world of ancients

Exploration in theWorld of the Ancients

Exploration in theWorld of the Ancients

JOHN S. BOWMAN

JOHN S. BOWMAN and MAURICE ISSERMAN

General Editors

]

D I S C O V E R Y E X P L O R A T I O N&

Exploration in the World of the Ancients

Copyright © 2005 by John S. BowmanMaps © 2005 by Facts On File, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowman, John Stewart, 1931–Exploration in the world of the ancients / John S. Bowman ; Maurice Issermanand John S. Bowman, general editors.

p. cm. —(Discovery and exploration)Summary: Discusses the voyages, navigation routes, and watercraft of ex-

plorers in the ancient world, from prehistoric times to the beginning of theMiddle Ages.Includes bibliographical references (p. ).ISBN 0-8160-5257-3

1. Geography, Ancient—Juvenile literature. 2. Discoveries in geography—Juvenile literature. [1. Geography, Ancient. 2. Discoveries in geography. 3.Explorers.] I. Isserman, Maurice. II. Title. III. Series.G86.B68 2004910'.9'01—dc22 2003023033

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To Francesca

who has supported my explorations all these years

]

Note on Photos{Many of the illustrations and photographs used in this book are old,historical images. The quality of the prints is not always up to currentstandards, as in some cases the originals are from old or poor qualitynegatives or are damaged. The content of the illustrations, however,made their inclusion important despite problems in reproduction.

Preface xi

1 PYTHEAS VOYAGES NORTH 1Ancient Navigation 4Tin Routes, 350 B.C.–A.D. 500 6

Pytheas’s Voyage, ca. 315 B.C. 9

The Kyrenia: An Ancient Ship Salvaged 10

2 THE ORIGINAL EXPLORERS 14Sites Associated with Hominids, 3.5 million–450,000 Years Ago 15

Homo sapiens as Homo explorans 17Sites Associated with Humans in the Americas before 8000 B.C. 21

The First Watercraft 22Discovering the Pacific Islands 26

3 EARLY ANCIENT EXPLORERS 28Egyptians and Ships 30Voyages by Egyptians and Phoenicians, ca. 600–475 B.C. 36

Fictitious Explorations 38Early Mediterranean and Black Sea Routes, ca. 900–350 B.C. 40

4 THE INQUISITIVE GREEKS 44The Amber Routes 46Amber Routes from Baltic to Mediterranean Sea,

1500 B.C.–A.D. 500 47

Contents{

Lost Atlantis 52World as Seen by Herodotus, ca. 450 B.C. 56

5 ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE HELLENISTIC WORLD 59

Journeys of Alexander the Great, 334–325 B.C. 65

The Lighthouse and Library of Alexandria 66Spread of Hellenistic Culture after 323 B.C. 69

The Greek Geographers 70

6 THE EXPANSIVE ROMANS 74All Roads Lead . . . 81Major Roman Roads in Italy, 312 B.C.–A.D. 14 83

Roman Empire in the Time of Augustus, ca. A.D. 14 85

A Roman Road Map 88Trade Routes between the Mediterranean and Asia,

350 B.C.–A.D. 500 90

7 CHINA’S AND ASIA’S ROLE IN EXPLORATION 93Pre-Columbian Asians in the Americas? 96Main Routes of Silk Road, 125 B.C.–A.D. 200 100

Buddhism across Asia 102Spread of Buddhism, 300 B.C.–A.D. 100 104

8 A WORLD CLOSES IN 108The Original Tourist: Pausanias 110Atlantic Islands 112The Inhabited World, ca. A.D. 500 116

Glossary 125Further Information 129Index 133

xi

Upon hearing that there is to be abook about discovery and explorationin the ancient world, many people

express some surprise: “Were there explorersin the ancient world?” “What did they dis-cover?” Such doubts are understandable be-cause there are so many preconceptions andmisconceptions about the nature of discoveryand exploration. Although no single book canset the record straight for everyone, this vol-ume—one in a set that will describe the entirehistory of the discovery and exploration of theworld—should go a long way toward throwinglight on this remote phase of history.

Perhaps the problem starts with the factthat, to put it politely, many people are a bit“shaky” when it comes to ancient history, so itis best to start by defining what is meant bythe ancient world. Usually this is consideredto begin with the first writing systems—whichwould be about 3500 or 3000 B.C. The timebefore that is then termed prehistory, a con-cept that recognizes the written record as thebeginning of “history” as a discipline. To bet-ter understand how the world was actuallyopened up by and to human beings, however,this book does go back before the writtenrecord and recognizes that the first discover-ers and explorers were, in fact, the nameless

people who first moved into so many distantcorners of the earth. Other histories of explo-ration tend to overlook these people. Thisbook takes considerable pride in giving themtheir due.

Then, by longstanding agreement amonghistorians in the Western world at least, the“ancient” period is considered to have endedabout A.D. 500. Various events are traditionallysingled out, but one in particular is regardedas the turning point: The last Roman emperorin the West was deposed in 476 by a Germanicleader, Odoacer. With the end of the Romancontrol of Europe, various tribes began to fightover the territories; Europe began to move intowhat was long known as the Dark Ages.

That concept is now generally rejected andthe more neutral term Middle Ages suffices.But there is no denying that putting an end to“the ancient world” in A.D. 500 still has a Euro-pean or Western bias. True, Huns and Mongolsbegan to move into India and across CentralAsia about this same time, and people in thoselands also experienced difficult times. But notall peoples throughout the world went into aphase of decline. In Central America, forinstance, some Mayan centers moved intotheir classical period; China went throughsome unsettling years, but by 618 entered a

Preface{

\

classical period with the Tang dynasty; Islamwould prove to be a dynamic force in a largepart of the world. Although this volume endsabout A.D. 500, it recognizes that peoples out-side Europe were still on the move.

Then there are the very words discoveryand exploration. Discovery tends to suggestthat no one had been there before, and thiswould hold true for those nameless peoplewho first moved into the various corners ofthe earth. But the concept of discovery of newlands has come to refer to those who firstreported their finds, those who usuallyreturned to their starting points and were thefirst to write about the lands and peoples theyhad just visited. Over and over again, this his-tory makes the point that “discovery” dependson a written account.

But this was not necessarily the report ofthe original discoverer. For that is anothercharacteristic shared by many if not most ofthese stories of ancient discoveries and ex-plorations: Many of the accounts of ancientdiscoveries and explorations are second-hand—that is, if there were original firsthandaccounts, they were long ago lost, and onlyreports of the original survive. Furthermore,the accounts are often fragmentary. Much ofthe evidence comes down to only one record—a passing reference in some text, often onedating from centuries after the alleged event.This often leads scholars—both ancient aswell as modern—to question the historicaltruth of these accounts. This is partly due tothe lack of complete documentation of allaspects of the earliest phases of history: Eitherthose ancient peoples did not see fit to recordall these stories, or the records did not survivethe ravages of the elements and time. In anycase, over and over again throughout thisbook there will be the admission that the truefacts about the explorers and their journeysmust remain somewhat in question.

There is another reason that these ancientpeoples’ voyages are sometimes not recog-nized as discoveries and explorations: Theydid not have much deliberate concern for orconscious awareness of opening up the worldfor posterity, for all humankind. The individu-als or expeditions went forth to gain someadvantage for their sponsors—usually rulers,and neither the explorers nor the sponsorsshowed much interest in assembling objec-tive knowledge and making it available to theworld at large. In fact, knowledge of newplaces was often jealously guarded for fearthat other people might try to gain access tothe land and its resources. Rather than givetrue reports, the first people to discover newlands often circulated stories of wild creaturesand dangerous features to frighten off others.

The ancient Phoenicians were particularlynotorious for guarding their knowledge ofnew routes and locales and resources. Theywanted to maintain a monopoly in the tradeof tin, for example, which they imported fromthe British Isles. There is even a storyrecounted by the ancient Greek historianStrabo of a Phoenician ship captain who real-ized he was being followed by a Roman shipwhile he was making his way to the BritishIsles to get a load of tin. Rather than reveal thesource of the tin, the Phoenician deliberatelyled the Roman ship onto a shoal where bothships were wrecked. After he made his wayback to the Phoenician colony at Gades,Spain, the captain was rewarded by the gov-ernment for his loss.

There was one ancient people, though,who stand out as exceptions to most of thesepractices. A people who showed an interest inthe earth other than what it might yield incommercial exploitation. Who did attempt togather facts about the world beyond their ownimmediate spheres of trade and power. Aboveall, who wrote down and circulated as much

xii B Exploration in the World of the Ancients

information as they could about the world,both known and unknown. That people wasthe ancient Greeks.

Yet not even the ancient Greeks, with a fewexceptions, set out deliberately for the sake of“pure” discovery and exploration. And thatraises the issue of just what is meant byexplorers. In the strict sense, it is intended toidentify an individual who consciously setsout primarily to find places unknown at leastto large numbers of people and then to makethese places known, probably through somewritten account. In fact, as will becomeapparent almost from the beginnings ofrecorded history, many people now creditedas “explorers” set out with quite differentgoals. Especially in the ancient world, most ofthe voyages and expeditions involved peoplessearching for land to possess, for naturalresources (often metals) to exploit, and fortrade markets to develop. Others were under-taken simply to encourage better diplomaticrelations—although again, probably with aneye on increasing trade. And some were reallymilitary campaigns, undertaken for conquest.

Yet many of the individuals who con-ducted these expeditions have come to behonored as explorers. Just as eventually indi-viduals with still other goals—a desire forglory, a love of excitement and danger, a wishto convert others to some religious faith, oreven just the sheer pleasure of travel—arehonored as explorers.

Because the history of ancient explorationis by definition a subject that has been aroundfor a long time, it is not one that lends itself tomuch scholarly revision or debate or contro-versy. There are continual discussions ofdetails at the edges of the subject, but nomajor scholarly revisions. Many of thedebates about ancient exploration, for thatmatter, have been going on even since ancienttimes. Questions of the trustworthiness of

certain accounts, debates over whether cer-tain claims can be accepted—these can befound in some of the oldest texts about voy-ages and journeys.

It is interesting to note, in that respect, thatthe standard histories of the subject todayhave been around for many decades. HenryTozer’s A History of Ancient Geography wasfirst published in 1897—and continues to beconstantly republished. Cary and Warming-ton’s The Ancient Explorers was first pub-lished in 1929. H. E. Burton’s Discovery of theAncient World was published in 1932, and J.Oliver Thomson’s History of Ancient Geogra-phy was published in 1948. They do not differmuch from one another, and all the articlesand encyclopedia entries (and now Web sites)for the general public tend pretty much todraw on these works. Unlike many phases inthe history of exploration that do provokeconstant investigation and controversy, thereis little of this among serious scholars of theancient world. The ancient world might becharacterized as a “finite” system.

There is, however, another side to the storyof ancient exploration that has come alive inrelatively recent years and that does seem toprovide constant debate, even excitement.And because it is the kind of excitement that ismost apt to appeal to young people, it deservessome recognition here. This is the aspect ofexploration that confuses the scholarly andauthoritative uncertainties about the historyof discovery and exploration with exaggeratedclaims for the possible or imaginative or fabu-lous. Thus there are claims of searches and dis-coveries of vanished civilizations and peoplesof ancient times—Atlantis and Mu and suchplaces. There are claims of visitors from outerspace or supernatural beings who have onceinhabited parts of the earth.

Above all, there are the claims for all thepeoples who “discovered” the Americas hun-

Preface B xiii

dreds and even thousands of years before Co-lumbus arrived there. Just limiting the can-didates to people from the ancient world,these include: Atlanteans (people from LostAtlantis), Assyrians, Basque, Canaanites, Cata-lans, Celts, Chinese, Cro-Magnons, Egyptians,Etruscans, Gauls, Greeks, Hindus, Huns,Israelites (the Lost Tribes), Lemurians (fromthe lost continent of Mu), Libyans, Madagas-cans, ancestral Mormons, Phoenicians, Ro-mans, Scythians, Tartars, Trojans, and Welsh.The proponents of these peoples offer all kindsof “evidence,” from inscriptions and coins tolinguistic and cultural similarities, and theirclaims appear in an endless stream of articlesand books, on the Internet, and even on rep-utable TV programs. Sometimes the cases arepresented in “fuzzy” ways that, although notmaking an explicit or absolute claim to be true,would leave uninformed minds thinking that,“Well, it must be true.” This is especially sowhen these claims are accompanied by vividillustrations and apparently authoritative“experts” promoting these claims.

Now these claims are not to be confusedwith the openly admitted fabulous and imag-inative tales of voyages and journeys. Theseare as old as the earliest literature—indeed,some of the oldest texts known involve justsuch fabulous journeys, some of which thisbook discusses. Nor should these modernclaims be confused with true scholarly differ-ences or debates. Thus, not all authorities tothis day agree on exactly when the firsthuman beings crossed over into the Americas.Not all authorities agree on what lands arereferred to in ancient Egyptian texts. Not allauthorities agree on whether all the voyagesdescribed in ancient Greek texts can be takenliterally. A healthy skepticism is the nature oftrue scholarship, and it is a theme of this bookthat it can be instructive to be aware of thiskind of uncertainty and debate.

Moreover, because these popular claimsare so readily available in the media thesedays—on TV and the Internet, in particular—and because they clearly do catch the atten-tion of young people, this history takesaccount of them and, wherever relevant, dis-cusses these fabulous ancient tales of LostAtlantis, of pre-Columbian visitors to theAmericas, of questionable Chinese travelers’journeys. It takes them seriously so that read-ers can understand the difference betweendubious claims and true knowledge.

Some of these questionable claims aretreated in the short essays in the boxes, orsidebars, a feature of this book designed ex-pressly to discuss topics that supplement themain narrative. Maps, of course, are indispen-sable in any presentation of discovery and ex-ploration, which by their very nature involvegeography, land and seas. Specially createdmaps are provided to show clearly all themajor areas and routes. Illustrations, too, helpto provide a more physical dimension to thesubject matter. Here a somewhat specialproblem arises because there are no contem-porary pictures of the ancient explorers orships or events discussed. Considerable efforthas been made, however, to gather as manyrelevant illustrations as possible—some espe-cially taken for this book. Yet another specialdimension to any discussion of the ancientworld is that the subject involves foreign peo-ples and cultures, and so many unfamiliarterms and words must be used. The glossaryprovides a handy way to remain constantlyaware of the meanings of these words.

Finally, to aid those who would like to fol-low up on any of the topics—which inevitablyin a book such as this can be discussed rela-tively briefly—the “Further Information” sec-tion offers a list of books that might beconsulted for more detailed presentations.And it includes not only works of nonfiction.

xiv B Exploration in the World of the Ancients

It has long been accepted that good novelscan sometimes capture the true flavor of his-torical periods, events, and personages as wellif not better than nonfiction, so the listincludes a selection of some of the better nov-els dealing at least peripherally with thesematters. There are now many excellent docu-mentaries and educational films about sub-jects in this book, and the list provides thenames of a number of the more relevant filmsavailable on videos (and now DVDs). Also,recognizing that many people today enjoyobtaining their information from the Internet,the list provides a selection of some of the

more informative sites. There are scores moreWeb sites, but as indicated above, in referringto the claims made for all kinds of fancifulexplorers, the Internet must be used judi-ciously.

One of the goals of this book, in fact, is toconvince readers that the true story of discov-ery and exploration in the ancient world is atleast as fascinating as those wild claims. Inleading readers along this exciting narrativetrail, the book’s ultimate goal is to give themthe sense of making their own journey of dis-covery and exploration.

Preface B xv

About 315 B.C., Pytheas, a citizen ofthe Greek colony of Massalia, on theMediterranean coast of France, head-

ed his ship westward to the Pillars of Her-cules. This was the ancient Greeks’ name forthe Strait of Gibraltar, the body of water

between Gibraltar and North Africa. (A Greekmyth claimed that Hercules had placed tworocks to guard the strait.) To pass throughthis strait at that period of history was amajor undertaking by a ship captain: Itmeant heading for the uncharted waters

1

Pytheas Voyages North

1{

\

The Rock of Gibraltar, just off the south coast of Spain, was considered by the ancient Greeks as one of the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which lay the ocean largely unknown to ancient Mediterranean mariners and generally regarded as a mysterious region. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-108739])

and unknown lands of the North Atlanticregion. But Pytheas had set his sights on justsuch a voyage.

Even before he reached the Pillars of Her-cules, Pytheas faced potential dangers. Mas-salia had been founded about 600 B.C. byGreeks from the city of Phocea on the coast ofAsia Minor (modern Foca, in Turkey) and in

the centuries since had grown and prosperedas a center of Greek culture and commerce inthe western Mediterranean. Located just eastof the mouth of the Rhone River, Massaliaserved as an entrepôt, or trading center, formerchants from all over the Mediterraneanand merchants who came down the Rhonefrom northwestern Europe.

2 B Exploration in the World of the Ancients

The old port of Marseilles, France, here seen in a late 19th-century photo, might well have looked somewhatlike this about 315 B.C. when it was known as Massalia and Pytheas sailed from it and headed for the AtlanticOcean. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsc-05118])

During those same centuries, another cityon the opposite shore of the Mediterraneanhad also grown powerful and prosperous. Thiswas Carthage, on the coast of North Africa(modern Tunisia) almost due south of Mas-salia. Carthage had been founded about 750B.C. by Phoenicians from the eastern coast ofthe Mediterranean—modern Lebanon. The

Carthaginians were an assertive people, deter-mined to dominate the maritime traffic andcommerce in the western Mediterranean.(Within 50 years the Carthaginians would befighting Rome for mastery of the westernMediterranean.) Carthaginians had establishedtheir own colonies along the coast of Spain,and they did not take kindly to the Greeks whoalso wanted a share of the commerce.

In particular, their colony of Gades (mod-ern Cadiz), on the coast of Spain just outsidethe Pillars of Hercules, was positioned to cutoff Greeks or others who might seek to sail outof the Mediterranean. Pytheas made his wayalong the south coast of France, down the eastcoast of Spain, through the Pillars of Hercules,and then along the southern coast of Spainand Portugal. He must have been very cleveror lucky to avoid any conflict with Carthagini-ans because ships in those days sailed androwed quite close to the coast during the day.

Pytheas’s ship, by the way, was most likelya merchant, or cargo, ship, not a warship.Those were the two major types of ships atthis time. Warships were designed for speedand strength and were relatively shallow, long,and trim; they were propelled by many oars-men. This type of ship would not have beenpractical for a long voyage. Merchant shipswere designed to hold cargo and so weredeeper, broader, and sturdy; most were pro-pelled by one large sail attached to a centralmast, but some merchant ships also had sev-eral oarsmen on each side. Both warships andmerchant ships were steered mainly by largeoars at the stern, or the rear, of the ships.

