The Story of Geographical Discovery | Page 9

horizontal strips,
called by him "climates," and determined by the average length of the
longest day in each. This is a very rough method of determining
latitude, but it was probably, in most cases, all that Ptolemy had to
depend upon, since the measurement of angles would be a rare
accomplishment even in modern times, and would only exist among a
few mathematicians and astronomers in Ptolemy's days. With him the
history of geographical knowledge and discovery in the ancient world
closes.
In this chapter I have roughly given the names and exploits of the

Greek men of science, who summed up in a series of systematic records
the knowledge obtained by merchants, by soldiers, and by travellers of
the extent of the world known to the ancients. Of this knowledge, by
far the largest amount was gained, not by systematic investigation for
the purpose of geography, but by military expeditions for the purpose
of conquest. We must now retrace our steps, and give a rough review of
the various stages of conquest. We must now retrace our steps, and give
a rough review of the various stages of conquest by which the different
regions of the Old World became known to the Greeks and the Roman
Empire, whose knowledge Ptolemy summarises.
[Authorities: Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, 2 vols., 1879;
Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, 1897.]
CHAPTER II
THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
In a companion volume of this series, "The Story of Extinct
Civilisations in the East," will be found an account of the rise and
development of the various nations who held sway over the west of
Asia at the dawn of history. Modern discoveries of remarkable interest
have enabled us to learn the condition of men in Asia Minor as early as
4000 B.C. All these early civilisations existed on the banks of great
rivers, which rendered the land fertile through which they passed.
We first find man conscious of himself, and putting his knowledge on
record, along the banks of the great rivers Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris,
Ganges and Yang-tse-Kiang. But for our purposes we are not
concerned with these very early stages of history. The Egyptians got to
know something of the nations that surrounded them, and so did the
Assyrians. A summary of similar knowledge is contained in the list of
tribes given in the tenth chapter of Genesis, which divides all mankind,
as then known to the Hebrews, into descendants of Shem, Ham, and
Japhet--corresponding, roughly, to Asia, Europe, and Africa. But in
order to ascertain how the Romans obtained the mass of information
which was summarised for them by Ptolemy in his great work, we have

merely to concentrate our attention on the remarkable process of
continuous expansion which ultimately led to the existence of the
Roman Empire.
All early histories of kingdoms are practically of the same type. A
certain tract of country is divided up among a certain number of tribes
speaking a common language, and each of these tribes ruled by a
separate chieftain. One of these tribes then becomes predominant over
the rest, through the skill in war or diplomacy of one of its chiefs, and
the whole of the tract of country is thus organised into one kingdom.
Thus the history of England relates how the kingdom of Wessex grew
into predominance over the whole of the country; that of France tells
how the kings who ruled over the Isle of France spread their rule over
the rest of the land; the history of Israel is mainly an account of how
the tribe of Judah obtained the hegemony of the rest of the tribes; and
Roman history, as its name implies, informs us how the inhabitants of a
single city grew to be the masters of the whole known world. But their
empire had been prepared for them by a long series of similar
expansions, which might be described as the successive swallowing up
of empire after empire, each becoming overgrown in the process, till at
last the series was concluded by the Romans swallowing up the whole.
It was this gradual spread of dominion which, at each stage, increased
men's knowledge of surrounding nations, and it therefore comes within
our province to roughly sum up these stages, as part of the story of
geographical discovery.
Regarded from the point of view of geography, this spread of man's
knowledge might be compared to the growth of a huge oyster-shell, and,
from that point of view, we have to take the north of the Persian Gulf as
the apex of the shell, and begin with the Babylonian Empire. We first
have the kingdom of Babylon--which, in the early stages, might be best
termed Chaldæa--in the south of Mesopotamia (or the valley between
the two rivers, Tigris