the Don River. As a geographical term, Sarmatia was always indistinct, but very stable. The presumed ancestors of the szlachta, the Sarmatians, were a confederacy of predominantly Iranian tribes living north of the Black Sea. In the 5th century BC Herodotus wrote that these tribes were descendants of the Scythians and Amazons. The Sarmatians were infiltrated by the Goths and others in the 2nd century AD, and may have had some strong and direct links to Poland. The legend of Polish descent from Sarmatians stuck and grew until most of those within the Commonwealth, and many abroad, believed that many Polish nobles were somehow descendants of the Sarmatians (Sauromates). Another tradition came to surmise that the Sarmatians themselves were descended from Japheth, son of Noah. Some holding to Sarmatism tended to believe that their ancestors had conquered and enserfed the local Slavs and, like the Bulgars in Bulgaria or Franks who conquered Gaul (France), eventually adopted the local language. Such nobility might believe that they belonged (at least figuratively) to a different people than the Slavs whom they ruled. "Roman maps, fashioned during the Renaissance, had the name of Sarmatia written over most of the territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and thus 'justified' interest in 'Sarmatian roots'." Centuries later, modern scholarship discovered evidence showing that the Alans, a late Sarmatian people speaking an Iranian idiom, did invade Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe before the sixth century, and that these "Sarmatians evidently formed the area's ruling class, which was gradually Slavicized." Their direct political connection to Poland, however, would remain somewhat uncertain. In his 1970 publication The Sarmatians (in the series "Ancient Peoples and Places") Tadeusz Sulimirski (1898–1983), an Anglo-Polish historian, archaeologist, and researcher on the ancient Sarmatians, discusses the abundant evidence of the ancient Sarmatian presence in Eastern Europe, e.g., the finds of various grave goods such as pottery, weapons, and jewelry. Possible ethnological and social influences on the Polish szlachta would include tamga-inspired heraldry, social organization, military practices, and burial customs. Sarmatism was used to integrate the ethnically different Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobles into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and also elevated Ukrainian Cossacks as part of this identity despite their non-noble status. Poles tracing their descent to the Sarmatians was part of wider tendency evident all over Europe, of various peoples tracing their descent to an ancient people who had lived in their country in Roman times: the Dutch taking