Aethicus Ister

[3] Heinz Löwe (1913–1991) found a striking correspondence between the letters of Aethicus[clarify] and the Old Turkic script.

[5] Aethicus is believed by Franz Brunhölzl to have been a Scythian that lived in the region of present day Dobrogea, Romania.

The work is also filled with many fictional sources, which makes Jerome similar to Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, an Irish pseudo-grammarian of the 7th century.

The Latin of the work is sometimes vulgar and facile, other times cryptic and opaque, owing in part to Jerome's extremely difficult vocabulary of Graecisms and Latin/Greek compounds.

Nevertheless, Jerome's knowledge of Greek (a rare feat in Western Europe at the time) may indicate an association with the Canterbury school of Archbishop Theodore in the late 7th century.

Start of the Cosmographia in the late 8th- or 9th-century manuscript from southwestern Germany