For a journey as ambitious as that of Pyth-eas, his ship probably had oarsmen—perhaps10 on each side. His total crew may have beenabout 30 men. The oarsmen enabled the shipto make some progress during the hours whenthere was no favorable wind. Even so, the shipprobably only averaged about five or six miles

Pytheas Voyages North B 3

an hour, so that on a long day they mightcover some 50 miles. The energy expended onkeeping such a ship moving must haverequired a fair amount of calories and liquidsfor the crew, so they had to pull their shipashore each night to replenish their food andwater supplies.

THE JOURNEYOnce past the southwestern corner of theIberian Peninsula, Pytheas sailed northwardalong the Atlantic coast of Portugal and north-western Spain. Arriving at the Bay of Biscay, healmost certainly stayed fairly close to the coastof France until he arrived at the great promon-tory of Brittany. Proceeding along it, hereached the island of Ushant, the western-most territory of modern France. At that point

he had to make one of his longest “runs” in theopen sea—some 100 miles, a solid 24-hourtrip, to reach the southwestern coast of Eng-land. Once there he proceeded to the regionknown to him as Belerion, today known asLand’s End, the promontory of Cornwall, Eng-land’s southwesternmost region.

Pytheas may not have been the firstMediterranean mariner to have sailed thisroute, although he would be the first to pro-vide a written report of many of the featuresof the coast. (The book he wrote has neverbeen found, but during the following cen-turies many ancient writers quoted from it.)When Pytheas reached England, his voyagebecomes a major contribution to the historyof exploration. The people of the Mediter-ranean had only the vaguest notion of thelands in northwestern Europe, especially the


Ancient Navigation =

In the thousands of years before Pytheas that humans had been sailing theopen seas, and for at least another 1,500 years, the knowledge, skills, anddevices used for navigating ships hardly changed. Most mariners basicallydepended on dead reckoning—estimates of their location at sea based onsome sense of a distance traveled and the time elapsed, modified by such mat-ters as position of the sun and the strength of the winds. Furthermore, theydepended on a store of common knowledge (e.g., familiar landmarks, the risingand setting of the sun, and the positions of certain stars and planets).

In the Mediterranean, except for coastal trips, most ship traffic ceased byabout November 1 and did not start in again until April: Ship owners and crewssimply did not want to take the risk of running into foul weather. Even duringthe sailing months, ships never needed to be much more than 150 miles fromshore. But at an average of five knots an hour, that was still a solid 30-hour trip,and that meant sailing at night and navigating by the stars. Although experi-enced navigators knew how to do this, most ships pulled into shore or at leastsafe harbors at night.

Knowing familiar landmarks such as promontories or cliffs or populated sitesand human constructions was not enough: Navigators had to know what the

\

islands later to be known as the British Isles.What they did know, though, is that a particu-lar material came from somewhere in thatregion: tin.

Tin was among the scarcest and most val-ued products sought by the peoples of theMediterranean. For some 3,000 years, theyhad been mixing tin with copper to form adurable alloy, bronze. Bronze was used formaking everything from weapons to religiousobjects, from armor to jewelry, from tools to coins, from statues to drinking vessels.Copper was relatively plentiful around theMediterranean, but tin was obtainable fromonly a few sources. For some centuries, tinhad been imported into the Mediterraneanregion from northwestern Spain and theBritish Isles. After being extracted from itsrocky ore, the metal was transported overland

through Spain or France to the shores of theMediterranean.

Massalia was one of the major trading cen-ters for tin, but most of the Mediterraneansinvolved in this trade had little knowledge of itsplaces of origin. They were dependent on themiddlemen who transferred it from its source,and this added considerably to the price. Therewere rumors of rich tin mines on islands in thatnorthern ocean; indeed, the Greeks’ word for“tin,” kassiteros, had been given to the distantislands believed to be the source of tin, theCassiterides. Evidently some of the merchantsof Massalia wanted to make direct contact withthose miners, and that seems to have been oneof the chief goals of Pytheas’s expedition—to find those tin mines. When Pytheas arrivedat the islands off Cornwall, he was convincedhe had found that place.


possible hazards were when approaching shore—reefs, rocks, treacherous cur-rents. All such knowledge was learned by experience and then passed on byword of mouth.

The document known as a periplus—literally, a “sailing around”—was littlemore than a list of places along the coast and would not come into use untilabout 500 B.C. Likewise, the astrolabe—an instrument that could be used tofind the latitude—although it may have been invented by about 200 B.C., did notcome into general use for many centuries later.

Probably the only instrument or device that these early navigators used wasa sounding rod, or line. To measure the depth of the water at any given point,they dropped down a line with a lead weight until it hit bottom. The more sophis-ticated lead weights had a little hollow at the bottom that was filled with tallowor grease. When it was brought to the surface, it revealed the nature of the oceanfloor at that point, and experienced navigators could tell a lot from this.

In the Greek language, the helmsman of a ship who also served as the navi-gator was known as a kybernetes—“governor.” This became the root of themodern word cybernetics—the science of control and communications pro-cesses, and this in turn has provided the prefix, cyber- for any number of wordsinvolving “navigation” by computers. So it is that today’s most advanced tech-nology links itself to the basic but intelligent skills of ancient navigation.


Ictis(St. Michael’s Mount)

Brigantium

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Bay ofBiscay

NorthSea

Mediterranean Sea

Senus R.

Liger R.

Duranius R.

Iberus R.

Durius R.

Tagus R.

Garunna R.

Arar R

.

Rho

danu

sR

.

Sequana R.

Baetis R.

Anas R.

P Y R E N E E S

CarcassonneGap

BELERION (LAND’S END)

Main tin routes

Main connecting land routes

Sea route ca. 350 B.C.

Overland route from 350 B.C.

through Roman times

0 200 miles

0 200 km

N

Tin Routes, 350 B.C.–A.D. 500

LugdunumLugdunum(Lyon)(Lyon)

Emporiae(Ampurias)

Lindum(Lincoln)

Eburacum(York)

Deva(Chester)

Glevum(Gloucester)

Londinium(London)

IscaDumnoniorum(Exeter)

PortusNamnetum(Nantes)

Burdigala(Bordeaux)

Tolosa(Toulouse)

Lugdunum(Lyon)

Massalia(Marseille)

NarboMartius(Narbonne)Emporiae

(Ampurias)

Tarraco

Pompaela(Pamplona)

Brigantium(La Coruña)

IriaFlavia

Ictis(St. Michael’s Mount)

In fact, he soon discovered that the tinmines were on the mainland of Cornwall, andPytheas would describe the process:

They extract the tin from its bed by a cun-ning process. The bed is of rock, but con-tains earthy interstices, along which theycut a gallery. Having melted the tin andrefined it, they hammer it into knuckleboneshape and convey it to an adjacent islandnamed Ictis [possibly St. Michael’s Mountoff the coast of Cornwall].

Having satisfied himself that he had foundthe source of the tin—and possibly loaded hisboat with some—Pytheas then sailed com-pletely around Great Britain. His reported

measurement of the coastline—based on esti-mates of the length of land passed in his dailyvoyage—was surprisingly exact, and he got onething right: “Britain is triangular like Sicily, withthree unequal sides.” And he did more than sailalong the coast; although most scholars cannotaccept his claim that “I traversed the whole ofBritannike accessible by foot,” he does seem tohave made occasional visits into the interior,and he reported on the people he encountered:

The inhabitants of Britain are said to havesprung from the soil and to preserve a prim-itive style of life. They make use of chariotsin war, such as the ancient Greek heroes arereputed to have employed in the TrojanWar; and their habitations are rough-and-


St. Michael’s Mount lies just off Cornwall, the southwestern tip of England, and is considered by some scholars to be the isle of Ictis that Pytheas referred to as the port from which tin was shipped. (Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsc-08234])

ready, being for the most part constructedof wattles or logs. . . . They are simple intheir habits and far removed from the cun-ning and knavishness of modern man.

When he reached the northern coast ofScotland, he was told about the island ofThule, which he claimed was six days’ sailnorth of Britain. He did not venture that far,but he did report that around Thule “there isneither sea nor air but a mixture like sea-lung,in which earth and air are suspended.” Exactlywhat he meant by “sea-lung” would never beknown for sure; some say he was describingjellyfish, some say slush-ice, but very likely hewas describing the thick, clammy fogs of the North Atlantic. He also described large fish blowing out sprays of water—obviouslywhales. As for Thule itself, some claim it is Ice-land, others Norway, still others the ShetlandIslands. In any case, he also reported thatThule was so far north that, in the middle of

summer, the sun went down for only two orthree hours. In general, much of what Pytheaswould describe and report was a mixture ofthe truth and misunderstanding.

After completing his encirclement ofBritain, Pytheas returned across the Channelto the coast of France or Belgium, then sailednorth along the coasts of the Netherlands andGermany. Exactly how far northeastward hesailed is not known, for the names he assignedto the geographic features he saw cannot beattached with any certainty to known featurestoday. But it does appear he moved into theNorth Sea, possibly as far as the mouth of theElbe River, where he probably turned backwhen he confronted the great peninsulatopped by Denmark.

In any case, he retraced his voyage homeby sticking close to the coast of westernEurope and appears to have arrived safelyhome in Massalia. His journey had coveredsome 7,500 miles, longer than Christopher


The monumental Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England is thought to date from at least1900 B.C., but there is no suggestion that Pytheas was even aware of it. Exactly who built it and why is notknown, but some reputable scholars believe it was built by practitioners of the Druidic religion who may haveused it to make astronomical calculations to time their observances. (© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)


BurdigalaBurdigala

Orcades(Orkney Is.)

HIERIYOHIERIYO(IRELAND)(IRELAND)

ALBIONALBION(BRITIAN)(BRITIAN)

ARMORICAARMORICA(Brittany)(Brittany)

TARTESSOS

Sardinia

Corsica

Balearic Is.

Sicily

Orcades(Orkneys)

Faroes

Jutland

Shetlands

Outer

Hebrid

esATLANTIC OCEAN

North

Sea

Mediterranean SeaPilllars ofHercules

Pytheas’s Voyage, ca. 315 B.C.

Massalia

Rome

Burdigala

Emporion

Gades

Nantes

Belerion

Carthage 0 400 miles

0 400 km

Commonly accepted route

Possible alternative routes

N

HIERIYO(IRELAND)

ALBION(BRITAIN)

ICELAND

NORWAY

GALACIA

TARTESSOS

ARMORICA(Brittany)

SSEEMMIITTIIRRAAMMSSEEPPLLAASEMITIRAMSEPLA

ONEROMARREIS

Columbus’s roundtrips to the New World. Butunlike Columbus’s voyage, what happened asa result of Pytheas’s voyage is unknown. Thereis no evidence of much of anything changingin the tin trade, for instance. As for Pytheas, hevanishes from history. Even the book or reporthe wrote about his voyage did not survive inits original copy.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PYTHEASNothing is known about Pytheas before orafter his voyage. He is known only from allu-

sions to him and quotations attributed to himby several ancient Greek and Roman writers—primarily Diodorus Siculus (fl. 60–20 B.C.),Strabo (ca. 63 B.C.–A.D. ca. 24), and Pliny theElder (A.D. 23–79). Ironically, several of theancients who describe Pytheas regarded himas a liar—that is, they did not believe he hadmade the voyage or discovered the things hedescribed. Although some of these ancientwriters quote long passages from the reportwritten by Pytheas—it is these secondhandquotations that have been cited here—no partof the original has survived. This in itself is notthat unusual: There are many famous individ-


The Kyrenia =AN ANCIENT SHIP SALVAGED

There is a ship dating from about the time of Pytheas that actually exists to thisday. In 1967, a Greek-Cypriot sponge-diver was diving in the Mediterranean offthe coast of Kyrenia, Cyprus, when he saw on the sea bottom what looked likethe wreck of a ship and its cargo. Ancient shipwrecks have been found else-where in the Mediterranean before and since, but they yielded only smallremains and incomplete knowledge. By the time skilled underwater archaeolo-gists had raised the “Kyrenian ship,” they had salvaged what was not only theoldest Greek vessel discovered to that time but also the best-preserved ship ofthe classical Greek world. Using the most advanced methods known, they wereable to save almost 75 percent of the ship because its wood was fairly well pre-served under a layer of sand.

The ship, made of Aleppo pine, was some 47 feet long and 14 feet wide. Itwas a merchant ship, and its cargo included about 400 amphorae, the large clayurns used throughout the Mediterranean to ship wine and oil. On this ship, theurns were evidently also storing almonds. Stone querns, or large grindingstones, were found, as were bronze coins. In the bow of the ship were recoveredsome plates, bowls, ladles, sieves, a copper cauldron, salt dishes, oil jugs, cupsand wooden spoons; it is assumed they belonged to the crew. After scientificdating of the various elements, scientists determined that the ship sank about290 B.C. but was built about a century before that.

The Kyrenia, as it came to be called, after the wood was treated in such a waythat preserved it, was reconstructed in a museum in Kyrenia, Cyprus, where all

\

uals from the ancient world about whomnothing is known except from references invarious texts. But there are enough consistentreferences to Pytheas that modern scholarsare convinced such a man did exist. All whowrote about Pytheas located him in Massalia,and they seem to place his voyage sometimebetween 325 and 305 B.C. His name suggestshe was a Greek, and he was almost certainly ofGreek descent, but considering that theGreeks had been settled in Massalia sinceabout 600 B.C., and that various other peopleslived in the immediate environs, he may wellhave been of mixed heritage.

If so little is known of the man, why do allwho write about the beginnings of explorationin the ancient world devote so many words toPytheas? Why does he stand as an archetypalfigure of the explorer?

Some of the ancient texts suggest thatPytheas was a relatively poor man, that hewas of no great distinction, but simply under-took the voyage as a commercial venture. It then has been suggested that he must have had the backing of wealthier merchantsin Massalia who wanted Pytheas to locate the exact sources of tin so they could pur-chase this directly and so outmaneuver the


This ancient Greek vase is a distinctive type,the amphora; relatively large, its two handlesallowed a person to pour out wine or otherliquids. For transporting wine at sea, plainclay amphorae were used. This one, fordomestic use, is in the black-figured style,with black figures on the light background—here depicting a shoemaker’s shop. (Libraryof Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-107428])

the artifacts found with it are also to be seen. In 1985, a replica, named KyreniaII, was launched in Piraeus, Greece, and in 1987 sailed from Cyprus to Greece ona trial run voyage. The ship endured two storms but completed the journey in20 days. Since then it has sailed at various events around the world, includingthe centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty in New York City in 1986.

The Kyrenia probably differed considerably from Pytheas’s ship because itwas not designed for a long voyage on theocean, but it remains an amazing survivor ofthat period of maritime history.

Carthaginians in their attempt to monopolizethe tin trade. Not only that, the Massaliansmight then eliminate the middlemen involvedin the overland route down across France.

In any case, it seems almost certain thatPytheas must have been at least partiallymotivated by the prospects of profit. If not aprosperous merchant himself, he must haveappreciated what lay in store for him shouldhe complete such a voyage. At the same time,it is highly unlikely that a poor man could everhave been able to finance the ship and crewnecessary for such an expedition. So if he wasrelatively poor, he must have had enough of areputation that the merchants of Massaliasupported him.

Whoever he was, whatever motivated himto undertake such a voyage, he must havebeen a master mariner. Sailing a ship for thou-sands of miles in those days was no easyfeat—most ships never sailed that far fromtheir home ports. Although the Mediter-ranean Sea extended some 2,200 miles fromthe eastern shores to the Pillars of Herculesand 600 miles at its widest, most ships at thistime would never have considered trying tosail to such distant shores. They loaded andunloaded their cargoes at various intermedi-ate ports. In any case, they put into familiarand safe harbors at night. They never ven-tured that far from coasts, and they knew thevarious landmarks. When navigational skillswere called for, they knew the winds, theyknew the stars, they knew the dangers lurkingbeneath the waves. But Pytheas sailed intocompletely unknown, uncharted seas. Therewere no maps or charts, no familiar land-marks, no way to know about the reefs orrocks as he approached a shore. He had to bea master mariner, a master navigator.

Some of those who wrote about him, inaddition to referring to him as a mastermariner, treated him as a serious astronomer.

They credited him with asserting—right-fully—that there was no star precisely over theNorth Pole. At least one ancient text thatreferred to him said that he set off on his voy-age to confirm this claim. He was one of thefirst known people to have connected theinfluence of the moon to the rise and fall ofthe tides. Also, by carefully calculating thechanging position of the sun and the resultantlength of shadows, he was able to calculate thelatitude of Massalia quite accurately. On hisvoyage, he also recorded the lengthening ofthe days as they proceeded northward, and byobserving the height of the Sun, he calculatedthe latitude at various points along the way.Many geographers and mapmakers who fol-lowed Pytheas used his latitude for Massaliaas the basis for calculating the latitudes ofother points in the known world.

There was another skill that Pytheas musthave had. It was not enough to guide a shipsafely through hundreds of miles of ocean.The ship had a crew—exactly how many is notknown, but most likely about 30, includingoarsmen, sail crew, and officers. These menhad to be provided with adequate food anddrink, day after day. They put into shore everynight and probably often stayed several dayswhile they replenished their food supplies—sending out hunting parties and water seek-ers. Men probably got sick or injured. His shipmust have occasionally required repairs.Often he had to deal with the native inhabi-tants. He probably carried some valuablecargo that he could use as barter, that is, totrade for vital supplies. So Pytheas had to be agood administrator of such an expedition.This meant not just satisfying material needs.He must have been a good leader of men,someone who could inspire his crew to keepgoing, to persevere against all odds.

In recent times, some speak of Pytheas asthough he was a lone adventurer, setting out


to explore for the sake of exploration, for thesheer sake of revealing the unknown, of find-ing what lay back of beyond. That is probablytoo modern a notion of such a man and suchan expedition. But there had to be somethingof the adventurer in Pytheas. No one couldhave forced him to undertake such a voyage.Meanwhile, there must have been hundreds,even thousands of mariners in Massalia whodid not choose to go. He had to have somespecial spark, some special vision. And he cer-tainly had to have courage—the willingness toset forth into the unknown, the guts to face allthat nature and humans might throw at him.Physical strength, too: Although there mighthave been an element of good luck for men ofhis era to survive and endure, Pytheas musthave overcome hardships of many kinds:storms at sea, cold and wetness, lack of properfoods, and occasional accidents and injuries.

