The Seversky Donets () or Siverskyi Donets (), usually simply called the Donets, is a
river
A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of w ...
on the south of the
East European Plain
The East European Plain (also called the Russian Plain, "Extending from eastern Poland through the entire European Russia to the Ural Mountaina, the ''East European Plain'' encompasses all of the Baltic states and Belarus, nearly all of Ukraine, an ...
. It originates in the
Central Russian Upland, north of
Belgorod
Belgorod ( rus, Белгород, p=ˈbʲeɫɡərət) is a city and the administrative center of Belgorod Oblast, Russia, located on the Seversky Donets River north of the border with Ukraine. Population: Demographics
The population of B ...
, flows south-east through
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
(
Kharkiv
Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.[Donetsk
Donetsk ( , ; uk, Донецьк, translit=Donets'k ; russian: Донецк ), formerly known as Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka), Stalin and Stalino (see also: cities' alternative names), is an industrial city in eastern Ukraine loca ...]
and
Luhansk Oblasts) and then again through
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
(
Rostov Oblast) to join the river
Don
Don, don or DON and variants may refer to:
Places
*County Donegal, Ireland, Chapman code DON
*Don (river), a river in European Russia
*Don River (disambiguation), several other rivers with the name
*Don, Benin, a town in Benin
*Don, Dang, a vill ...
, about from the
Sea of Azov. The Donets is the
fourth-longest river in Ukraine, and the largest in
eastern Ukraine, where it is an important source of fresh water. It gives its name to the Donets Basin, known commonly as the
Donbas, an important
coal-mining and
industrial region in Ukraine.
Etymology
The names ''Don'' and its diminutive ''Donets'' are derived from
Iranic
The Iranian peoples or Iranic peoples are a diverse grouping of Indo-European peoples who are identified by their usage of the Iranian languages and other cultural similarities.
The Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separate ...
,
Sarmatian
The Sarmatians (; grc, Σαρμαται, Sarmatai; Latin: ) were a large confederation of ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples of classical antiquity who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th cen ...
"the river".
[Mallory, J.P. and Victor H. Mair. ''The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West''. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. p. 106] Scytho-Sarmatians inhabited the areas to the north of the
Black Sea
The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Rom ...
from 1100 BC into the early medieval times.
In the 2nd century CE
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance ...
knew the river Don, into which the Donets flows, as ''Tanais'', and Western Europeans recognized that the Don had a significant tributary which they called either the small Tanais or ''Donetz''. The Slavic name of ''Seversky Donets'' derived from the fact that the river originates from the land of
Severians