History of Geography. Sir John Scott Keltie
He has much to tell of the Scythians inhabiting the country north of the Black Sea, but it is difficult to make out exactly to what race they belonged and whither they had wandered; they may have been the forerunners of the Slav peoples. Of Europe to the north of the Danube, and of the Scythian country, he had no information of any importance. He did not believe in the Hyperboreans, nor did he credit the statement that there was any sea north of Europe. He has a good deal to say about Africa. He had been up the Nile as far as the first cataract to the old city of Elephantine, but above that his information is vague and largely erroneous. He knew of the great bend which the Nile takes to the west above Elephantine, and had heard of Meroe on the other side of that bend; but his notion of the length of Africa was so erroneous that, instead of carrying the Nile south into the interior of the continent, he made it rise far to the west and run eastwards before it turned north at Meroe. But he at least controverted the view that it rose in the ocean itself to the south—a belief based possibly on some rumour, transmitted through many lips, of the existence of great lakes towards its headwaters. As for a river flowing west-and-east, in the west of the continent, he had heard of such a river in a story of five Nasamonian youths who travelled south from the shore of the Syrtis, crossed the desert for many days, and were at last taken captive by black men of small stature, who carried them to a city on the banks of this river, whence they were subsequently allowed to return. It has been eagerly discussed what truth underlies this story, and whether the river was the Niger in its upper course; but at best the account added little to the knowledge of distant Africa. The idea of a pygmy people dwelling towards the southern shore of the ocean is older than the Iliad in which it is found (III, 3). Herodotus’s conception of the shape of Africa did not carry its southward extension much beyond the latitude of Cape Guardafui. He discarded the popular conception of the round earth, regarding it as longer from east to west than from north to south. The philosopher Democritus of Abdera (born c. 470–450) exhibited the same conception in a map which he constructed.
An important episode in the progress of a more accurate knowledge of the world of the Greeks was the Retreat of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon in 401–400 B.C. The younger Cyrus had made a great expedition from Sardis, in western Asia Minor, eastwards through the Cilician Gates to the Euphrates, and along the course of that river to the neighbourhood of Babylon. He was accompanied by a band of Greek mercenaries, who, after his defeat at Cunaxa, began the retreat of which Xenophon left a graphic account, containing what must have been to the Greeks much new information concerning the region from the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates northwards past Lake Van and through the mountains of Armenia, north and west to the shores of the Black Sea at Trapezus (Trebizond), and along the south coast of the Black Sea, partly by sea and partly by water, to Byzantium. Xenophon’s story is an illustration of the well-known fact that war is one of the chief means of promoting geographical knowledge. This will appear more clearly in the next important episode in the story of exploration—the campaign of Alexander the Great.
In the interval there were one or two writers from whose work something is to be gathered of Greek geographical knowledge and theory about the middle of the fourth century. The philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) may be referred to here in connection with his story, based on an Egyptian tradition, of the great island of Atlantis, that land which plays so important a part in later mythical geography. In the Egyptian story it lay just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and adjacent to it was an archipelago. This would aid its later identification with the Canaries, though it came also to be connected with America and other known lands besides, as well as giving name to an island in the Atlantic Ocean, the disproof of whose existence may almost be called modern. From Plato’s account of Atlantis as the home of a powerful people who in early times invaded the Mediterranean lands, it has also been sought to associate the tradition with Crete at the period of the Ægean civilization mentioned in the first chapter.
Some fragments exist of the writings of the historian Ephorus of Cyme in Æolis (c. 400–330 B.C.). He seems to have endeavoured to cover the whole field of the world as known to the Greeks, and conceived the four most distant regions of the earth to be occupied on the east by Indians, on the south by Ethiopians, on the north by Scythians, and on the west by Celts. The last he considered as occupying all Spain, as well as Gaul. Strabo (p. 24) commended his geographical work and his skill in separating myth from history. A document of this period is the Periplus, already referred to as known under the name of Scylax. This class of work became more and more common as navigation developed, and corresponded in some measure to the modern Admiralty guide or pilot. The Periplus is confined mostly to the regions known to the Greeks bordering the Mediterranean. From the Pillars of Hercules the writer follows the north coast eastwards, including the Adriatic and the Euxine as far as the mouth of the Tanais, which he regards as the continental boundary. He then follows the Levantine coast, the north African coast westward, and the west African coast as far as the island of Cerne. He incidentally makes what is regarded as the earliest extant mention of Rome; but his notions of rivers and other features away from the coast are generally erroneous.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), in two of his extant works, the Meteorologica and the treatise on the Heavens, revealed something of his ideas on physical geography and the figure of the earth and its relations to the heavenly bodies. He believed the earth to be a sphere in the centre of the universe, because that was a form which matter gravitating towards a centre would necessarily assume, also because the shadow cast by the earth on the moon during an eclipse is circular. He accepted the conclusion that the circumference of the earth was 400,000 stadia (nearly 46,000 miles). His views with reference to the cosmical relations of the earth were the same as those adopted by Eudoxus of Cnidus (fl. middle fourth century), but he did his best to prove them. He adopted, however, the prevalent view that the habitable world was confined to the temperate zone between the tropics and the arctic regions. He believed there must be a temperate zone in the southern hemisphere, though he did not suggest that it must be inhabited. In the Meteorologica he treats of such subjects as weather, rain, hail, earthquakes, etc., and their causes. He recognized that changes took place in the relations of land and sea. His knowledge of the origin and course of rivers and their relation to mountain systems was confused, and mainly erroneous; and it would seem that little progress had been made in geographical knowledge since the time of Herodotus. In the work of Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos (c. 372–287), an important department of geographical study—that of distribution—finds a place in its particular application to plants.
Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), King of Macedon, however, during the last few years of his life, made possible by his campaigns a greater extension of Greek geographical knowledge than had taken place almost since Homeric times. When he passed eastward through Mesopotamia, by Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis, and through Media to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, he was in a region which, though an ancient cradle of civilization, had been till then only vaguely known to the Greeks. Beyond that he entered new country, peopled by Herodotus and others with dubious tribal names. He came almost into the heart of Central Asia, founding a city on the upper course of the Jaxartes. Passing southwards through Bactria and across formidable ranges of mountains such as the Hindu Kush, he struck the upper course of the Indus, made his way down to its delta, and would have proceeded right into the heart of India and followed the Ganges to its mouth but for his mutinous troops. He returned through the north of Baluchistan and Persia to Ecbatana, and so homeward. He also sent a member of his staff, Nearchus, by sea along the coast of Baluchistan and Persia, in order to define it and to ascertain the extent of the Persian Gulf. Dicæarchus of Messana, a pupil of Aristotle, who died early in the third century B.C., used the geographical results of Alexander’s expeditions, including the distances obtained by his bematists, or measurers by pacing. Dicæarchus wrote a topography of Greece, and also drew on a map a parallel or equator, for the first time, so far as is known, along the length of the Mediterranean and, with a distorted idea of their relative directions, along the Taurus and Himalayan ranges. Before his time, and probably contemporaneously with Alexander’s campaigns, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) visited (practically discovered) Britain, and made mention of Thule, six days’ voyage north of it, having perhaps heard of the Orkneys and Shetlands. As these islands, however, are at no such great distance as is here suggested from the nearest point of Britain, the name of Thule has been variously taken to represent some part of Norway, the Faeröe, or Iceland: it certainly seems by some