It turns out, then, that Pytheas must havecombined in himself many of the main ele-ments that will be found in explorers not onlyin the ancient world but also in explorersacross the ages and of all cultures. Not allexplorers had all these qualities and charac-teristics and skills, but they had to have someof them. Some would be driven primarily bythe profit motive, often expressed as a desireto seek gold. But even if they had that personalgoal, many like Pytheas needed to gain thesupport of others, whether fellow seekers afterpersonal profit or rulers who wanted the prof-its for their realms. Like Pytheas, almost allexplorers had to have the knowledge and skillseither to navigate ships or conduct expedi-tions across unknown terrain. They had to beable to organize the logistics of an expedi-tion—provide the food and shelter needed,maintain the ships or the animals. They had tobe able to inspire their “teams,” to hold themembers of their expeditions togetherthrough thick and thin. Some explorers, it is

true, were motivated by an almost pure desirefor understanding the world—advancing thesciences, adding to knowledge, enlarging theknown. But all must have had some sense ofadventure. Even the most scientific of explor-ers had to have something that took them outof the library or the laboratory to set forth andconfront unknown physical challenges. So allhad to have some form of courage. Possibly,too, they had a touch of ego to think that theycould carry off what lesser men might not beup to undertaking.

Finally, what links Pytheas to many of thegreat explorers who followed, but distin-guishes him from most who went before him,is that he does seem to have written anaccount of his voyage. He was wrong aboutmany of the details he described. He was notbelieved by many of his contemporaries. Butthe point was that he brought these dim anddistant lands into the light of human aware-ness. It was not enough to travel bravely todistant lands. Unless some record was made,some report, even contemporaries would notknow for certain what lay out there, and pos-terity would definitely not know. There havebeen explorers who have personally shown lit-tle or no interest in recording their discoveriesor their own role in daring expeditions. Butone way or another, someone must set downan account for the world to profit, to add to itssteadily enlarging realm of the known.

Most explorers before Pytheas did notrecord their adventures, but this does notmean that the world had not been explored.Clearly there were people living all over theearth by the time Pytheas made his voyage of“discovery.” Before giving credit to the manybrave explorers known to have preceded andfollowed Pytheas, it seems necessary to recog-nize the many anonymous and unsung peo-ple who were truly the first to open up theworld.


Pytheas, the ancient Greek marinerwho figures so prominently in his-tories of exploration, was by no

means the first person to travel in the regionshe explored. Rather, he owes his fame to the fact that he wrote about his voyage, andso brought his activities into the light of his-tory. But there is another lesson that such avoyage of “discovery” brings to the fore: Thelands Pytheas visited and explored wereinhabited.

This is true for many if not most of theindividuals honored as “discoverers” andexplorers throughout history. They were notthe first human beings to be present in thelands and waters associated with their namesand feats. This is as true of the oldest knownancient explorers as with the 20th century’sgreat explorers. Except for expeditions in thepolar regions and space, most explorers havebeen going into regions already inhabited ortraveled—perhaps not completely or denselypopulated, perhaps not frequently or thor-oughly traveled. But human beings had longbeen settled throughout many parts of theworld before writing began to record thenames of explorers for history.

The ancient world, as mentioned previ-ously, is usually defined as beginning with the first appearance of writing. This majorthreshold in human culture differs for various regions of the world, but it does tendto appear about the same time in manyplaces—about 3500 to 3000 B.C. That is whenwriting or at least characters, symbols, ordrawings of some kind appear to be recordinginformation.

Before that time is what is known as pre-history, and tools, bones, hearth remains, andother kinds of physical evidence are needed to trace the presence of human beings for this period. At that point, archaeologists andphysical anthropologists usually take overfrom historians. They are the ones who findout when and where human beings firstappeared. And it can be argued that it is thesefirst human beings in each part of the worldwho deserve to be known as the first discover-ers and explorers.

THE EARLIEST EXPLORERSThe earliest ancestors of human beings areclassified as hominids, and virtually all

14

The Original Explorers

2{

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authorities agree that the hominids emergedin East and South Africa. Depending on thecharacteristics that scientists and othersrequire to define a “human being,” the firstprimitive ancestors known as Homo erectus(“erect man”) appeared about 1.8 millionyears ago. Not long after that, these primitive

beings began to show up in places farremoved from their original sites, specificallyin China, India, and Java. (Some even claimthat Homo erectus remains are found inJapan.) Again, most experts believe that theseprimitive hominids made their way up Africa’seast coast, across Egypt—or somehow crossed

The Original Explorers B 15

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1.2.3.4.5.6.7.

8.9.

10.11.12.13.14.

15.16.17.18.19.20.

Hadar (Ethiopia) 3,200,000Gona (Ethiopia) 2,550,000Turkana (Kenya) 1,600,000Olduvai (Tanzania) 1,850,000Laetoli (Tanzania) 3,500,000Swartkrans (South Africa) 1,500,000Sterkfontein (South Africa) 2,000,000

Ternifine (Algeria) 600,000Sidi Abdettahman(Morocc0) 600,000Thomas Quarries (Morocco) 600,000Ubeidiya(Israel) 1,400,000Dmanisi (Georgia) 1,800,000Atapuerca(Spain) 780,000Orce (Spain) 1,000,000

Ceprano (Italy) 800,000Java (Indonesia) 1,200,000Longgpu (China) 1,800,000Zhoukoudian (China) 450,000Lantien (China) 800,00Yuanmou (China) 600,000

N

Shown here are some of the major sites throughout the world where fossil finds show that hominids— ancestors of human beings—were present at times between 3,500,000 to 450,000 years ago. The modern countries are in parentheses; the figures approximate numbers of years ago the finds are dated.

Sites Associated with Hominids, 3.5 million–450,000 Years Ago

A F R I C A

A S I A

E U R O P E

A U S T R A L I A

INDIAN OCEAN

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Mediterranean Sea

CaspianSea

Nile R.

Zaire

R.

Euphrates R.

TigrisR.

Yangtze R.

Huang

He R.

the narrowest straits of the Red Sea and thePersian Gulf—and then wandered all the wayacross Asia. Until relatively recently, it was notthought that such early beings moved all theway into Europe, but sites such as those in theSierra de Atapurca and Orce, Spain, andCeprano, Italy, have yielded human fossils andother remains indicating that Homo erectuswas present as early as 1 million years ago.

Why such creatures would have traveled sofar and in different directions can probablynever be known. But something motivatedthese hominids to keep pushing forward, tomove ever onward into unknown territory.Perhaps this instinct, this drive, is what distin-

guishes them both as humans themselves andas ancestors of later humans.

The next major stage of human evolutionoccurred between about 500,000 to 160,000years ago, when the Archaic Homo sapiens(“wise man”) appeared, first in Africa but,within 30,000 years, also in China, India, theMiddle East, Central Asia, and Europe. Expertsdo not agree on whether these ancestors ofmodern Homo sapiens evolved independentlyin each of these regions or whether they camefrom some single group of migrants. In eithercase, these people clearly moved into previ-ously uninhabited areas. Their physicalremains are found across Europe, from En-gland to Greece, in remote parts of Uzbek-istan, and throughout eastern China.Whatever their origins, whatever their motiva-tion, these people were opening up new lands.

Then, by at least 130,000 years ago, theanatomically modern species known as Homosapiens sapiens appeared. This is the speciesthat all human beings today belong to. Theoldest known fossils have been found inAfrica, but similar fossils almost as old—sometimes designated Archaic Homo sapiens—have been found in other parts of the OldWorld, and this has led to two competing the-ories. One of them, sometimes called the “Outof Africa Hypothesis,” claims that the newspecies evolved in Africa and about 55,000years ago migrated up to the Middle East;some individuals then split off and went overinto India and Southeast Asia and East Asia.Others went up into Central Asia and fromthere split into groups, one at least going westinto Europe, another heading farther east intonortheastern Asia. As they moved, this newspecies displaced any local populations ofArchaic Homo sapiens.

The other theory, sometimes known as“The Regional Continuity Hypothesis,” claimsthat the Homo sapiens sapiens in each region


Although this drawing by John White of RoanokeIndians in a dugout canoe dates to the late 1580s, itis assumed that some of the earliest watercraft madeby humans were not unlike this—crude boats madefrom hollowed-out tree trunks—and used to travelto islands such as Australia. (Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-54016])

evolved from the Archaic Homo sapiens livingin that region. However, even in this theory, allmodern humans are fundamentally the same

because their common ancestors, the ArchaicHomo sapiens, were the same. Again, though,whatever the origins of Homo sapiens sapiens,


Homo sapiens as Homo explorans =

The English word explorer comes from the Latin word, explorare, which in turnwas based on the Latin meaning “to cry out,” a reference, it is believed, tohunters calling out when they had sighted game. The proposal to characterizethe human species as Homo explorans, “the human as explorer,” thus turns outto recognize that the first “explorers” were very likely the men who went out insearch of game. This motive for the forward movement of human populationsinto ever more distant regions has been accepted for some time by anthropolo-gists and other students of the earliest human beings. Some of the most con-vincing evidence that the earliest human beings were present in remote placesof the earth are animal bones with signs of having been broken or scraped in amanner indicating someone was eating the flesh off these bones.

The theory has been that even the earliest ancestors of modern humans whomoved out of Africa were searching for more plentiful sources of food. Theycould gather some vegetable matter—fruits, nuts, berries, roots—but this wasleft to the women and children. For the energy required to survive in a hostile orat least competitive environment, animal meat was needed, and it was men’stask to secure it. Since these hunters would understandably want to obtaintheir prey as easily as possible, it makes sense that they would periodicallymove on to find more plentiful populations.

An analogy might be what happens to this day in many places where there isa hunting season for particular species—deer or moose or game birds. Peoplewho live in these regions often see these wild animals appearing quite fre-quently and openly when there is no hunting allowed. When the hunting seasoncommences, it seems that these animals are no longer so easy to find. Do theanimals know the law? Obviously not, but they do know what the sound of agun means, and they know what the sound of people thrashing around in thewoods can mean. So the animals lie low or move into less accessible areas.

Both the limits of laws and terrain prevent modern hunters from chasingtheir intended prey ever farther. But there were no such limits on the firsthuman beings. Whether they killed most of the animals in a given area or sim-ply drove them away, the hunters could keep moving on into virgin territory insearch of game. If this is true, if this is how the world was discovered and set-tled, then Homo explorans, “the human as explorer,” the crier-out at the sightof game, becomes almost synonymous with Homo sapiens, the “wise human”who survived to populate the earth.

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they were clearly on the move. Not only didthey spread throughout ever-farther parts ofthe main landmasses of Europe and Asia, theymoved into several new regions. In SoutheastAsia, for instance, they moved into the landsknown today as Burma (Myanmar), Cambo-dia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.But perhaps even more striking is that theynow moved over onto relatively distant islandssuch as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Tai-wan. Above all, they moved over onto Aus-tralia—at least by 45,000 years ago.

The earth’s sea levels were much lowerduring much of this time, so that some islandsof today were in fact linked by land. But Aus-tralia and the islands mentioned above wereseparated by at least 50 miles from the main-land, which means that these first settlersmust have had some kind of basic water trans-port—most likely rafts or crude dugouts. Onetheory, in fact, is that the Homo sapiens whomoved from the Middle East to Southeast Asiaduring many thousands of years had done soby making short boat trips along the coasts.But whether they moved over land or sea,these early Homo sapiens were demonstratingphysical courage, intelligent thought, andsome form of emotional energy in their com-mitment to moving into new territory.

THE FIRST AMERICANSNowhere was this truer than in what was prob-ably the most significant movement in thisera—the migration of humans into the West-ern Hemisphere. Not all authorities agree onthe time when these first humans appeared inNorth America, but it seems that it was at leastabout 16,000 B.C. Not all authorities agree,either, on the exact people who were the firstto come, but most believe they were people liv-ing in Siberia or eastern Asia—possibly theancestors of the Chukchi people of northeast-

ern Siberia, possibly related to people once liv-ing in Central Asia. Scholars, however, areincreasingly suspecting that at least some indi-viduals from other origins were among theearly immigrants to North America.

Finally, not all authorities agree on justhow these first settlers in the Americascame—that is, by what route and by whatmode of transport. But once again, mostauthorities believe they came on foot over theland bridge now known as Beringia. For aboutthis time—20,000–12,000 B.C.—the last phaseof the great Ice Age still had quantities of theearth’s water “locked up” in massive ice capsand glaciers that covered much of NorthAmerica and northern Eurasia. This meantthat the world’s sea levels were so low that theland between Siberia and Alaska was exposed,and it was by this route that the first humansentered North America. (Other authoritiesnow believe that at least some of these firstAmericans made their way by boats from Asiato the western shores of North America.)

As with all these matters of prehistory,there is not total agreement among theexperts as to the date of the first appearance ofhumans in the Americas. There are actually afew experts who claim they have found toolsat sites such as Calico, California, dated to asfar back as 200,000 years ago: This wouldmean that Archaic Homo sapiens made theirway there. Other experts claim to be able todate human bones found at Taber, in Alberta,Canada, and the Yuha Desert of southern Cal-ifornia to 50,000 to 25,000 years ago; hearthsand stone tools found at Pedra Furada, innortheastern Brazil, to about 48,000 years ago;and tools and other evidence at the Oro-grande Cave in New Mexico, to about 30,000years ago. Such claims, however, are notaccepted by most students of this subject.

Then there are a group of sites where theexcavators date the human presence to peri-


ods earlier than the most commonly acceptedones but not so much earlier as to be rejectedby all experts. Bluefish Cave in Alaska and asite in Venezuela, Taima Taima, have yieldedbones with unusual markings that may havebeen made by humans about 23,000 B.C. At thePikimachay (“Flea Cave”) in the Ayacicho Val-ley in Peru, an excavator claims to have foundtools dating to about 20,000 to 15,000 yearsago. At a site known as Monte Verde in Chile,the excavators claim to have evidence thatdates the site to about 11,000 B.C. Two of themore intriguing sites excavated only since the1990s are Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, about

one hour east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,and the Cactus Hill site near Petersburg, Vir-ginia; at both these sites, excavators claim tohave found evidence of human occupationthat dates back to at least 12,500 B.C. (Becauseof these early dates now being assigned tofinds in the Northeast, there are some expertsclaiming that at least some of the earliesthumans in North America made their waythere from western Europe; most authoritiesreject such claims.)

Although the claims for the dates at thesesites remain controversial, virtually all expertsagree on the finds dating to about 9500 B.C. as


The excavators of the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, in Avella, Pennsylvania (near the border of West Virginia),claim that it was inhabited by humans at least by 12,500 B.C., which would make it one of the oldest knownsuch sites in the Western Hemisphere. (Courtesy of Francesca DiPietro Bowman)

indisputable proof of human presence in theAmericas. These people are referred to asPaleo-Indians (“ancient Indians”) and areassumed to be the direct ancestors of most ofthe Indians of the Americas. (They were not,however, the ancestors of the people longnamed “Eskimos” but now more scientificallycalled Inuit and Kalaadit; they did not appearin Alaska until about 9000 B.C.) The finds arethe stone weapons known as Clovis points,named after the site in New Mexico wherethey were first found in 1929, and wereattached to spears. Clovis points were usedthroughout North America—indicating not

just a widespread population but a shared wayof life, one based on hunting the megafauna,or large animals that then roamed the Ameri-cas: mammoths and mastodons, giant bisonand yaks, saber-toothed lions, large wolves,ground sloths, and camels. By about 8500 B.C.,the Clovis point was replaced by a slightly dif-ferent stone spear point known as the Folsompoint (also after the site in New Mexico wherefirst found, in 1927). It is believed that the Fol-som people were then hunting the large bisonin the West and the caribou in the East.

Whether the oldest and most controversialdates are true or only the universally accepteddates of the Clovis and Folsom cultures aretrue is not the issue here. Rather, what is trulyremarkable about the appearance of the firsthuman beings in the Western Hemisphere ishow fast they moved down and throughoutthe Americas. For instance, indisputable evi-dence of human occupation at Fell’s Cave inPatagonia, near the southern tip of SouthAmerica, is dated to 9000–8000 B.C. In fact,though, it has been calculated that humanbeings could easily have traveled the 10,000miles between the coast of Alaska to the tip ofSouth America in 1,000 years: That wouldmean only 10 miles a year. Still, this was anamazing phenomenon in human history—thepeopling of two complete continents in a rela-tively short period of time.

The question then becomes, Why? Whatmotivated these people to keep moving intounknown territories? Were they all imbued with the spirit of explorers? Hardly likely. More likely is that they were simply seekingmore congenial climates and environments.Drought conditions may often have played arole. More particularly, they were driven to seekfood, for that was apparently the major if nottheir sole concern and occupation. These peo-ple subsisted almost entirely on hunting andfood gathering. The former included birds and


These spear points, made from a type of stoneknown as chert, are called Clovis points after thesite in New Mexico where the first such were identified. These were found in Colorado, but Clovis points were used by the inhabitants of muchof North America between about 9500–8500 B.C.(Peter Bostrom, National Museum Collection)

Chapter title B 21

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?Old Crow, Alaska 30,000?Taber, Alberta, Canada 24,000Snake River, Wash. 10,000Wilson Butte, Idaho 11,000Colby, Wyo. 11,000Danger Cave, Utah 10,000?Calico, Calif. 200,000?San Diego, Calif. 40,000

Clovis, N. Mex. 12,000Folsom, N. Mex. 10,000?Orogrande, N. Mex. 30,000Big Eddy Falls, Wisc. 11,000Gainey, Mich. 11,000Vail, Maine 11,000Nantucket, Mass. 10,000?Meadowcroft, Pa. 17,500

Shawnee-Minisink, Pa. 11,000Tilghman, Md. 10,000John Pearce, La. 10,000Little Salt Spring, Fla. 11,000?Pedra Furada, Brazil 48,000?Pikimachay, Peru 20,000?Monte Verde, Chile 13,000?Fell's Cave, Argentina 11,000

Major sites throughout the Americas where fossils or stone tools suggest that human beings were present by at least 8000 B.C. Figures approximate the number of years ago finds are dated. Question mark indicates early dates disputed by many specialists.

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Sites Associated with Humans in the Americas before 8,000 B.C.

N O R T HA M E R I C A

S O U T HA M E R I C APACIFIC OCEAN

ATLANTIC OCEANGulf ofMexico

HudsonBay

Caribbean SeaM

issouri R.

Mississippi R

.

Ohio R.

R io Grande

Color

adoR.

Platte R.

Columbia R.

Amazon R.

Yukon R.

marine species as well as large land animals.The latter included nuts, fruits, berries, roots,and any plants they identified as edible. Andprobably the Paleo-Indians found that the preyand the “picking” were easier to come by if theyjust kept moving into virgin territory. It may

also have been that in the competition for food,some of these people crowded out others, andthat, too, contributed to the rapid dispersal.

