddish yellow,
so that the Greek name Xanthus is only a translation of the Semitic Sirbes or Zirba. The Xanthus has its sources in Mount Taurus, on the frontiers between Lycia and Pisidia, and flows as a navigable river in a SW. direction through an extensive plain (Ξάνθου πεδίον, Hdt. 1.176), having Mount Bragus on the W. and Massicytes on the E., towards the sea, into which it discharges itself about 70 stadia S. of the city of Xanthus, and a little to the NW. of Pinara. (Herod. l.c.; Ptol. 5.3.2; Dion. Per. 848; Ov. Met. 9.645; Mela, 1.15; Plin. Nat. 5.28.) Now the Etshen or Essenide. (Fellows, Lycia, pp. 123, 278.) Respecting Xanthus as a name of the Trojan river Scamander, see SCAMANDER
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.