Sambation

According to rabbinic literature, the Sambation (Hebrew: סמבטיון) is the river beyond which the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were exiled by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V (Sanchairev).

[1] An Ashkenazi tradition speaks of the Lost Tribes as di Royte Yiddelekh, "The little Red Jews", cut off from the rest of Jewry by the legendary river Sambation, "whose foaming waters raise high up into the sky a wall of fire and smoke that is impossible to pass through".

[2] Obadiah Bartenura writes that he was informed by Adeni Jews in Jerusalem that they had heard from Muslim merchants that the river was located about fifty days' walking distance from their place as one journeys through the desert.

[3] The river, which flows with rocks for six days a week, completely surrounded a land inhabited by Jews who could not ever leave, for by doing so, Shabbat would be desecrated.

[citation needed] In modern literature, the Sambation appears prominently in Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino, whose protagonists manage to cross the raging river of stones and find on the other side, not the Lost Ten Tribes, but the Kingdom of Prester John of Christian myth.