The lifestyles and tools of the Clovis andFolsom hunter-gatherers of North Americawere in many ways similar to those of other


The First Watercraft =

Until it was established that human beings were present in Australia as early as50,000 B.C., it was not necessary to consider that watercraft had been inventedanywhere near that early. The islands where humans had appeared earlier thanthat were at the time of settlement linked by land (due to lower sea level), sohumans could have walked or at least waded across. For example, Japan wasjoined to Siberia and Korea, Sri Lanka was joined to India, the Philippines werejoined to the East Indies and so to the mainland. But the case of Australia hasforced students of that era to imagine what kind of watercraft these very early“sailors” had.

The oldest known boats to survive are some from ancient Egyptian tombsdated to about 2500 B.C., and these have survived only because the Egyptiansthemselves placed them in such dry environments that they did not rot away.Long before the sophisticated boats of the Egyptians, though, there had to havebeen all kinds of primitive watercraft, for it is evident from the evidence ofhuman presence at several locations that at least some early humans did getaround on the water.

Undoubtedly the first watercraft were simply rafts made of plant materials.Even the most primitive people would have observed that quite large branchesfloated. From that, it would have been an easy step to realize that if a large logcould float, that log could be hollowed out to hold a person who could then con-trol the direction of the craft. Rafts and dugout canoes, then, must have sufficedto provide water transport for many thousands of years. Canoes made of barkmay also have appeared very early. But because all these watercraft were madeof vegetable matter, and especially because they got wet, they rotted awayquite quickly without leaving a trace behind. The oldest known dugout, forinstance, was found in Holland and is dated to only 6300 B.C.

At some point, people in various parts of the world would have begun todevise variations on these two basic craft. Depending on the plant forms in theirregion, they would have made rafts of reed, for example, and once they began totie bundles of reeds together, they probably realized they could make a moreseaworthy craft if they shaped the reeds somewhat—build up the sides or aprow, for instance, to keep much of the water out. Likewise, canoemakers would

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peoples of this period throughout the then-inhabited world. Most people still hunted wildnomadic herd animals and ranged widely insearch of food sources. It should be under-stood, too, that as widespread as humanbeings had become by about 8000 B.C., the

world was still quite sparsely inhabited. Inmost instances, there were still relatively smallbands of people roaming relatively smallareas—not much more than extended fami-lies in many cases, or perhaps loosely formedbands of up to 50 adults.


have found some trees made lighter and more manageable boats. Meanwhile,some people realized they could sew skins together and stretch them around alight wooden frame to form a type of boat known as a coracle. Others probablyrealized they could inflate the skins of animals and use them to make rafts.

Such craft were probably the only ones known by human beings for thou-sands of years. Other refinements would have come much later. Some ancientpeople discovered that hollow clay pots served to support a raft; others foundthat even large clay “tubs” would float. The Polynesians constructed outriggers,whereas American Indians made their canoes from birch bark.

Reed—stalks of a type of thick grass—was used by some of the first people tomake watercraft. This boat, used to this day by sailors in parts of India, is undoubtedly more elaborate than the first reed boats, but it utilizes the samematerial. (© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)

A CHANGING WORLDAbout 8000 B.C., major changes began to occurthroughout much of the inhabited world. Theworld’s climate was warming relatively rap-idly, the great ice caps and glaciers had bythen melted, new plant and animal species

were taking over the territory formerly domi-nated by the large animals. Whether becauseof this climate change or other causes such asthe spread of disease pathogens and over-hunting by humans, many of the large ani-mals throughout the world began to becomeextinct. In particular, those hunted by the


The bison pictured here was painted on the cave of Lascaux, in southwest central France, about 15,000 B.C.These large, wild animals were hunted down in such numbers by the people of that period that they eventually became extinct in Europe, just as many large, wild animals in the Americas would also becomeextinct. (Larry Dale Gordon/Getty Images)

Paleo-Indians in the Americas all becameextinct, while in Europe and Asia, such ani-mals as the woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses,cave bears, cave lions, Irish elk, large bison,and other giant species also became extinct.(Pygmy mammoths survived to as late as 4000B.C. on an island in Siberia.) The extinctions inAfrica did not proceed as rapidly, and somegiant fauna still survive there—elephants, rhi-noceros, giraffe, hippo, and gorillas. This mayaccount in part for why sub-Saharan Africansat least did not feel the need to participate inthe next major step in the development ofhuman history—what is known as the Neo-lithic Revolution.

Neolithic literally means “new stone” and isthe term used to distinguish a major period inthe development of human culture. As with all

such phases, the Neolithic Age did not begin atthe same time and in the same way everywherein the world, but in general it was underwayabout 8000 B.C. By singling out stone, the termemphasizes that this period saw the develop-ment of a much more elaborate stone “toolkit.”But the reason there were more tools and morespecialized tools was that there were more spe-cialized tasks to be accomplished. Indeed,many of the tools were made from bone andantlers and eventually some began to be madefrom metal such as copper. They began tomake objects out of fibers—both baskets andtextiles—and clay. They also began to domesti-cate animals such as sheep and cattle.

Perhaps the most significant development,however, was that peoples in many parts ofthe world began to cultivate plants of various


Anthropologists believe that the first wave of humans—Paleo-Eskimos—may have arrived on Greenland asearly as 2500 B.C., in which case they very likely were already making igloos like the one pictured here on Baffin Island in the 1920s. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-103524])

kinds—that is, turn to agriculture. This, alongwith the activities referred to above, meantthat people were settling down in more per-manent and ambitious settlements. As thesesettlements produced more reliable food sup-plies and other aids to survival, populationsbegan to grow. The Neolithic Revolution, inother words, marked the beginning of village

life and larger populations, which in turnwould lead to the growth of cities.

By 3000 B.C., then, the world had greatlychanged. Settlements, although still relativelyscattered, now existed across much of theworld. In addition to the lands already identi-fied as inhabited, people had moved into stillmore locales. The island of Crete, for example,


Discovering the Pacific Islands =

One area of the world often overlooked in histories of discovery and explorationis Oceania, the name for the main islands in the Pacific Ocean. In part this maybe because it is so hard to reconstruct a history that all the experts agree on: Itis not so much that they disagree as the simple fact that there is so little solidevidence to rely on. Modern students have divided the islands into threegroups: the Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians. (-Nesians is a Greeksuffix meaning “islands,” mela- means “black,” micro- means “small,” andpoly- means “many.”) These groupings refer to certain physical and culturalaspects of the native peoples, but they should not be taken as some absolutecategories.

The major islands of the Melanesians include New Guinea, Bismarck Archi-pelago, the Solomons, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and Fiji. New Guinea andperhaps several others were settled as far back as 40,000 years ago; startingabout 1600 B.C., a new wave of settlers apparently began to come over fromSoutheast Asia—Indonesia or the Philippines. The Micronesians include theMarianas, Marshalls, Carolines, Gilberts, Wake, and Guam islands. It is possiblethat one or more were settled as early as 4000 B.C. by people from the Philip-pines and Indonesia, but most were not settled until after 1600 B.C., whetherfrom Melanesian islands to their west or more waves from Southeast Asia.

Then there are the Polynesian islands, which include Hawaii, Midway, Tonga,Marquesas, Samoas, Society, Cook, Tahiti, and New Zealand. Tonga may havebeen settled by 1200 B.C., but most of the rest—with two major exceptions—were not settled until between 500 and 300 B.C. Those exceptions are the twoof the best known groups of the Polynesians—Hawaii Islands and New Zealand.The Hawaii Islands were not settled until about A.D. 300–500. New Zealand wasnot settled until sometime between A.D. 750 and 1000.

Some of these islands may have been connected by land bridges, but mostrequired people to make their way by boats. This required skills both in boat-making and navigation, and the first to reach these islands deserve to be knownas among the first anonymous explorers.

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was settled by at least 6500 B.C. The first waveof Paleo-Eskimos had moved into Alaska fromSiberia by at least 3000 B.C., for it was aboutthen that the first wave began to move acrossArctic North America. Indeed, by 3000 B.C., it iseasier to list the places on the earth where nohuman beings had yet set foot. Antarctica, ofcourse, was not only an untouched but anunknown continent. Many parts of the Arcticregion also remained unexplored—the Paleo-Eskimos probably did not get to Greenlanduntil about 2500 B.C. The many islands of the Pacific beyond the Philippines and NewGuinea—including New Zealand—were stilluninhabited and probably still unknown, aswere a few islands off Africa’s northwest coast:the Azores, the Canaries, the Madeiras. Mada-gascar, the large island only some 250 milesoff Africa’s southeast coast, may have beenknown but it was not yet inhabited. Then, too,large regions of the continental landmasses

were untouched—the Himalayan region, forinstance, or the Rocky Mountains, the highestAndes, the largest deserts.

Still, by 3000 B.C., before any individualsrecognized today as “explorers” even set out,most of the world had been discovered. Notinhabited, not even thoroughly explored, nev-ertheless human beings had exerted them-selves, crossed bodies of water, climbedmountains, endured extreme cold and heat,and confronted fierce animals to move intounknown territory. Once again the questionarises, What motivated people to move into somany distant, even inhospitable regions? Andas will be seen, even settling into large andcomfortable cities does not destroy thatdesire. And along with the civilization that isalmost defined by city life, there emerges theability to write and record. With this skill,human beings embark on a new phase of dis-covery and exploration.


The first societies that were based incities and that would have the mostinfluence on later Western history

were those that emerged in the Near East andthe eastern Mediterranean. Radiating out fromtheir urban centers, these peoples ranged everfarther into unknown lands and seas. Theseearly expeditions and explorers were not moti-vated by some selfless desire to shed light onthe unknown. Rather, most were engaged intrade or diplomacy or conquest. Whatevertheir motives, because these civilizationssimultaneously developed systems of writing,some of their members are credited today withbeing among the earliest of explorers.

THE EARLY MESOPOTAMIANSThe first major societies based on city-states,at least as measured by their influence on laterWestern civilization, were the ones thatemerged in the region between the Tigris andEuphrates rivers about 4000 B.C. This region isgenerally known as Mesopotamia—“betweenthe rivers”—and for at least the next 3,500

years it was the homeland for a series of dif-ferent dominating peoples. The first of thesewere the Sumerians, a people of unknown ori-gins who appeared in southern Mesopotamiaand soon were developing a number of smallbut powerful city-states: Eridu, Kish, Lagash,Nippur, Umma, Ur, and Uruk. The Sumerianswere an inventive people—they appear tohave been the first to develop a coherent sys-tem of writing and among the first to usewheeled vehicles—and they were also activetraders. In search of prized metals, stone, andwood, some of them went into the distantmountains of Armenia, the Taurus Mountainsof Turkey, over into Central Asia andAfghanistan, and even down into northernIndia. Others sailed out along the Persian Gulf,apparently even as far south as the mouth ofthe Indus River in northwestern India andpossibly west around the Arabian Peninsula asfar as the Red Sea.

The script that the Sumerians developed isknown as cuneiform—“wedge-form.” A sharpstylus was used to cut the letters into dampclay, leaving small impressions that werepointed at the interior and wider at the sur-face (like a wedge). The clay was then baked to

28

Early Ancient Explorers

3{

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retain the writing, and since the clay tabletshave survived, there are records of many ofthe Sumerians’ varied activities. The names ofthe individuals who made specific journeys,however, were not recorded. Then, about 2350B.C., a man from the relatively obscure city ofAkkad, or Agade (probably in what is nowsouthern Iraq, but no remains have yet beenfound), set about to conquer most of theseSumerian city-states. He soon controlled notonly all of southern Mesopotamia but alsomuch of the region to his east (modern Iran)and to his west (Syria, Palestine, and Turkey).As Sargon of Akkad, he is said to have ruled for61 years, in effect the first great emperor inhistory.

Various poems and inscriptions fromMesopotamia of this era refer to distant lands,most of which cannot be identified with com-plete certainty, but it is clear that the Sumeri-ans were at least aware of the sources of many

products from Africa to Turkey. But it is Sargonof Akkad himself who allegedly left an accountof a naval expedition that he led “across thesea in the west” and conquered Anaku-ki,Kapptara-ki, “and lands beyond the uppersea.” Scholars debate just what these placeswere, some claiming he went as far as Spain,others saying he was referring to Cyprus andCrete, while still others say he never gotbeyond the Persian Gulf.

The dynasty founded by Sargon of Akkadended within 200 years, and for the next 1,500years a succession of other rulers dominatedMesopotamia, most of them based in the cityof Babylon. As powerful and imperial as someof these rulers were, the Mesopotamians didnot seem especially interested in setting sailfor destinations unknown. They do not seemto have ventured far beyond the Persian Gulfor the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.They do not seem to have used sails on their

Early Ancient Explorers B 29

The vessel depicted in a stone carving from the Palace of Sennacherib in present-day Iraq and dated to about700 B.C. is transporting goods on the Tigris River in Mesopotamia. It is essentially a raft of inflated animalskins—and note the man floating on a similar inflated skin being pulled along behind. (From Ninive etl’Assyrie, Vol. III, by V. Place. Paris, 1867)

boats until long after other maritime peopleshad adopted them. They were, in fact, a rela-tively self-contained people, with a way-of-lifefocused on their rivers.

THE EGYPTIANSMore or less parallel to the Mesopotamianworld, both in time and space, another greatriver-based civilization was thriving—ancient

Egypt. It emerged into recorded history about3200 B.C., and this is embodied in a beautifulcarved stone tablet depicting Narmer, the firstking of a united Egypt. Some scholars inter-pret other carvings on the stone to indicatethat Narmer may have even gone intoMesopotamia. During the next 300 years, suc-cessors to Narmer appear to have sent trade ormilitary missions into the Sinai Peninsula andup as far as the Black Sea.


Egyptians and Ships =

The Egyptians can not be credited with inventing ships: Various people all overthe world independently invented watercraft of all kinds. It so happens, though,that no other people left so much physical evidence of watercraft as theyevolved across the centuries. Carvings, wall paintings, vase designs, textiledesigns, models—the ancient Egyptians left a wonderful record that probablyreflects the evolution of watercraft among many ancient peoples.

Their earliest craft, like those of so many peoples, were probably only raftsmade of reeds, and none of these have survived. But by at least 3500 B.C., theywere shaping the reed into long, narrow boats: Numerous drawings exist thatdepict these early vessels, some with high prows and sterns, some with cabin-like structures, most with multiple oars. Then an Egyptian vase painting datedto about 3100 B.C. depicts a small sail on a boat—one of the earliest if not theearliest depiction of a sailboat.

Egyptian boats for the next few centuries continued to be made of reed andprobably seldom ventured beyond the Nile River. By about 2700 B.C., however,the Egyptians were using wood at least to reinforce some parts of their reedboats—providing platforms to stand on, for instance. Most likely they veryquickly began to make all wood boats. The Egyptians built them with planks ofwood with no internal ribs or keel, and this basic form of construction at firstproduced flat-bottom, square-ended boats that were not much more thanbarges. And by about 1800 B.C., the Egyptians were building rivercraft more than200 feet long and 70 feet wide to haul the heavy stone required for their mon-umental temples and other structures.

The Egyptians’ method of constructing boats—that is, building up a shell ofplanks rather than starting with a “skeleton” of a keel and frame—was usedthroughout much of the world for many centuries to come. But it does not seemto have limited the ancient Egyptians when it came to building the sleeker shipsdesigned for open seas. As early as 2450 B.C., Egyptians were building quite

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For the most part, though, the lives ofEgyptians were centered on the Nile River,and reed boats of all sizes moved up anddown the river carrying produce and materi-als. Once the Egyptians began to makewooden boats, they recognized all too wellthat their land did not have enough trees. Aninscribed stone (now in Palermo, Italy)describes how about 2700 B.C. EgyptianPharaoh Sneferu “brought 40 ships of cedar-

wood” from Byblos, a Phoenician port city onthe Mediterranean. Sneferu is also said tohave led a military expedition into the landsouth of Egypt known as Nubia, and some 250years later, an Egyptian named Harkhufreported that he had been sent to Nubia “toexplore a road to this country. I did so in onlyseven months and I brought back gifts of allkinds . . . 300 asses loaded with incense,ebony, grain, panthers, ivory, and every good


trim wooden ships for sailing on ocean water, and the seagoing ships depictedin the reliefs at Queen Hatshepsut’s burial temple are estimated to be some 90feet long. Egyptian seagoing ships had two features not required by river craft:a rope truss that connected the bow and the stern and could be adjusted like atourniquet to keep the front and end of the boat from sagging; and a rope net-ting that encircled the upper part of the hull to keep the planks from separatingunder pressure from the deck and cargo.

Many of the Egyptians’ rivercraft depended on humanpower—rowing, pad-dling, poling—but sails were also used on many boats, either alone or withhumanpower. At first the masts were simple poles, but as the boats becamelarger and required heavier sails, the Egyptians turned to “two-legged” masts:poles tilted from each side of the boat to join at their top ends. By 2200 B.C.,however, the Egyptians had found a way to make single pole masts to supporteven the heaviest sails required for seagoing ships.

Because sails were made of easilyperishable material, it is not knownexactly when they were first used,but this is the oldest known pictureof a ship with a sail. It is from anancient Egyptian vase dated toabout 3200 B.C. (From Studies inEarly Pottery of the Near East,Vol. 1, by Henri Frankfort. London:Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1924)

product.” (He also said he brought back a“dancing dwarf” as a present to the king—possibly an African pygmy, a member of one

of the peoples in equatorial Africa—such asthe Mbute or Batwa—who are particularlysmall.) Nubia, which extended from the bor-


These impressive sailing vessels are part of the fleet of trading ships that Queen Hatshepsut sent to the“land of Punt” (possibly Somaliland, possibly India) about 1492 B.C. Carved on the Temple of Deir el-Bahrialong the Nile, where Hatshepsut was buried, they provide a remarkable image of the advanced nature ofmaritime trade by that time. (From Deir-el-Bahari, by Auguste Mariette, Leipzig, 1877)

der of southern Egypt (roughly, Aswan on theNile) into northern Sudan, was about as farsouth as the ancient Egyptians ever imposed

their control, although they had commercialdealings with black Africans.

Several Egyptian pharaohs, however, didconduct military campaigns that took theminto Mesopotamia, Syria, ancient Phoenicia(Lebanon), and Asia Minor (Turkey). Themost notable expedition, however, was not amilitary campaign but a combination diplo-matic and commercial mission sponsored byQueen Hatshepsut, who effectively ruledEgypt between about 1505 and 1485 B.C.About 1492 B.C. she sent Egyptian ships underthe command of Nehsi down the Red Sea andinto the Indian Ocean to what was called theLand of Punt, which some scholars believereferred to Somaliland, on the horn of Africa,while others believe it referred to India. Thiswas not the first time Egyptians had visitedthe Land of Punt, but it was not until Hat-shepsut’s expedition that regular trade wasmaintained between the two lands. Thefamous carved reliefs at the great temple ofDeir el-Bahri along the Nile, where QueenHatshepsut was buried, depict the magnifi-cent sailing ships that the Egyptians pos-sessed by this time.

