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We need not attempt any elaborate definition of Geography at this stage; it is hoped that a fairly clear idea of its field and functions may arise during the following brief summary of its history and evolution. The old-fashioned definition, “A description of the earth,” is serviceable enough if accepted in its widest sense. Geography may be regarded as the mother of the sciences. Whatever was the origin of man, whether single or multiple, and wherever he emerged into manhood, he was a wanderer, an explorer, from the first. Necessity compelled him to make himself familiar with his environment and its resources, and as the race multiplied emigration became compulsory. The more that relics of primitive humanity are brought to light, the further back must man’s earliest wanderings be dated. The five thousand years of the old Biblical chronology must be multiplied a hundred times, and still we find that half a million years ago our primitive forefathers must have travelled far from the cradle of the race. They were unconscious geographers. Their conceptions of the earth and of its place in the universe are unknown to us; it is not impossible to infer something of them by analogy of ideas existing to-day among more or less primitive peoples, though to do so is beyond our present scope. Yet it may be said that certain root-ideas of geographical theory and practice must surely date from the earliest period of man’s capacity for observation. Thus the necessity for describing or following a particular direction presupposes the establishment of a definite standard—the face would be turned towards the position of some familiar object; then in that direction and the opposite, and to the right hand and the left, four such standards would be found, and would become the “cardinal points.” The value, for this purpose, of so patent a phenomenon as the rising and setting of the sun must have been impressed upon human intelligence at an elementary stage. Again, map-making is not very far removed from a primitive instinct. Modern travellers have described attempts at cartography by the North American Indians, the Eskimo, and the Maori and other less advanced inhabitants of the Pacific Islands.

Fig. 1.—Tahitian map.

It is again beyond the scope of the present summary of the development of geographical knowledge among European peoples to attempt to give any detailed history of exploration; it is only possible to deal with the salient episodes, and these mainly in so far as they have influenced man’s general conception of the earth. Nevertheless, ages before the existence of any documentary evidence of its development geographical knowledge must have advanced far in other lands. America was “discovered” probably thousands of years before Columbus stumbled against the New World, or even the Norsemen had set foot in “Vineland”; it had time, before the Spaniards swarmed over it, to become the seat of civilizations whose origin is far beyond knowledge. It is worth noticing for our particular purpose that the European conquerors found evidence of highly developed geographical methods both in Central America and in Peru; the native maps were intelligible to them, and the Peruvian Incas had even evolved the idea of relief maps. China, again, a great power in early ages, possessed knowledge of much of central Asia; India was the seat of powerful States and of a certain civilization; Babylonia and Egypt were working out their destinies, and had their own conceptions of the earth and the universe, long before the starting-point of the detailed investigation within our present view.

But the names of Babylonia and Egypt bring us nearer to that starting-point. The history of Europe dawns in the eastern Mediterranean, and so does the history of geography. It has, however, to be premised that connection existed, in very early times, between the eastern Mediterranean circle and the lands far beyond. When princes of Iranian stock (to cite a single illustration) are found established on the confines of the Levant as early as the fifteenth century B.C., it may be realized that the known radius from the Mediterranean centre was no short one. Much earlier than this—even in the fourth millennium B.C.—astronomy, a science of the closest affinity to geography, was well organized in Babylonia, and there is evidence for a cadastral survey there. Clay tablets dating from more than two thousand years B.C. show the work of the Babylonian surveyors.

The Egyptians worked along similar lines. Examples of their map-work include a plan, in the museum at Cairo, showing the basin of the lake Mœris, 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.