Black Sea–Caspian Steppe The Manych Depression is not much more than 65 feet above sea level and the area around Astrakhan and part of Kalmykia is below sea level. Rivers: Through the center runs the northwest-tending Kuma-Manych Depression. This was once a strait connecting the Black and Caspian Seas and is now marked by the Manych River which is basically a chain of lakes. It will probably be the route of the Eurasia Canal if that great engineering work is ever built. In the south the rivers that flow north from the Caucasus are caught by the west-flowing Kuban River and the east-flowing
Black Sea 1570 map of Asia titled from Abraham Ortelius's labels the sea ("Great Sea", compare Latin ). English-language writers of the 18th century often used the name "Euxine Sea" ( or ) to refer to the Black Sea. Edward Gibbon, for instance, calls the sea by this name throughout "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". During the Ottoman Empire period, the Black Sea was called either or , both meaning "the Black Sea" in the Ottoman Turkish. In the tenth-century geography book , which was written in Persian by an unknown author, the Black Sea is