Under Thutmose III, who ruled for some30 years after Hatshepsut’s death, Egyptattained its most expansive empire, control-ling the entire eastern Mediterranean coastand up into the northern reaches of the Tigrisand Euphrates rivers and extended Egypt’ssouthern borders down into Sudan and alongthe coast of the Red Sea. One of the aides toThutmose III described how the pharaoh,after crossing the Euphrates River, moved intoSyria and “hunted 120 elephants for the sakeof their tusks.”

During this time, too, Egypt traded withpeoples as far removed as Crete and Greeceand possibly even Malta, but there is reason tobelieve that the Egyptians left much of thelong-haul trade to others: That is, the Egyp-tians preferred to import and export wares by


staying put in their own ports and letting for-eigners do the sailing. The Egyptians, in fact,were not that interested in exploring beyondtheir circle of familiar trading partners.

MINOANS AND MYCENAEANSOne people who did range widely across theMediterranean Sea during this era were theMinoans, who between 2500 and 1500 B.C.conducted a bustling commercial empirebased on the island of Crete. Perhaps becausetheir homeland was so relatively small—almost exactly the area of Puerto Rico—thepeople of Crete had always looked outwardboth to import needed products and to exporttheir own wares. Even before the emergence ofthe Minoan civilization—so named by modernarchaeologists after a mythical Cretan king,

Minos—Cretans were trading with Egypt;Minoans also traded with the island of Cyprusand other islands throughout the Aegean.There is some evidence to suggest thatMinoans also sailed as far west as Italy andeven Spain. In the east, Minoans seem to havehad at least trade contacts with Turkey,Afghanistan, and India.

About 1500 B.C., Greeks from the mainlandappear to have moved over to Crete and takenover from the Minoans. Usually referred to asMycenaeans, after their main city on themainland, these Greeks also took over manyof the Minoans’ overseas commercial routesand contacts. But the Mycenaeans wereapparently not all that interested in seekingout new lands or dominating foreign trade,and this left the field open to some of the mostenterprising and adventurous people of theancient world, the Phoenicians.

THE PHOENICIANSThe Phoenicians were a people who livedlargely along the coasts of what are modernSyria, Lebanon, and Israel. Their name comesfor the Greek word phoinix, meaning “red-purple,” in recognition of the fact that thesepeople were famous for trading in reddishpurple dyed goods, primarily textiles. Some-times known as Canaanites from Old Testa-ment references, the Phoenicians identifiedthemselves usually as Sidonians, after Sidon,one of their major cities, because they neverorganized into one nation state. But if thePhoenicians were backward when it came toinstitutional organization, they were amongthe most progressive of ancient peoples whenit came to artful crafts, manufacturing, trade,and colonization. They also developed analphabet that the Greeks and Romans bor-rowed and from which all Western alphabetshave since been developed.


This Minoan sailboat is accompanied by dolphinsas it makes its way across the Mediterranean about1300 B.C. Note the high prow, designed to cutthrough the waves. It is carved on a sealstone, apiece of stone about the size of a five-cent piecethat was pressed into clay to identify the owner.(From The Palace Minos, Vol. 1, by Arthur Evans. Lon-don: Macmillan and Co., 1921)

Considering that the Phoenicians had analphabet and kept such careful records, itmight seem strange that they did not leaveaccounts of their far-ranging voyages. The evi-dence, instead, comes from other peoples’accounts and from the physical remains thatthe Phoenicians left in many distant locales.The earliest recorded record of Phoenicians astraders was the Egyptian account of thePharaoh Sneferu’s expedition to import cedarwood from Byblos, one of the major Phoeni-cian port cities. Cedar and other trees, plenti-

ful in the Lebanon range that backed thecoastal cities of the Phoenicians, wouldremain one of their major exports.

As early as 1200 B.C., with the decline ofthe Minoans and the lack of interest by theEgyptians, the Phoenicians were alreadyprominent if not dominant mariners in theeastern Mediterranean. Greek traditionsclaimed that the Phoenicians were soonthereafter founding colonies in the westernMediterranean—Utica in Tunisia, Gades(Cadiz) in Spain, Nora in Sardinia. Modern


This carving from the Palace of Sargon at Khorsabad (modern Iraq) is dated to about 715 B.C. It depicts threePhoenician cargo vessels loading and towing logs—most likely cedar from Lebanon, a major export productof the Phoenicians who lived along the east coast of the Mediterranean. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ6-929])


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Hanno’s voyage

Himilco’s voyage

Possible voyage of Himilco

Pharaoh Necho’s Phoenician ships circumnavigate Africa

Xataspes’ voyage

0 1,000 miles

0 1,000 km

Equator

Voyages by Egyptians and Phoenicians, ca. 600–475 B.C.

Nile

R.

CongoR.

Zambezi R.

Senegal R.

Niger R.

E U R O P E

NorthSea

Baltic Sea

Black Sea

Meditteranean SeaMeditteranean SeaMediterranean Sea

ATLANTICOCEAN

INDIANOCEAN

CaspianSea

RedSea

Carthage

A F R I C A

E U R O P E

EGYPT

archaeologists do not confirm such earlydates but they do agree that Phoenicians were definitely establishing colonies in thosevery sites by about 700 B.C. The most famousof their colonies was that of Carthage,founded by Phoenicians on the coast ofTunisia about 800 B.C. Carthage soon becamea major trading center in the westernMediterranean and began to establish its owncolonies all around the coast of Spain and onthe Balearic Islands, on Sicily and Malta, andon Corsica and Sardinia. Although at first theydo not seem to have resorted to force, theCarthaginians seemed determined to beatout their Greek rivals in the westernMediterranean and by about 500 B.C. they hadcolonies on the North African coast oppositeGibraltar and so controlled traffic through theStrait of Gibraltar—the Pillars of Hercules tothe Greeks.

Once they were solidly established at the far end of the Mediterranean, theCarthaginians evidently decided to ventureout into the Atlantic. There are two majorexpeditions by Carthaginians; ironically, bothare known about solely from texts by thePhoenicians’ enemies, ancient Greeks andRomans. One of these was a voyage by Him-ilco, who about 500 B.C., according to the firstcentury A.D. Roman historian Pliny the Elder,passed into the North Atlantic as far as theFrench coast of Brittany. Some modern schol-ars claim Himilco went as far as Cornwall, thesouthwestern tip of Britain, reached some 200years later by Pytheas; others claim he wentout into the North Atlantic as far as the Sar-gasso Sea, well past the Azores. Such extremeclaims are rejected by most scholars, andeverything about Himilco’s voyage remainsquestionable.

A somewhat more solid story is thatinvolving the expedition of a contemporary ofHimilco and a fellow Carthaginian, Hanno. He

was said to have posted an account of his voyage at a temple in Carthage when hereturned, and it is that account that is quotedby Polybius, a Greek historian of the secondcentury B.C.:

He set sail with sixty vessels of fifty oars anda multitude of men and women to the num-ber of 30,000 and provisions and otherequipment. After putting out to sea andpassing the Pillars [of Hercules] we sailedbeyond them for two days.

At this point, Hanno, unlike Himilco, turnedsouth and proceeded down the northwestcoast of Africa:

We sailed on for half a day until we arrivedat a lagoon full of high and thick-growncane. This was haunted by elephants andmultitudes of other grazing beasts.

Continuing down along the coast, Hannowent ashore at various points and reported allmanner of exotic sights:

Beyond these dwelt inhospitable Ethiopi-ans [Africans]. Their land is infested withwild beasts. . . . These highlands are inhab-ited by a freakish race of men, theTroglodytes [from Greek for “hole dwellers,”here referring to some unknown Africanpeople] who are said to run faster thanhorses. . . . Sailing on from that point wecame to another deep and wide river, whichwas infested with crocodiles and hip-popotami. . . . The second island was full ofwild people. By far the greater number werewomen with hairy bodies. Our interpreterscalled them Gorillas.

There are numerous problems raised byHanno’s voyage, but the major one is just how


far down the coast of Africa he went. Somescholars say he got no farther than Morocco,on the northwestern shoulder; at the otherextreme, some scholars say he got all the wayto Sierra Leone, only 8 degrees above theequator. If the latter, Hanno was some 3,000

miles from Carthage, making for a round-tripalmost as ambitious as that of Columbus’s,and it would be 2,000 years before any Euro-pean got as far down the coast of Africa.

The Phoenicians are credited with voyagesin many other directions and regions. By 650


Fictitious Explorations =

Separating fact from fiction is difficult when it comes to knowing exactly howmuch of the world was explored by the ancients. In part this is because theyoften lacked the means to observe, to measure, and to record “facts” abouttheir world; information was passed on largely by word of mouth, and thisinevitably led to errors and distortions. Beyond that, ancient peoples placedgreat faith in myths and legends and were not necessarily anxious to displacethese with “scientific” evidence. It is no wonder, then, that some of the earlieststories about discovery and exploration involve what people today regard asfictional accounts.

Perhaps the most famous of the poems of the Babylonians, for instance,recounted the story of Gilgamesh. He was said to have been a powerful andoppressive ruler who, after conquering several city-states in southernMesopotamia, traveled down into southern Arabian peninsula, crossed the Ara-bian Sea and went over to the island of Socotra off Somaliland and possiblyeven on to Somaliland itself. Although the best surviving copy of this epic datesto only the seventh century B.C., it is known to include myths, folklore, and talesdating back to well before 2000 B.C. Although clearly fictional, the poem servedto introduce the Babylonians to a world beyond their narrow confines.

The Egyptians, meanwhile, had their own story of a merchant who claimed tohave been sent by a pharaoh on a business trip; when his ship was wrecked ina storm, he alone survived and was washed up on an island. The island was richin fruits and animal life, and after an encounter with a giant snake, the merchantwas rescued by a ship that the snake had loaded with fine products to bringback to Egypt. The story was written down on a papyrus as early as 2000 B.C.and seems to be describing a journey to the Land of Punt, variously located inIndia, Africa, or Arabia.

Scholars have noted certain elements in these two famous tales that recur inlater works, including the Old Testament of the Bible and Homer’s Odyssey. Thismay have been due to a direct influence of these works, but it may also repre-sent simply the recurrence of certain themes in the ancient world. And althoughthese stories cannot be used as true geography or history texts, they probablyreflect some knowledge of the world of that era.

\

B.C. they were a prominent presence in theIndian Ocean; some modern scholars haveclaimed they got to the East Indies—even toChina—but such claims find no supportamong most serious scholars. Then there arethose who insist that some Phoeniciansreached the Americas, whether by acciden-tally being driven there by winds or by delib-erately seeking new lands. The supporters ofthis theory cite various inscriptions they claimto be the Phoenician language, as well as otherfinds such as coins, but most serious scholarsreject all such claims.

One story of a major Phoenician expedi-tion, however, has been the subject of seriousdebate almost since the time it was firstreported. That is the voyage sponsored by theEgyptian pharaoh Necho about 600 B.C. Onceagain, the only source for this story is theancient Greek historian Herodotus, and hedevotes only one brief paragraph to it:

Africa is clearly surrounded by water exceptwhere it touches Asia. Necho, pharaoh ofEgypt, was the first person we know of todemonstrate this. After he had finished dig-ging out a canal between the Nile and theRed Sea, he sent out a naval expeditionmanned by Phoenicians, instructing themto come back by entering the Mediter-ranean through the Pillars of Hercules andin that way return to Egypt. Setting out fromthe Red Sea, the Phoenicians sailed into theIndian Ocean. Each autumn they put in atwhatever part of Africa they happened to besailing by; there they planted crops andstayed until harvest time, reaped the grain,and then sailed on. In that way, two yearspassed and it was not until the third yearthat they entered the Pillars of Hercules andmade their way back to Egypt. They re-ported many things that others can believeif they choose to, but I cannot—in particu-

lar, that while sailing around Africa they hadthe sun on their right side.

Most scholars just find it hard to acceptsuch a feat at such an early point in history. Itcould be done, they agree—scholars have cal-culated the way these sailors could have hadfavorable weather, then put ashore for severalmonths required to grow a crop of grain.Scholars also point out that the very detailHerodotus singles out as disproving such astory actually supports it: Namely, if thesailors had rounded the tip of Africa, the sunwould often have been to the north—that is,to their right.

In the end, the Phoenicians, for all theirinitiative and ambition when it came to sail-ing, colonizing, and trading, showed littleinterest in exploring for the sake of discover-ing the unknown or of adding to the sum oftheir contemporaries’ knowledge.

THE PERSIANSAbout the time the Phoenicians’ reputation asmaster mariners was at its peak, with theircommercial empire extending from the shoresof the eastern Mediterranean to the Pillars ofHercules, a new power had emerged in theNear East—the Persians. Their homeland wasmodern Iran and Afghanistan, and by 549 B.C. Cyrus the Great had expanded the Per-sians’ power through conquest so that theycontrolled territory from the Mediterraneancoast all the way to what is now Pakistan. Infact, the Persians controlled the Phoenicians’own homeland as well as Mesopotamia, andCyrus’s successors would extend Persianpower still farther—including parts of north-ern Greece, Egypt, and Libya.

The Persians ruled this vast empire with arelatively light hand, allowing most peoplesto continue in their own ways—retaining


their languages, religions, cultures. The Per-sians were more interested in trade and taxes,and to advance this they encouraged cara-vans to cross their land, exchanging wares

between Europe and Asia. That is why theyallowed the Greeks and Phoenicians livingalong the eastern Mediterranean coast tocontinue their own activities. The Persians


Pillars of Hercules Carthago Nova

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ATLANTIC OCEAN

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.

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Leptis Magna

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N

Main Greek routes

Main Phoenician routes

Main connecting routes

0 300 miles

0 300 km

Early Mediterranean and Black Sea Routes, ca. 900–350 b.c.

also built a network of roads connecting themajor cities of their empire. Although theirships sailed all around the Persian Gulf andthe Arabian Sea, they were essentially a land-

based empire that looked more to the eastthan to the west.

Unfortunately, almost none of the Persians’own accounts of their discoveries survive


Byzantium Chalcedon

Sinope Trapezus

Heraclea

Jerusalem

Tyre

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Naucratis

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Gulf of Suez

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(Sea of Azov)

Pontus Euxinus(Black Sea)

Savus R.

Dravus R.

Tyras R.

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Bosporus

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Athens

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Cyrene

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Jerusalem

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ByblosCitium

Salamis

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Byzantium Chalcedon

Sinope Trapezus

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because Alexander the Great, when he con-quered the Persians, destroyed most of theirrecords. However, Herodotus, a Greek histo-rian, described an important expedition spon-sored by the Persian emperor Darius, whoruled 586–521 B.C.

The greater part of Asia was explored byDarius, who desired to know more aboutthe Indus River, which is one of the tworivers in the world to produce crocodiles.He wanted to know where this river runsout onto the sea and sent in ships boththose on whom he could rely to make a truereport and also Scylax of Caryanda.

They set out from the city of Caspatyrusin the land of Pactyike, sailed down the rivertoward the east and to the sea. Sailing west-ward over the sea, they came in the thirtieth

month to the place from where the king ofthe Egyptians had sent out the Phoeniciansof whom I have spoken earlier [the expedi-tion of Necho] to sail around Africa.

There are many problems with this text, butsome scholars believe that Pactyike was ineastern Afghanistan and that Caspatyrus wassomewhere along the Kabul River, which tookScylax to the Indus. Once in the Arabian Sea,Scylax evidently sailed across the IndianOcean, up into the Persian Gulf, then downand around the Arabian Peninsula, and upinto the Red Sea all the way to the Egyptianport of Suez.

Aside from problems with the geographicdetails of this voyage, what is interesting isthat Scylax himself was a Greek. His home city,Caryanda, was in Caria, over on the south-


By 400 B.C., a growing number of sailors, merchants, travelers, and writers from the Mesopotamian andMediterranean world were beginning to have firsthand experience with the Indian Ocean, and they wouldhave been familiar with boats like these sailing along the northwestern coast of India. (Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division [LC-D4271-384])

western Mediterranean coast of Turkey, andthen under Persian rule. His role in this ex-pedition thus confirms the sense that the Persians were open to people of “foreign”extraction.

Scylax, by the way, was so respected in hisday that a periplus, or sailing guide, wasattributed to him, even though it clearly wascomposed at least two centuries later—about350 B.C. Known as the Periplus of Scylax, it wasan amazingly detailed guide to the manyislands, rivers, harbors, towns, and even peo-ples bordering the Mediterranean and BlackSeas and the waters connecting them, evenproviding the distances between all the iden-tified places. In fact, it is so thorough thatmany scholars believe that what has survivedto this day is a work that was heavily revisedand reworked in later centuries.

There was another famous Persian explor-atory expedition, this one involving a cousinof the Emperor Xerxes (who ruled 485–465B.C.). Once again, the only source for thisevent is Herodotus. He told how Sataspes wasto be executed for a crime when his motherpersuaded Xerxes instead to send him on atrip to circumnavigate Africa. Sataspes pro-ceeded in the opposite direction from theone sent by Necho: He sailed west throughthe Strait of Gibraltar and then down along

the northwestern coast of Africa. Herodotuswent on:

After sailing for many months over a vastamount of water and always finding he hadto go further, he turned around and madehis way back to Egypt. From there hereturned to Xerxes and reported that, at thefarthest point he reached, he sailed by adwarf race who wore clothes of palm leavesand fled their villages to the mountainswhenever Sataspes and his men wentashore, and that he and his men did themno harm but only went in and took somecattle. But finally, the reason he didn’t sail allaround Africa was that the ship stoppedand just could not go any further.

Upon hearing this excuse for failing to com-plete his assignment, Xerxes had Sataspeskilled after all. Whether true or not, such a taleperhaps says something about the risksassumed by early explorers.

It is noticeable that a number of Greekshave begun to play prominent roles in the his-tory of exploration by this time—Herodotus,Scylax, Alexander the Great. This is no coinci-dence, as the Persian Empire was about to bechallenged by the Greeks, who would bring awhole new dimension to exploration.


44

4{

The people known to modern Englishspeakers as “Greeks” never calledthemselves that, and still do not. They

call themselves “Hellenes,” just as they calltheir country “Hellas.” In ancient times, theyoccasionally also called themselves “Hel-

lenes,” but in general they referred to them-selves by the name of the major city-state inwhich they lived or which dominated theirregion: Athenians, Corinthians, Spartans, andso on. And in the many centuries before thesegreat city-states arose, if the people identified

Although only one of several Greek city-states, Athens felt it was first among equals and demonstrated it byconstructing its great temple, the Parthenon (447–438 B.C.), and other fine buildings. (In the foreground isthe Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a theater erected by a wealthy Roman in the late second century A.D.(© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)

The Inquisitive Greeks

\

with any large groups, it was with one of themajor groups who moved into and through-out the land now known as Greece. Whatmakes their story so amazing, then, is the waythese disparate groups managed to shape andshare a culture that was so distinctive. In par-ticular, a people and a culture that wouldshow such a modern inquisitiveness about theworld at large.

