History of Geography. Sir John Scott Keltie
with its canal and the position of towns on its borders, together with notes giving information about these places; and, in Turin, a map of the Wadi Alaiki, where the Nubian goldmines were situated; and this map may date from the earlier half of the fourteenth century B.C.
Meanwhile, in the Ægean lands and from Sicily to Cyprus, at points principally but not invariably insular or coastal, and especially in Crete, communities grew up that developed a high standard of civilization, to which the general name of Ægean is given. It appears that a central power became established in Crete about the middle of the third millennium B.C., and that an active oversea trade was developed in the Ægean and the eastern Mediterranean during the ensuing thousand years. As for the knowledge of the mainland which came to be called Europe, it is suggested that the Ægean civilization was assailed, about the fifteenth century B.C., by invaders from the north, and was practically submerged, probably by a similar movement, five hundred years later; and invasion presupposes intercourse.
The Phœnicians, next taking the lead in Mediterranean maritime trade, must have extended knowledge of the inhabited world, even though they left the reputation of secretiveness in respect of their excursions (a natural and not uncommon characteristic of pioneer traders). A Semitic people, they seem to have emigrated from the Persian Gulf in detachments, and established independent settlements on the Levantine littoral. Tyre was their chief trading city. They provided the commercial link between east and west. Their penetration of the western Mediterranean and even of the Straits of Gibraltar is assigned to the earliest period of their activities. They established relations not only with the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, but also with central European traders; they are said, for example, to have dealt in amber brought from the Baltic overland to the Adriatic and to the mouth of the Rhone. They founded colonies in Cyprus, Sicily, and elsewhere as far as the west of Spain, where Gades (Cadiz) was established perhaps about 1100 B.C. Thence they carried their enterprises far to the north. If they did not actually exploit the tin of Cornwall, they probably knew of Britain. One of the greatest enterprises of antiquity, if we may trust Herodotus, who was, however, sceptical, was conducted by Phœnician navigators under the auspices of Necho, king of Egypt, about 600 B.C. Even before this they brought from distant lands, it may be the Malay peninsula or it may be what is now Rhodesia, gold and other presents for King Solomon. If the Phœnicians had really found their way as far as the Zambezi and the country on the south, they may well have conjectured that it would be possible to sail round Africa. At any rate, if the story as told by Herodotus is true, Necho was convinced that Africa could be circumnavigated. The Phœnician navigators sailed down the Red Sea, and in autumn landed on the coast and sowed a crop of wheat; when this was reaped, they started again and made their way south round the Cape of Good Hope, and so northward, entering the Mediterranean in the third year. At one part of their course they had the sun on their right, which would be natural, though Herodotus regarded this as evidence of the incredibility of the narrative. There is no inherent impossibility in such an expedition, but it led to no direct results; no further effort was made to round the continent for twenty centuries.
The Phœnicians founded Carthage about 850 B.C. (though an earlier trading post occupied the site), and the Carthaginians carried out trading enterprises on their own account from their central point of vantage on the North African coast. Some time after Necho’s expedition (probably about 500 B.C.) they sent out two distant expeditions. One of these, under Hanno, appears to have consisted of a very large fleet, and to have been intended to establish trading posts along the west coast of Africa, which was already known to the Carthaginians. Certain details are furnished which serve to identify points at which he touched, and it is generally agreed that he got as far south as the neighbourhood of the Bight of Benin. Almost simultaneously Himilco made a voyage north along the west coast of Europe. He appears to have visited Britain, and mentions the foggy and limitless sea to the west.
Information obtained by such means as this cannot have become in any sense the common property of the period. But there would be no mean supply of geographical data at the disposal of traders on the one hand, and at least of a few philosophers and generally well-informed persons on the other, at a period long anterior to that at which it is possible to begin our detailed history. Whatever tendency there may have been on the part of the Phœnicians, and no doubt their predecessors, to preserve their commercial secrets, there is no necessity to suppose that traders in distant lands did not describe these lands to those with whom they immediately dealt. The links in the commercial chain would then become links in a chain of geographical knowledge. This supposition granted, geographers may be prepared to risk the charge of temerity if they recognize and enjoy, as an exquisite description of the unbroken summer daylight on some northern fjord-coast, the picture of the Læstrygons’ land in Odyssey, X.: “Where herdsman hails herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth answers the call. There might a sleepless man have earned a double wage, the one as neatherd, the other shepherding white flocks: so near are the outgoings of the night and of the day.” And again, “the fair haven, whereabout on both sides goes one steep cliff unbroken, and jutting headlands over against each other stretch forth at the mouth of the harbour, and strait is the entrance … no wave ever swelled within it, great or small, but there was a bright calm all around.”1 Here are words which on their face indicate hearsay in the Mediterranean concerning Scandinavia in the Homeric age. Again, the gloomy home of the Cimmerians, at the uttermost limit of the earth, suggests hearsay of the arctic night. As to Homeric geography generally, it may be said briefly that the lands immediately neighbouring to the Ægean are well known, though there is little evidence of knowledge of the inhospitable interior of Asia Minor; something is understood of the tribes of the interior of Europe to the north; the riches of Egypt and Sidon are known; mention is made of black men, and even of pygmies, in the further parts of Africa; the western limit of anything approaching exact knowledge is Sicily. The earth is flat and circular, girt about by the river of Ocean, whose stream sweeps all round it.
1 Trans. S. H. Butcher and A. Lang.
Thus we have found geographical knowledge, so far as it is possible to trace its acquisition at all, to have been acquired for purely commercial purposes, and it remained for the Greeks to seek for such knowledge for its own sake. It has been well said that the science of geography was the invention of the Greeks.
Chapter II.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS
The birthplace of Greek geographical theory is to be found, not in Greece proper, but in Asia Minor. Miletus, a seaport of Ionia, near the mouth of the Mæander, became the leading Greek city during the seventh to the sixth centuries B.C., trading as far as Egypt and throwing off colonies especially towards the north, on the shores of the Hellespont and the Euxine. It was thus an obvious repository for geographical knowledge, besides being a famous centre of learning in a wider sense. Thales of Miletus (640–546 B.C.), father of Greek philosophers, geometers, and astronomers, may have learnt astronomy from a Babylonian master in Cos, and became acquainted with Egyptian geometry by visiting that country; he applied geometrical theory to the practical measurement of height and distance. He has been wrongly credited with the conception of the earth as a sphere. That conception is actually credited to Pythagoras, who, born in Samos probably in 582 B.C., settled in the Dorian colony of Crotona in Southern Italy about 529 and founded the Pythagorean school of philosophy. He (or his school), however, evolved the correct conception of the form of the earth rather by accident (so far as concerns any scientific consideration) than by design, for the Pythagorean reasoning was abstract in nature, in distinction from that of the Ionian school, which sought material explanations for the phenomena of the universe. The Pythagoreans (whose view does not greatly affect the later history of geographical theory) conceived the earth as a globe revolving in space, with other planets, round an unseen central fire whose light was reflected by the sun, just as the moon reflects the sun’s light. Later the philosopher Parmenides, of Elea in Italy (c. 500 B.C.), considered the universe