I've noticed that the province south of Finland (in EB) is named "Sápmi". How comes that? The sami people lived (and still lives) in northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and western Sibiria. Did the sami really have settlements south of Finland? Or was the province just named "Sápmi" by the romans, who may have thought that everyone in the northern Europe were sami?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1pmi_%28area%29


Edit: Added a source.

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I'm afraid I can't answer your question, but I'm 99% sure that "Sápmi" isn't the Romans' name for the town. First off, it doesn't look like a Latin word (they didn't have accents and I can't think of any words that end in "i" in the nominative) and secondly, the EB team always uses the locals' names for their towns, not the more famous names (e.g. the Romans' name for the town) where they can help it.

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I've been wondering about the Sápmi province too. Sápmi is a Northern Saami word, and so is the one used in the settlement name. The weird thing about this is that while the Saami did inhabit parts of Southern Finland and Karelia in EB's timeframe, they were hardly the most significant of the peoples there. The Balto-Finnic tribes of present-day Estonia and Latvia were far more powerful, and the somewhat obscure Finnic peoples farther east even more so. Also, Sápmi is a modern Saami word, it wasn't used back in 272 BCE.

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"Sápmi" is indeed a modern word. But what people could have used it during EB timeframe? A finno-ugric tribe?

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The word itself is indeed taken from a proto-saami language (it has the same form in its ancient version, apparently) however according to a linguistic theory presented here: http://www.sgr.fi/ct/ct51.html - in the period it may have been used in various forms by all peoples living in and around the area, as it was borrowed and re-borrowed by proto-saami, proto-finns, proto-baltic and even germanic people, as saami, haami, soomi, sabmi, sapmi etc.
Not having a finnish history expert on the team at the time of making the map, we kinda had to go with what we had. The province boundaries represent the general area of finnic-saamic languages and archeological cultures as far as I was aware of them, but any additional data is welcome.

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I see. I'm hardly an expert, but I do have certain familiarity with the subject and I'd be more than happy to help out the EB team, so here's what I know.

I think the best name for the province would be Sōme. That's the reconstructed Proto-Finnic root for a number of modern Finnic ethnonyms, including Suomi (Finland). Saami words Sápmi, Sabme etc are related to it, however, by 272 BCE Saami languages had already differentiated from Balto-Finnic languages and at this point, the Saami would have called themselves Sāmē. Thus, Sōme is a Balto-Finnic name. The name of the people of Sōme would be Sōmalaiset, respectively.

The name of the settlement - Asodát - is obviously a Saami word, but I don't speak any of the Saami languages, so I don't know what it means. I think the most sensible thing would be to give the settlement a Balto-Finnic name, such as Sōmeŋkylä (village of Sōme) or Sōmenlitna (town/fort of Sōme). Also, it would make sense to place the settlement on the northern coast of Estonia, for there was the centre of Balto-Finnic culture in EB's timeframe.

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