THE EARLY HISTORY OFTHE GREEKSPeople had been living on the Greek mainlandand islands for thousands of years andundoubtedly they would eventually becomepart of the people and culture to be known as“Greek.” But scholars generally agree that thefirst people who could be called Greeks camefrom somewhere to the north of Greece aboutthe year 2000 B.C. Little is known of themexcept that they spoke an Indo-European lan-guage that was the ancestor of classical andmodern Greek; worshipped a number of gods,among whom a male deity was supreme; andbehaved in a relatively aggressive or at leastexpansive manner. This first wave of Greeksbecame known as Achaeans, and within a fewcenturies, they were the dominant people inmuch of Greece. By about 1650 B.C., Mycenae,their stronghold in the Peloponnesus, thesouthern portion of Greece, seemed toemerge as the most powerful of the Achaeansettlements, and the Achaeans are thus alsoknown as Mycenaeans.

Although not primarily a seagoing people,the Mycenaeans did gradually make theirpresence felt around the Mediterranean. Byabout 1500 B.C., they moved over to Crete andtook control of the island’s centers and econ-omy from the Minoans. They moved on toCyprus and the southern coast of Turkey andeven founded settlements in Syria. Mean-

while, they also ventured westward, tradingwith the inhabitants of southern Italy, Sicily,Sardinia, and possibly even in Spain. As ven-turesome as they were, however, the Myce-naeans did not really set forth for new lands;they traveled the well-known routes of the dayand they were apparently interested solely intrade. Even the Trojan War—which if it was ahistorical event was fought principally by theAchaeans—may well have been a war overcontrol of a trade route.

The Trojan War, regarded as the climacticevent of this phase of Achaean history, isdated to about 1250 B.C. Within about a cen-tury, a new wave of people moved down fromthe north and began to compete with theMycenaeans. These people were known asDorians and, judging from the Greek languagethey spoke and wrote, they must have beenclose relatives of the Achaeans. Within a cen-tury or two, they had replaced the Myce-naeans as the dominant people in many partsof Greece, and they had also moved ontoCrete, Rhodes, southwestern Asia Minor(Turkey), Sicily, and southern Italy. But theywere even less of a maritime people than theMycenaeans, and they do not seem to havesought out any new territories.

It was a third group of people—the Ioni-ans—who seem to have brought the mostadventurous and innovative streak to the mixknown as “the Greeks.” The exact origin of theIonians remains in dispute, but whoever theywere, they appear to have spoken a languageclose to that of the Achaeans and Dorians. TheIonians may have been resident in the Pelo-ponnesus, and when the Dorians moved in about 1000 B.C., some Ionians apparentlyfled to Attica, the region where Athens islocated, while others fled to the southwesterncoast of Turkey. The Ionians who settled onthe coast and islands of Turkey would becomeso prosperous and prominent that they would

The Inquisitive Greeks B 45


The Amber Routes =

One of the most prized substances of the ancient world was amber, and in itsown way, this “gold of the north” contributed to the ancients’ knowledge of newlands. Amber is formed from the resin exuded from certain coniferous trees thatgrew many millions of years ago; on contact with the air, the resin solidified.When the trees eventually became buried under earth or the sea, the resinchanged into the very hard, yellowish-brown, almost translucent lumps knownas amber. By far, the largest and finest source of amber in the world is foundalong the Baltic Sea of northern Europe, from the Jutland peninsula acrossPoland’s coast to Lithuania. Some amber is taken directly from the sea, butmost of it is “mined” from a claylike soil known as “blue earth.”

Amber has been prized since prehistoric times for its decorative value; someancients also ascribed symbolic, magical, and curative values to it. It has beenfound in ancient sites in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as at the MinoanPalace of Knossos on Crete. But it was the Mycenaean Greeks who really beganto import amber into the Mediterranean world in relatively large quantitiesstarting about 1600 B.C. The Greeks who succeeded the Mycenaeans on themainland and around the Aegean continued to be fascinated by amber. Theycalled it elektron and realized that when they rubbed it with a piece of cloth, theamber attracted certain materials. They had in fact discovered what is nowcalled static electricity, and the English word electricity was deliberately basedon the Greek name for amber.

Starting with the Mycenaean Greeks, as the demand for amber grew, severalmajor routes developed for transporting it to the Mediterranean from the Balticregion. Amber from the western end of the Baltic was carried along the coast ofnorthern Europe and over to Britain or Britanny in France; from there it made itsway by ship or over land to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Amber from the east-ern coast of the Baltic might take an overland route south through Poland, Slo-vakia, and Slovenia to Aquileia, a port on the head of the Adriatic Sea. From thereit would be transported by boat to the Greek mainland and the greater Aegean.Another possibility was to send the amber to the Black Sea, where Greek traderswould then transport it to the Aegean. There were two preferred routes to theBlack Sea: One followed the Vistula River south through Poland to the DniesterRiver in Ukraine and down to the Black Sea; another led overland south to theregion of modern Vienna, then down the Danube River to the Black Sea.

The reason that amber figures in the history of exploration is that theseroutes had more than an economic impact. The movements and contacts of thevarious peoples along these routes led to the spread of knowledge of the

\


Aquileia

0 300 miles

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Amber Routes from Baltic to Mediterranean Sea, 1500 B.C.–A.D. 500

A L P S M T S .

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JUTLANDPENINSULA


eventually take the lead over mainland Greeksin various endeavors.

SHARED STORIESBy about 800 B.C., a relatively homogenousculture was emerging on the Greek mainlandand on the islands and coastal regions of theAegean Sea (including the Turkish coastknown as Ionia), the culture the people them-selves would call “Hellenic.” This was basedon such elements as the common language,particular techniques and motifs in their artsand crafts, and certain ways of arranging theirsocial, economic, and political systems. Aboveall, these ancient Greeks shared variousmyths, legends, and tales that expressed theirviews of the world and humans’ relations withit. Among these were a special variety of sto-ries about heroes who, although descendedfrom gods, performed feats that Greeksrecounted as though they were part of theirhistory. Perhaps the best known of theseheroes was Herakles (or Hercules, as he wasknown to the Romans), who performed the 12labors. Other well-known heroes includedTheseus and Perseus.

One of the common themes of the storiesof these heroes is that they traveled far andwide around the Mediterranean and even out-side its bounds to perform their deeds. Ofcourse, these tales were mythological, but thatdoes not cancel the fact that the ancientGreeks evidently had tremendous curiosityabout the world outside their immediate envi-rons. Greek heroic myths, in other words,express the Greeks’ willingness both to seekout new lands and to communicate informa-tion, however incorrect.

This was especially true with the story ofJason, who was said to have organized anexpedition of some 50 men to go in search ofthe Golden Fleece. Their ship was named the

Argo, so the men were known as the Arg-onauts. The Golden Fleece had belonged to a ram, or male goat, that had been sacrificedto the god Zeus in a distant land, Colchis,where the fleece was hanging in a grove oftrees. Colchis was in the Caucasus region atthe far eastern end of the Black Sea, and aftersailing there and obtaining the fleece, Jasonand the Argonauts made their way back toGreece. Once again, this story, like those ofthe other heroes, was full of fictional doings,and scholars cannot agree on exactly whatreal places were being referred to. But it isknown that some Greeks had made their wayup to the Black Sea by at least 800 B.C., andcertainly by 700 B.C. were establishing the firstof many colonies they would plant aroundthat sea.

The best known of the shared stories of the ancient Greeks, were the epic poems

Rhodes, an island in the southeastern corner of theMediterranean, was a major participant in theancient Greek realm. On a rock at the site of Lindoson Rhodes is this carving of the stern of a ship(some 4.6 m long, 5.5 m high), with a lateral rudderand the helmsman’s seat visible. It dates fromabout 180 B.C. and is believed to have been commissioned by sailors to honor both a local official and a local goddess. (Courtesy of Francesca DiPietro Bowman)


The adventures of Odysseus were known wherever Greeks and their culture were present around theMediterranean. One example is this bronze mirror (about 500 B.C.) from the Etruscan people of Italy, which on its opaque side depicts Odysseus attacking Circe. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-110245])


attributed to Homer, The Iliad and The Odys-sey. Virtually nothing factual is known ofHomer as an individual, although it is gener-ally believed that he came from one of the Ion-ian cities along the coast of present-dayTurkey; it is also believed that he wrote downthese poems about 750 B.C. Whoever thisHomer was, it is quite certain that a large por-tion of the poems attributed to him had beenpassed along for several centuries by genera-tions of storytellers.

The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan Warand so is largely confined to the locale of Troy.The Odyssey, however, recounts the story ofthe 10-year voyage of Odysseus as he attemptsto make his way back to his island home offthe northwestern coast of Greece after theTrojan War. Along the way, he has numerousadventures at various exotic locales, and bothprofessional scholars and amateur enthusi-asts have never tired of trying to pin thesedown to specific places. Usually they try toidentify Odysseus’s locales with sites aroundthe Mediterranean, but some interpret thetext as referring to places well outside thatsea—as far as Britain—while others place theentire voyage in the Black Sea. Although noone would argue that The Odyssey can betreated as a geography text, it is the supremeexample of the ancient Greeks’ fascinationwith voyaging into unknown territory. Putanother way, it is no wonder that generationsof young Greeks raised on The Odyssey wereinspired to want to set out to see the world.

THE IONIANSUntil about 650 B.C., virtually all peoples onearth chose to explain the world, both knownand unknown, by myths, legends, and otherimaginative accounts. About then, however, asmall number of Greeks began to employ sci-ence and mathematics to account for the Earth

and its phenomena. These “rationalists” werethe Ionian Greeks who lived in cities along thesouthwestern coast of Turkey, a region that had thus become known as Ionia. As men-tioned, there is considerable uncertainty asjust who these Ionians were, but there is noquestion that these people spoke and wroteGreek. One of their major cities was Miletus,and it was one of its citizens, Thales, who livedabout 640–546 B.C., used geometry to predictan eclipse of the Sun—a phenomenon thatmost people attributed to the gods. About 550B.C., another citizen of Miletus, Anaximander,revolutionized astronomy by claiming that theentire universe was a sphere, with the Earth atthe center (although he regarded the Earth asshaped like a cylinder) and the Moon, planets,stars, and Sun encircling it. He used a gnomon,a sundial-like device, to determine the equi-noxes, and he was also credited with drawingthe first map of the Earth.

That did not survive, but still another Ion-ian Greek from Miletus, Hecataeus, camealong about 500 B.C. and was credited withimproving Anaximander’s map by providingeven more details. Hecataeus is also said tohave written two volumes, Europe and Asia,described as “a journey round the world” andthus gaining for him the epithet “Father ofGeography.” That should not be taken as prov-ing that he himself traveled widely or meaningthat he possessed a solid knowledge of theearth. In fact, as his two books suggest, hebelieved like most of his Greek contempo-raries that there were only the two conti-nents—Africa was regarded as part of Asia.And although Hecataeus thought of the Earthas round, he regarded it is a flat plane, with thetwo continents surrounded by an ocean.

All these views and versions of the Earthwere essentially intellectual—that is, theseindividuals had apparently arrived at them bycollecting information that was brought to


them by others and using mathematics andother mental calculations. This approachowed much to the fact that these same Ioniancities were active in sending out mariners,traders, and colonists to distant lands. Theport city of Phocaea (near the modern Turkishvillage of Foca) was among the leaders, andduring the 500s B.C., it founded a string oftrading stations along the Mediterraneancoast, from southern Italy to Spain. Some ofthe Phocaean settlements grew into prosper-ous cities; Massalia, the home of Pytheas, themariner credited with sailing northwesternEurope, was merely the best known of these.The Phocaean also founded settlements upalong both shores of the Adriatic Sea, betweeneastern Italy and Yugoslavia.

The Phocaean also had a settlement on theBlack Sea, but the Ionians of Miletus were farmore active in exploring and settling the BlackSea. The Roman historian, Pliny, told a story ofMidacritus, an Ionian Greek most likely fromPhocaea, “who was the first to import ‘whitelead’ [that is, tin] from the Tin Island.” It is notclear what this refers to, but it would seemthat Pliny was claiming that this Midacritussailed all the way to Cornwall, in Britain, thesame destination of Pytheas. The Greeks whowent off to establish these settlements maynot have been heroes like the Argonauts, andthey were probably motivated primarily bythe desire to improve their own lot in life.

OTHER GREEKS, OTHER JOURNEYSIonians were not the only Greeks active inexploring distant lands between 650 and 400B.C. Scylax has already been mentioned: Hewas the mariner commissioned by the PersianKing Darius to lead an expedition to India andthe Persian Gulf. Scylax was from Caria, aregion just south of the Ionian Greek region,

and if not a Greek himself, was probably influ-enced by the expansive Ionian Greeks. Therewas even the story—although told only by thelater Greek historian Pausanias—that anothercitizen of Caria, Euphemus, was blown by thewinds through the Strait of Gibraltar and allacross the great ocean to an island inhabitedby red-skinned men with horses’ tails; somepeople have tried to claim that this indicatesthat some ancient got all the way to theAntilles (in the Caribbean!), but no scholarsaccept this.

Herodotus, the Greek historian, told of amariner named Colaeus, who about 640 B.C.was trying to sail from the coast of NorthAfrica back to his island home of Samos, offthe coast of Turkey. Heavy winds instead blewhim west all the way across the Mediterraneanand outside the Strait of Gibraltar to the landof Tartessus, located on the southwesterncoast of Spain. There Colaeus is said to havepicked up such a large load of silver that,when he got back to Samos, he was able toretire.

Then there was a tale about a certain seacaptain from Massalia, the same Greek colonythat was home port to Pytheas, who was saidby a later Roman author, Festus RufusAvienus, to have written a periplus (literally,“sailing-round,” basically a guide to coastalsettlements) about 525 B.C. In this periplus,the Massalian mariner shows a good knowl-edge of the coast of Spain and also refers tothe British Isles and even to Ireland, but sincethe Roman Avienus is the only one ever torefer to this periplus, it is not clear just howmuch credence should be given it. And therewas still another Massalian, Euthymenes, whoabout 530 B.C. was said to have sailed outthrough the Strait of Gibraltar and down alongthe west coast of Africa. There he came to alarge river in which he saw crocodiles—whichEuthymenes believed indicated he had seen

the Upper Nile. (Modern scholars believe it isthe Senegal River that was being described.)

Nothing about these tales can be verified,but as with all such stories that the ancientGreeks recounted, what matters is the mes-sage between the lines: The Greeks knew therisks of setting out to sea but were intrigued bythe prospects of traveling far afield.

TWO ADVENTUROUSGREEKSPerhaps no one epitomized this spirit of theancient Greeks more than Herodotus, a Greekfrom another city of Caria, Hallicarnassus.Born about 484 B.C., he traveled widely in hisyouth, not only in Greece, but also in Meso-


Lost Atlantis =

One of the most enduring yet astounding contributions of the ancient Greeks tothe discovery of new lands is in fact a complete fiction: the tale of Lost Atlantis.The story began with the famous Greek philosopher Plato (429–347 B.C.), whoin two of his works, the Timaeus and the Critias, told of a story allegedly passedon to Greeks by an Egyptian priest. The priest said Atlantis had existed 9,000years before ancient Athens and that the island was located in the great oceanoutside the Pillars of Hercules—that is, the Strait of Gibraltar.

This Atlantis was a highly advanced and prosperous land. Among its moreremarkable features were quantities of gold, ambitious canals, plentiful fruitsand flowers, great palaces, a horse-racing track, and wild bulls that werehunted down. Atlantis was purportedly the center of an empire that dominatedmuch of the Mediterranean world until Athens rose up and defeated it. Afterthat, violent earthquakes and floods overwhelmed Atlantis, and in one day thewhole island sank to the depths of the ocean.

Most of the ancients who commented on Plato’s story of Atlantis recognizedit as a fiction intended to convey a moral: The pursuit of excessive material pos-sessions and power would only lead to the destruction of a society. Someancients, however, did seem to take it literally. They might be excused for notknowing that, in 9000 B.C., human beings were barely emerging from the StoneAge. But they should have been suspicious that such a large landmass couldhave sunk in one day; according to the tale, the capital city of Atlantis alone hadan area greater than all of Greece!

For many centuries, Atlantis was simply a name occasionally discussed byscholarly writers. With the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas, however,Atlantis suddenly emerged as though it were a real place. One or another of thenewly found American islands or the complete American continent was nomi-nated as Atlantis—somehow the fact that Atlantis was to have sunk beneath thewaves was overlooked. And in the five centuries since 1492, various writers havecontinued to nominate locales all over the earth as the site of Atlantis. The list ofbooks dealing with Atlantis since 1492 fills many pages; many of these books areserious discussions of geology, geography, and other scientific disciplines.

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potamia, the Phoenician coast, Egypt, the east-ern coast of North Africa, and all the way tosouthwest Russia. He visited Athens in 447 B.C.,and by 443 B.C. he had moved to a new Greekcolony in southern Italy. By then he was writinga history of the world up to his time, withemphasis on the wars between the Persiansand the Greeks (499–479 B.C.). But Herodotus’s

history was much more than what is under-stood by that word today. In addition to the historical narrative, it is a vast encyclopedia ofgeographical facts gained firsthand or from hisresearch, observations on human beings en-countered or described, quotations frommajor writers and obscure sources, tales of themost commonplace and the most fantastic.


Atlantis was the creation of the Greek philosopher Plato, but people across thecenturies have chosen to treat it as a real place. In this map from a book of 1665,Atlantis is shown as a large island between Europe and North America. (Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-76292])

Then in the 20th century, a new twist was added to this story: actual expedi-tions—some costing large sums of money and involving professional scien-tists—set forth to points all over the world to search for Atlantis. To this day,every few years another “explorer” claims to have found the actual remains ofAtlantis. So it is that this ancient Greek tale has stimulated centuries of discus-sions that have contributed in some degree to exploring and revealing disputedparts of the world.


Herodotus was called “the Father of His-tory” by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle,but he might also be called the first true

explorer. Almost no individual earlier thanHerodotus comes into focus with such aninsatiable curiosity about the world at large.

