Tartary

Tartary (or Tartaria) is a old term that referred to that region of Asia east of the Ural mountains. Originally, and before Zheng He and Christopher Columbus, it meant every part of the world that excluded Europe and Africa to the Europeans.

The term was eventually replaced with Siberia by Russian territorial expansionists, and has now died out. Nevertheless, it still often remains visible on old maps.

See also: Strait of Tartary, Tatars, Tatary, East Tartary

Tărtăria is also a village in Romania which gained fame after discovery of Tartaria tablets.

In the novel Ada by Vladimir Nabokov, Tartary is the name of a large country on the fictional planet of Antiterra. Russia is Tartary's approximate geographic counterpart on Terra, Antiterra's twin world apparently identical to "our" Earth, but doubly fictional in the context of the novel.