Herodotus, a Greek from Hallicarnassus in what is today southwestern Turkey, traveled widely before arrivingin Athens in 447 B.C.—the very year construction of the Parthenon, shown here, began. He would not stay tosee it completed, but he would have been inspired by the Athenians to continue writing about the accomplishments of his fellow Greeks. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-94169])


He not only traveled widely, he collected everybit of information he could about the placeshe visited and those he was only told about.

Many of the stories about the early explorersare known only because Herodotus collectedthem. Many places in distant parts—south-west Russia, for example, or lower Egypt—were barely known about until Herodotusreported on them. And he did so in an engag-ing, flexible style that made his informationaccessible to any literate person. True,Herodotus repeated all kinds of fabulous tales,but there are also elements in his work thatsound like thoroughly modern scholarship.Below Herodotus tells of how he learnedmuch about Egypt from the priests he met atEgyptian temples:

Those of their narrations that I heard withregard to the gods, I am not anxious torelate in full, but I shall mention them onlybecause I consider that all men are equallyignorant of these matters: and whateverthings of them I may record I shall recordonly because I am compelled by the courseof the story. [The priests] said also that thefirst man who became king of Egypt wasMin; and that in his time all Egypt exceptthe district of Thebes was a swamp, andnone of the regions were then above waterwhich now lie below the lake of Moiris, towhich lake it is a voyage of seven days upthe river from the sea. I thought that theysaid well about the land, for it is manifestlytrue even to a person who has not heard itbeforehand but has only seen, at least if hehave understanding, that the Egypt towhich the Hellenes come in ships is a landthat has been won by the Egyptians as anaddition, and that it is a gift of the river.

Egypt—“the gift of the [Nile] river”: No onehas ever said it better in all the centuries sinceHerodotus. After talking with the priests, like atrue explorer he set out to learn about thesource of the Nile and its annual flooding, but

he eventually concluded: “[A]bout the sourcesof the Nile, no one, whether Egyptian orLibyan or Greek, who has talked with me, hasadmitted that he knew anything, except theclerk of the holy utensil at the shrine of Athenein Sais in Egypt; but I think he was jokingwhen he said he knew accurately.”

Herodotus is believed to have died about424 B.C., and just a few years before this, about430 B.C., another remarkable Greek was born.Xenophon was an Athenian aristocrat andmilitary man, and in 401 B.C. he accepted aninvitation from the Persian Cyrus the Youngerto join a military campaign that turned out tobe an attempt to overthrow Cyrus’s olderbrother, Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Some10,000 Greek mercenaries eventually joinedthis expedition, and when Cyrus was killed in

the battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia,Xenophon eventually assumed command ofthis Greek army and led them on their retreatfrom the Persians. Their six-month journeytook them some 800 miles from near Baghdadall the way to the Black Sea, and often theyhad to fight off hostile forces. It was an epicfeat but might have gone unnoticed had notXenophon eventually written a stirringaccount of it, the Anabasis—the Greek mean-ing “a military movement” but usually trans-lated as “The Retreat of the 10,000.”

After they made their way north and out ofMesopotamia, these Greeks moved across theregions known today as Kurdistan and TurkishArmenia. It appears that they reached thesource of the Tigris River and passed near thesource of the Euphrates; they were close to


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Lake Van. During the winter weeks, they foundthemselves in the rugged mountains, andmany died from the cold and exhaustion.Finally they arrived at a mountain peak, andXenophon described this event in one of thebest known passages in Greek history:

No sooner had the men in the leadascended it and caught sight of the sea thana great cry arose. Xenophon, in the rear,catching the sound of it, assumed thatanother group of enemies must be attack-ing. . . . But as the shout became louder andnearer, and those who from time to timecame up from the rear began racing at fullspeed toward the shouting, and the shout-

ing continued at still greater volume as thenumbers increased, Xenophon realized thatsomething extraordinary must have oc-curred, so he mounted his horse and takinghis cavalry with him, galloped to the rescue.Presently they could hear the soldiersshouting and passing on the joyful word,“The sea! The sea!”

Xenophon never saw himself as anexplorer, not even a geographer; he wrote hisaccount as an historian; but he was so obser-vant and so graphic that his Anabasis servedto introduce a whole new region to his fellowGreeks. That is not to say that they knew noth-ing about parts of the region. Nor does it meanthat it is absolutely clear just where Xenophonand his army traveled, although modernscholars have pretty much agreed on theroute. The point, though, is that this verysophisticated man wrote an account thatdemonstrated both honesty about a near dis-astrous expedition and objective descriptionsof a little-known region.

Consider a typical passage from theAnabasis. where the Greeks have captured agroup of men in northern Mesopotamia andare wondering what lies ahead:

After hearing the statements of the prison-ers, the Greek officers seated apart thosewho claimed to have any special knowledgeof the country in any direction. They satthem apart without making it clear whichparticular route they intended to take.Finally they decided that they must force apassage through the hills into the territoryof the Kurds; according to what theirinformants told them, when they had oncepassed these, they would find themselves inArmenia—the rich and large territory gov-erned by Orontas—and from Armenia itwould be easy to proceed in any direction.


There are no contemporary portraits of Xenophon,any more than of the other ancient Greeks still so admired. This portrait from 1810 is really an idealized tribute to this general/adventurer/authorwhose account of his epic trek across the MiddleEast helped to introduce that region to the ancientEuropeans. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ61-1366])

Thereupon they offered sacrifice so as to beready to start on the march as soon as theright moment arrived. Their chief fear wasthat the high pass over the mountainsmight be occupied in advance.

This is a far cry from the mythological ver-sions of adventures and exotic lands that mostancient peoples were accustomed to.

THE GREEKS’LIMITED KNOWLEDGEAs it happened, at the same time thatXenophon was fighting alongside Cyrus at theBattle of Cunaxa, another Greek was aidingCyrus’s brother, King Artaxerxes. This was Cte-sias, a physician from Cnidos, yet anotherGreek colony on the southwest coast of Turkey.The Persians had controlled this part of south-west Asia since 546 B.C., and it was quite com-mon for Greeks to cooperate with the Persians.Little is known about Ctesias, and none of hiswritings have survived in their original texts,but it is clear from other ancient authors thathe was famed for a history of India that he hadwritten. Ctesias’s so-called history was hardlywhat would qualify as history today; it wasclearly little more than a collection of tales

that he heard while at the Persian court, forthe Persians did have dealings with India.Another ancient writer, Dionysus of Halicar-nassus, characterized Ctesis’s work as “enter-taining but badly composed.” Ctesias did noteven claim to have visited India, and the landhe describes is full of the exotic and fabulous,although it is possible that some of what heclaims is based on misunderstandings. Forinstance, Ctesias says that, in India, theredwell some people who have only one verylarge foot—so big they can use it as a sun-shade. Some scholars suggest that Ctesias sim-ply misunderstood reports of the practice ofcertain Indian holy men who stood in unusualposes for a long time, usually on one foot.

Ctesias may be an extreme example of theGreeks’ misconceptions of the world duringthe classic age, but there is no denying thatmost ancient Greeks’ descriptions of theworld were rife with errors. For all their trav-els, for all their research, for all their attemptsat objective description, they simply did notknow enough about the world beyond theirown immediate environs—primarily, thelands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.This would change with the contributions ofthe man who came to be known as Alexanderthe Great.


The ancient Greeks, for all theiraccomplishments, were in fact limitedin their knowledge of the world at

large. Partly this was because it was simply notthat easy to obtain and communicate factsabout the world beyond one’s immediateregion: A ship captain might return from somedistant land and describe unusual sights, butsuch tales would not have carried far. Partly,too, it was because the ancient Greeks had acertain smugness, a sense of superiority: Theyfelt they had the most civilized, the mostsophisticated society, so there was no greatneed to rush off to seek out new places. This isreflected in their word for non-Greek speak-ers—barbaros: Believed to be derived from thesound of the languages spoken by non-Greeks, it came to mean foreign, crude, ignorant. Since the non-Greek world wasinhabited by “barbarians,” the Greeks be-lieved that there was not much to be gainedfrom them.

North of the main Greek city-states, forexample, was a vast territory known as Mace-don—a region now divided up among modernGreece, the Former Yugoslavian Republic ofMacedonia, and Bulgaria. A raw, mountainousland, most of it was as shadowy as its inhabi-tants. Even today, scholars are not absolutelyclear about just who the ancient Macedonianswere—that is, their ethnic origins and rela-tionships—and the ancient Greeks of the cen-turies just tended to regard them as at leastsemi-barbarians.

In fact, although Macedon long remaineda rather primitive society compared to thegreat city-states of Greece, many Macedo-nians spoke a form of Greek and their leadersclaimed to share Greek culture. When Philip IItook over the throne of Macedon in 359 B.C.,he asserted his “Greekness” by setting aboutto conquer the Greek city-states. By 336 hehad accomplished this and was preparing tolead a combined Macedonian-Greek invasion

59

Alexander the Great andthe Hellenistic World

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of Persia when he was assassinated. His 20-year-old son, Alexander, immediately assumedthe throne. In the short life left to him, Alexan-der accomplished so much that he would go down in history as one of the few individu-als always identified as “the great.” Althoughthis usually is taken to refer to his militaryfeats, the case can be made that the sameword characterizes his role in the history ofexploration.

ALEXANDER THE WARRIORThere are several authentic texts aboutAlexander by his contemporaries, but they areknown only from later works that quote them.Probably many of the tales told of Alexanderwere of the legendary kind attributed to suchcelebrated heroes, but there was probably atleast a grain of truth behind them. For

instance, it was claimed that when he heardabout his father’s conquests of the Greek city-states, he cried, saying, “My father will leavenothing great for me to do.” He was said tohave carried a copy of Homer’s Iliad with himat all times because he so admired the war-rior-hero Achilles. It was also said that hisfavorite horse, Bucephalus, was one that noone else had dared to try to tame.

Whether Alexander was such a superhu-man person or not, he was an extraordinarilygifted individual. When he was 13 years old,his parents engaged the Greek philosopherAristotle to come to Macedonia to tutor him.Aristotle was an equally extraordinary person,in command of the entire range of humanknowledge at that time. He taught Alexanderthe great classics and ideals of Greek cultureand also about the countries and peoples else-where in the known world as well as the natu-


These gold coins portray Philip II, king of Macedonia from 382–336 B.C. and father of Alexander the Great. It was Philip who succeeded in conquering the city-states of Greece. He died before he could undertake hisplan to invade the Persian Empire, a goal his son attained. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-107427])

ral history of the plants and animals aroundthem. By the time he became king, then,Alexander was not only a brave and vigorousyoung man, he was an intelligent and inquisi-tive one.

His first acts as king were to extend his ruleover some of the tribes north of Macedoniaand to put down a revolt in the Greek city-state of Thebes—and then sell most of its30,000 citizens into slavery. After this, the restof the Greek city-states, including Athens,acknowledged Alexander’s leadership, and bythe spring of 334 B.C. he was ready to pursuethe goal his father had in mind before he waskilled—to conquer the Persian Empire. With

an army of some 35,000 Macedonians, Greeks,and foreign mercenaries, he crossed theHellespont, the ancient Greeks’ name for theStrait of Dardanelles that separated Europefrom Asia in what is modern Turkey.

In the next four years, Alexander led hisoften-outnumbered troops in a series of bat-tles and sieges that routed the Persian armiesand conquered all the major cities of the Persian Empire. These included the Phoeni-cian port city of Tyre (in modern Lebanon),the Egyptian city of Memphis, the Mesopo-tamian city of Babylon (in modern Iraq), andthe Persian capital city of Persepolis (in mod-ern Iran). While in Egypt, he founded the

Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World B 61

An early 19th-century print of the remains of ancient Tyre, the prosperous Phoenician port-city on theMediterranean coast of what is now southern Lebanon. Alexander began a siege of Tyre in early 322 B.C.,but it took some seven months and tremendous efforts before he conquered it. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-3489])

first of many cities he would establish, Alexan-dria, along the Mediterranean coast, destinedto become one of the great cities of theancient world.

ALEXANDER THE EXPLORERAfter he conquered Persepolis—and burnt it, according to legend, to pay back the Per-sians for having burnt Athens in 480 B.C.—Alexander released the many Greeks whowanted to go home. Which again says some-thing about the Greeks’ attitude toward theworld at large. They had now traversed theworld that they knew about; beyond lay theunknown—and these Greeks were not in-terested in exploring this “barbarian” world.

But Alexander was, and during the next five years he led a mixed army of Macedo-nians and mercenaries from several lands inone of the most amazing expeditions of alltime.

True, Alexander’s immediate goal was topursue rival rulers and to conquer more lands.But to accomplish what he did, he had to bemotivated by something beyond the meredesire to win battles and acquire land. In anycase, the expedition earns its place in the his-tory of exploration because Alexander—faith-ful to his tutor, Aristotle—took along anumber of scientists to observe and record allthat was new. And although much of the landtraversed was inhabited, it rates as an expedi-tion of discovery because it was the reports ofseveral of Alexander’s staff that brought this


The Khyber Pass on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, some 30 miles long, provides a relatively easyroute through the Safed Koh Mountains. It has been the main land approach to India from Central Asia andthe west since ancient times, and it was chosen by Alexander the Great for his entry into northern India.(© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)

vast region of Asia into the consciousness ofthe Western world.

This was not just some vague notion of anexotic region. The famous historian-geogra-pher Herodotus, for instance, writing some100 years before Alexander’s expedition, haddescribed some of the geographical featuresand peoples of this part of the world, but hebased everything on secondhand reports andwas usually way off the mark. Alexander tookwith him some bematists (Greek for “pacers”),meaning surveyors, who not only measuredthe distances of the routes but also recordedthe peoples and products along the way.

Alexander set out from Persepolis in thespring of 330 B.C. and led his army norththrough the Zagros Mountains into the regionknown as Media. He then proceeded along thesouthern shore of the Caspian Sea—which hemistakenly came to believe was an oceangulf—eastward through the region known asParthia. After turning down into southeasternPersia, he headed north into Afghanistan; atone point he crossed a mountain pass at some8,700 feet, where his troops suffered greatlyfrom the cold and snow.

After spending the winter in northernAfghanistan (near the location of modernKabul), he set out in the spring of 329 B.C. andcrossed the mountain range known as theHindu Kush into regions known as Bactria andSogdiana. There he crossed the great OxusRiver (now the Amu Darya) and went on toanother great river, the Jaxartes (now the SyrDarya), where he founded a city to mark thefarthest point he would reach in Central Asia.

Alexander was now determined to invadeand conquer India, and in the spring of 327B.C. he set out southward. One part of his armyentered India through what is now the famousKhyber Pass, but Alexander led another forcethrough mountains so remote and wild that itwould be another 2,220 years before there was

any record of an explorer visiting them. Hejoined up with his other troops on the banksof the Indus River (in what is now Pakistan),where he rested over the winter before cross-ing over into the region known as the Punjab.There, in spring 326 B.C., Alexander led histroops against the Fortress of Aornus, high ona rock, and in a seemingly impossible feat,defeated the Indian tribesmen who had takenrefuge there. He then proceeded to defeat the


This 19th-century painting is an artist’s version ofAlexander’s forces attacking the fortress of Aornusnear the upper Indus River. Situated on an almostinaccessible rocky prominence, the fort was takenby Alexander in the spring of 326 B.C. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-93890])

most powerful prince in northwestern India ata battle near the Hydaspes River. (His belovedhorse, Bucephalus, died after this battle, soAlexander founded the city of Bucephala onthe site.)

Alexander intended to march still furthersouth and conquer more of India, but histroops refused to go any farther. So Alexan-der had his men build a small fleet of shipsand then, with about half his troops march-ing along both sides of the Indus River andthe rest in the ships, he led his army down tothe Indus Delta on the Arabian Sea. Along the way they were amazed by some of theexotic vegetation they saw, such as the greatbanyan trees, which one of his companions,Onesicritus, described in his account of thetrip:

The branches. . . . grow downwards untilthey touch the earth; after which theyspread underground and take root like lay-ers and then spring up and grow into astem; after that again. . . . they are bentdown and form first one and then anotherlayer, and so on continuously so that fromone tree proceeds a long sunshade, resem-bling a tent supported by many poles, . . .the trees are of such a size that five men canwith difficulty clasp their trunks.

Alexander now faced the challenge of get-ting his men back to Babylon, the city that hehad chosen to be the capital of his new empirein Asia. Well before reaching the sea, he hadalready sent one section of his army—led byCraterus—across western India and southernPersia (Iran). He now divided his remainingforces into two groups. He would lead onegroup westward overland, but the otherstayed with the ships they had built to saildown the Indus. This fleet, commanded by aCretan-Greek admiral, Nearchus, sailed all the

way along the coasts of the Arabian Sea andthe Persian Gulf until reaching its head andthe mouth of the Euphrates River. This voyageitself ranks as one of the great maritime voy-ages of the ancient world—some 1,400 milesthrough largely unknown waters and along anunknown coast. Nearchus himself wrote athorough account, and although it was lost, aquite complete summary survived in the workof Arrian, a Roman of the second century A.D.who also wrote the best account of the life ofAlexander.

Many of Nearchus’s detailed descriptionscan be easily assigned to known placestoday—Karachi in Pakistan, Ormuz in Iran. Healso described the many unusual encountersduring the five months they were either sail-ing or seeking food and water on shore. At onepoint, they had to fight off some 600 “savages,”and Nearchus described those they took captive:

They were hairy over their heads as well asthe rest of their persons and had fingernailslike wild beasts; at least they were said touse their nails like iron tools and to kill fishby tearing with them and to cut up woods ofthe softer sorts. . . . For clothing they worethe skins of wild beats, some indeed wear-ing the thick skins of the bigger fish.

On another occasion, according to Arrian’saccount:

Nearchus says they saw in the east waterblown up from the sea, as though it werecarried along by the blast of a whirlwind,and the men, being terrified, enquired oftheir guides what this was . . . They repliedthat these were whales. . . . whereupon thesailors were seized with panic and droppedthe oars from their hands. Nearchus wentup to his men and cheered and inspirited


them and as he passed them in his own ves-sel he bade them draw up their ships in lineas if for a naval engagement and row for-ward in close array and with much noise,accompanying with loud shouts the plash-ing of their oars. At this they took heart andadvanced all together at a signal and whenthey came near the monsters of the deepthey shouted with all their might and blewtheir trumpets and made all possible noisewith their oars . . . on hearing which thewhales . . . took fright and plunged into thedepths, but not long after came to the sur-

face again close to the sterns of the vesselsand once more spouted great jets of seawater.

Nearchus and his ships and crews eventu-ally sailed up to the heads of the Persian Gulfand made their way up the Tigris River andsoon rejoined Alexander, who had made hisway across southern Persia and then intoMesopotamia. His trip, which had taken aboutthe same five months, had its own challenges,for it led through uncharted and rugged terri-tory, aggravated by the extreme heat and con-


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stant shortages of food and water. With thosemen still with him—he had lost thousands of men along the way and thousands of othershad chosen to stay behind—Alexander madehis way to Babylon, arriving there in early 324 B.C.

ALEXANDER’S LEGACY:The Hellenistic WorldIt had been a truly fabulous six years sinceAlexander had set out from Persepolis, yearsin which he not only fought a number ofmajor battles, killed or displaced a number of Persian and other leaders, founded some 70 outposts and cities, and overcame the

most difficult physical obstacles imaginable.Through the writings of several of his com-panions, he would throw light on a vast part ofthe earth that had been consigned to dark-ness. And once established at Babylon,Alexander set about introducing some orderinto his far-flung empire. He also was said tohave planned to lead a sailing expeditionaround Arabia and Africa, but before he coulddo this, he died of malaria in June 323 B.C.Alexander left behind one son, but he wasonly an infant, so Alexander’s generals beganto share in governing the empire. By 311 B.C.,however, they had taken to quarreling somuch that they split up the empire into threekingdoms.


The Lighthouse and Library of Alexandria =

Under Ptolemy I and his successors in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the Egyptian portcity of Alexandria soon developed into one of the major cities of the ancientworld, a center of both international trade and cosmopolitan culture. Promi-nence in these two areas was embodied in Alexandria’s two great structures—the lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) and the library.The lighthouse, designed by a Greek, Sostratos, was some 440 feet high andstood on an islet in the harbor. A continually burning fire provided the light thatcould be seen far at sea by the many ships approaching the city with theirgoods—and tales—from all over the world. Erected about 270 B.C., it collapsedduring an earthquake about A.D. 730. The library, established by Ptolemy I butgreatly expanded by his son, provided another window on the world: It gradu-ally collected copies of virtually every existing written work known. These werein the form of scrolls, most of them made of papyrus, the early form of paper,and also some of parchment, made of animal skin. But the great library ofAlexandria was more than a depository of written works; it was also a center ofscholarly and scientific studies. Its succession of distinguished chief librarians,its staff, the permanent and transient scholars who used its resources—even-tually estimated to have reached 700,000 scrolls—made this the premier cen-ter of knowledge about the world for several centuries. Some ancients blamedJulius Caesar for destroying a large part of it when he besieged the city in 47B.C., but most scholars now agree that it was destroyed over a long period oftime and during several attacks on the city.

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Alexander’s accomplishments and legacydid not vanish. Not only had he establishedthose many outposts and cities, he hadimposed Greek and Macedonian rulers overmuch of the territory that he had conquered.Many of his Greek and Macedonian soldiershad simply stayed behind to make new lives inthese distant lands. The Greek language,Greek ideas of society, Greek culture, Greekcommerce—they were now pervasive fromthe old Greek colonies at the far westernMediterranean such as Massalia to the newoutposts in Central Asia and northern India.This phase of history is known as the Hellenis-tic Age—for the Greeks called themselves“Hellenes”—and is regarded as lasting fromthe time of Alexander until the Romans tookover most of this realm about 200 years later.

The Hellenistic Age was characterized notjust by the prominence of Greek ideas andculture. There was a more cosmopolitan spiritto this period, brought about by the diversityof peoples and activities now moving aboutthis vast area. There was an openness to newideas, new places, new ways of doing things.Pytheas, the Greek from Massalia who sailedinto the north Atlantic, was one example ofthis new spirit. Perhaps the most outstandingsymbol of the Hellenistic Age was, fittingly, acity founded by Alexander himself—Alexan-dria, on the Mediterranean Sea at the westernedge of the Nile Delta. With the breakup ofAlexander’s empire, one of his Macedoniangenerals, Ptolemy, made this port city the cap-ital of his new kingdom based in Egypt.

THE PTOLEMIES SUPPORTEXPLORATIONPtolemy, who had accompanied Alexander allthe way to the Indus River and back, took upAlexander’s idea of an expedition to Arabia.During his reign (323–285 B.C.), he sponsored

an expedition under an admiral Philo, whosailed down along the Africa side of the ArabianSea. Philo did not discover any new lands, butfollowing his return the Egyptians underPtolemy began to import elephants and ivoryfrom Africa south of Egypt. Ptolemy I’s son andsuccessor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, establishedtrading ports along the Red Sea, opened uptrade with Yemen and Somalia, and sent expe-ditions that explored the coast of the Horn ofAfrica. Subsequent members of the PtolemaicDynasty, as these rulers of Egypt are known,sent still more expeditions to this region.

Admittedly, these expeditions were moreconcerned with trade, but each contact in-creased the store of knowledge of these little-known locales. One of the most ambitiousexplorers of this era was a man who seemed tohave combined commercial goals with sheercuriosity, Eudoxus of Cyszicus, a city in north-west Turkey. The adventures of Eudoxus areknown only through the account in Strabo,the Greek geographer and historian (ca. 63B.C.–ca. A.D. 24), who in turn was simplyrepeating the account of Posidonius (ca.135–50 B.C.), another Greek-Roman historian.Eudoxus’s first expedition took place underPtolemy VIII Euergetes II, who ruled the king-dom from 146 to 111 B.C. As the story went, “anIndian happened to be brought to the king bythe guards of the Arabian [Gulf], who said theyfound him cast ashore alone and half dead,but who he was and whence he came they didnot know because they could not understandhis language.” After the Indian was taughtGreek, “he promised to be a guide on a voyageto India for men chosen by the king.” Eudoxusis among those who went but when hereturned loaded with precious stones andother valuable objects, Euergetes took all (ormost of) his cargo. When Euergetes died, hiswidow sponsored another expedition to India;again, Eudoxus returned with valuable goods,


again, the new king, seized all (or most all) ofhis cargo.

One would think that Eudoxus would quitat that, but while returning on that secondvoyage, he had been blown ashore on the eastcoast of Africa. Not having any notion of howlarge Africa was, he decided to sail around itand head straight for India, thus avoiding thePtolemies—by heading first for its west(Atlantic) coast. He fitted out a ship and sailedacross the Mediterranean, along the way tak-ing on all kinds of cargo expected to trade inAfrica and India, “and also physicians. . . . andcarpenters besides.” Sailing through the Pil-lars of Hercules, he rounded the northwestshoulder of Africa, but before long his ship ranaground and was wrecked. He built a new shipand sailed a bit farther, but then turned back,intending to make a new voyage in a largership. In fact, Eudoxus probably had gone onlyslightly south of Morocco.

On his way back “he saw and noted downa well-watered and well-wooded but unpeo-pled island”—possibly one of the Canaries,possibly one of the Madeiras. After severaladventures in northwest Africa, he made hisway back to Spain, built two more ships, andorganized yet another expedition with thegoal of reaching India. Even Strabo remarks:“How was it that [Eudoxus] did not fear. . . . tosail again.” In any case, he sailed off oncemore into the Atlantic and down the westcoast of Africa—and was never heard ofagain. Although some scholars question justhow much of Eudoxus’s story is true, othersaccept it and regard Eudoxus as havingearned a place in the history of exploration.

THE LEGACY OF OTHER GREEKSThe Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt, but therest of Alexander’s vast empire was divided up

among several of his former generals and theirheirs. One of these was Seleucus I Nicator,who by 312 B.C. assumed control of the terri-tory that included Mesopotamia and Persia.He extended his rule west to the Mediter-ranean and east all the way to the upper IndusValley of India, where Alexander had leftbehind a relatively weak Macedonian-Greekcolonial administration. Seleucus, of Greek-Macedonian descent, although a tough mili-tary man, was also interested in knowingmore about the world he lived in—to exploitit, of course. About 285 B.C., he sent a mannamed Patrocles on an expedition to theCaspian Sea. Patrocles sailed along the south-ern edge of the sea, noting the various riversthat entered there, and then sailed eastwardout of the sea on a since dried-up gulf. Hereturned with claims that the Caspian Seaopened into a northern ocean and that it alsowas connected by a water route to India, mis-understandings that would mislead theGreeks for some time to come.

Meanwhile, an Indian by the name ofChandragupta Maurya had seized power innortheastern India, and by about 305 B.C. hehad forced Seleucus to cede him control overthe region once occupied by Alexander’sforces. Chandragupta established a new capi-tal at Pataliputra on the Ganges River, andSeleucus, wanting to maintain good relationswith his neighbor, in 302 B.C. sent an ambassa-dor there. He chose Megasthenes, a Greek ofconsiderable learning, who ended up writingthe Indica, a complete account of India—itsgeography, climate, government, people, cus-toms, and religion.

Once again, the original text has not sur-vived, but large parts of it were preserved inthe texts of other ancient authors, includingStrabo and Arrian, who have previously beencited as preserving so much about Alexander.The Indica was for many centuries the most


respected work on India in the West, andmodern scholars, by comparing his state-ments with those of Indian accounts of thattime, have confirmed that Megasthenes wasfar more accurate than most of his contempo-

raries. He knew, for instance, that the IndusRiver flowed from northeast to southwest; thatthe Ganges also started in that direction butthen turned eastward; that the Himalayarange ran across the northern boundary of


Antioch

Babylon Susa

Ecbatana

Bactra

Phra

Persepolis

en

Perg

Tigris R.

Euph

rates R.

.Reli

N

Indu

sR

.

Hypha

sisR.

EGYPT

Mediterranean Sea

INDIAN OCEAN

PersianGulf

RedSea

Black Sea CaspianSea

Tigris R.

Euph

rates R.

.Reli

N

Indu

sR

.

Hypha

sisR.

Oxus R.

Jaxartes R.

Danube R.

EGYPT

ARABIA

ABYSSINIA

A F R I C A

AFGHANISTAN

Athens

Alexandria

Cyrene

Pergamum

Antioch

Babylon Susa

Ecbatana

Bactra

Phra

Persepolis

Extent of Hellenistic influence

Hellenistic foundation

Important Hellenized city

Trade route

N

Spread of Hellenistic Culture after 323 B.C.


The Greek Geographers =

Beyond their role in leading expeditions to distant lands, the ancient Greekshad a strong tradition of what might be called “intellectual journeying.” That is,they were among the first to speculate about, calculate, and describe the truenature of the earth. The first to claim that the earth was a complete sphereseem to have been followers of the Greek philosopher and mathematicianPythagoras. A rather mysterious figure, he was born about 580 B.C. and eventu-ally settled in southern Italy, where he evidently taught that the Earth wasspherical. (None of his writings have survived.) Another Greek, Heraclides Pon-ticus, born about 388 B.C. at one of the Greek colonies on the Black Sea, seemsto have been the first to claim that the earth revolved around its axis, not thatthe stars were moving around the Earth. Still another Greek, Aristarchus fromthe island of Samos, actually suggested that the earth revolved around the Sun.

Aristarchus had in fact anticipated the modern theory of the solar system,but it was not only rejected by the ancients, it would be another 1,800 yearsbefore Copernicus would establish it once and for all. But well-informed peopledid begin accepting that the earth was a sphere, especially when the greatGreek philosopher Aristotle proved this. Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322B.C., also was one of the first to divide the globe into zones. Perhaps his great-est contribution, however, to revealing that there was a world out there waitingto be discovered and explored, was to have tutored a young prince who went onto become Alexander the Great.

True, these early Greek geographers were deskbound men, but some of theirwork was highly relevant to the discovery and exploration of the world. Perhapsthe most notable example of this was the work of Eratosthenes, who becamethe head of the Alexandrian Library in 247 B.C. Like many such men of that time,he was proficient in various areas—poetry, literary criticism, philosophy, his-tory, mathematics, astronomy, and geography. It was these last three disci-plines that he employed to calculate the polar circumference of the Earth withamazing accuracy: Although it is impossible to make an exact conversion of theunit of measurement that he used, it seems he came up with a figure of about24,662 miles, whereas the measurement, with all the latest technology, is24,860 miles.

But the importance of Eratosthenes for exploration is not in that simple fig-ure—for one thing, it remained unknown to most people for many centuries.More important was his concept of climate zones, his awareness of the Arcticand Antarctic regions, and the calculation of many of the parallels, or lines oflatitude. Of course he was far from correct in many details, just as he was in hiscalculations of the sizes of the Earth’s lands and seas, both known and un-known—after all, he had not the slightest idea that the Western Hemisphere laybetween the Pillars of Hercules and India.

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The first people known in the Western world to claim that the Earth is a completesphere were followers of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras(about 580–unknown B.C.). In this early 16th-century woodcut, he is shown (on the right) with the late Roman philosopher Boethius (about A.D. 480–524) and awoman probably representing the muse of mathematics. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-95297])

Ephesus, on the coast of southwestern Turkey, was originally an important Greek city; conquered by the Persians, it was taken by Alexander in 334 B.C. and became a major center of the Hellenistic world. Even afterthe Romans took it over in 133 B.C., it retained its prominence as witnessed by the remains of a temple builtby Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 130. (© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)

India; that the summer monsoon seasoncaused great floods; and that a large island,Taprobane (Sri Lanka), lay off India’s coast.

Megashenes was not the only Greek whocontributed greatly to the knowledge of theworld in the Hellenistic Era. There was Aga-tharchides from Cnidos, a Greek colony on thesouthwestern tip of Asia Minor (modernTurkey). Born about 140 B.C., he wrote knowl-edgeably about both the Erythraean Sea (theancient Greeks’ name for what is today theRed Sea, and sometimes also including theIndian Ocean and Persian Gulf) and the landsbordering it, particularly modern Yemen, onthe Arabian Peninsula, and Ethiopia, in whatwas then southern Egypt. For this latter land,Agatharchides gave a full and graphic accountof its gold mines, and he spares nothing indescribing the slaves forced to work there:

Unkempt, untended as they are, withouteven a rag to hide their shame, the awfulmisery of these sufferers is a spectacle tomove the hardest heart. None of them,whether sick or maimed or aged, not evenweak women, meet with compassion orrespite; all are forced by blows to work with-out intermission until they expire underthis hard treatment, So overpowering istheir affliction that they are ever anticipat-ing worse evils in the future and welcomedeath as a blessed change from life.

It appears that Agatharchides dependedon others for his account. Another Greek of

the Hellenistic era who definitely did basemany of his observations about the Earth onfirsthand experiences was Posidonius. Born inSyria about 135 B.C., he was immenselylearned and wrote on a variety of subjects, butit was his works on meteorology and theocean that contributed most to the ancients’knowledge of the earth. Drawing on his exten-sive travels throughout the Mediterraneanregion and into France (and possibly as far asBritain), he wrote about the depth of that sea,the role of earthquakes and volcanoes informing particular features of the landscape,and—most important—the influence of thesun as well as the moon on producing thehighest “spring” tides. So influential was Posi-donius that, unfortunately, his wrong calcula-tion of the circumference of the Earth waslong accepted instead of the correct calcula-tion by Eratosthenes.

By the time Agatharchides and Posidoniuswere writing, the whole Hellenistic world hadbeen undergoing a profound change for sometime. The Greek language and culture was stillwidely prevalent, but most of the formerempire of Alexander was no longer ruled bythe descendants of those Macedonians andGreeks who divided up Alexander’s empire.Instead, a new power was in control andwould gradually displace the Greek cultureand language. That power was Rome, and itwas about to dominate an empire even largerthan Alexander’s.


The Romans who took over Alexan-der’s realm and went on to dominatean empire larger than any up to that

time were Latini, members of a large group ofpeople who inhabited west-central Italy. Aslate as 600 B.C., the Romans were an obscurepeople living in not much more than an agri-cultural community (the city of Rome doesnot even appear in known writings until about400 B.C.), but in the ensuing 325 years, theygradually extended their power over much ofthe Italian peninsula. They had accomplishedthis by military might, to be sure, but they hadalso succeeded by establishing colonies ofRomans throughout Italy, by building roads,by forming political alliances, and by a generaltolerance of the cultures of the peoples whomthey conquered. By and large, it would be thismix of means that would eventually allowthem to extend their empire from the NorthAtlantic to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf.

Yet as successful as they were as empirebuilders, the Romans were not great explorersin the conventional sense. Their militaryforces certainly moved into remote lands, theysent out trading expeditions to distant places,they wrote books about both familiar and

exotic places, but in the roll call of great ex-plorers—individuals who set forth primarilyto discover and investigate—there are virtu-ally no Romans. In fact, for all their boldnessin extending the borders of their empire, theynever really ventured into the unknown. Dur-ing the many centuries that the Romans wereso dominant, however, they contributedgreatly to consolidating what was knownabout the world.

THE ROMANS EXPANDHaving taken over Italy south of the Alps by275 B.C., the Romans began to move onto thelarger stage of the Mediterranean world. Atonce, they confronted the major power in thewestern Mediterranean, the port-city ofCarthage, the colony of the Phoenicians whohad earlier challenged the Greeks in thisregion. In what are known as the Punic Wars(the name derived from the Latin for “Phoeni-cian”), which extended intermittently from264 B.C. to 146 B.C., the Romans not only drovethe Carthaginians out of their several coloniesin the western Mediterranean—Sicily, Sar-dinia, Corsica, and above all, Spain—but in

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The Expansive Romans

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146 B.C. captured and destroyed Carthageitself. Rome now found itself master of thewestern Mediterranean and a large part ofNorth Africa.

To its north and northeast, Rome facedvarious challenges. Gallic tribes from Franceinvaded northern Italy but were defeated in225 B.C. During the ensuing century, Romeasserted its authority over the peoples alongthe northern frontiers of the Alps and all theway from Portugal and Spain across southern

France to the Dalmatian coast, the westernshore of the Adriatic Sea.

Meanwhile, Romans had also been bat-tling the remnants of Alexander’s Hellenisticempire in the east. By 189 B.C., Rome haddefeated Antiochus III, grandson of the Seleu-cus I who had ruled the empire in Asia, andeffectively took control of the coastal landsand islands of the eastern Mediterranean. In196 B.C., Rome had defeated the Macedoniansunder Philip V, heir to Alexander’s original

The Expansive Romans B 75

This 16th-century engraving depicts the Romans capturing the powerful Phoenician port-city of Carthage onthe coast of Africa (present-day Tunisia) in 146 B.C. The Romans then completely destroyed Carthage to prevent the Carthaginians from ever again challenging them. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-88804])


Throughout their conquered lands, the Romans introduced their culture and architecture. The six columnshere are all that remain of the grandiose Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek in Lebanon, constructed between A.D. 138 and 217. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-106198])

kingdom that included Greece as well asMacedonia; after subsequent challenges toRome’s authority, Rome simply annexedMacedonia as a province in 147 B.C. The nextyear—the same year that Rome destroyedCarthage—Rome crushed all resistance inGreece by destroying its great city of Corinth.

During the next 100 years, Rome contin-ued to expand its possessions. Numidia was akingdom in northwest Africa—roughlytoday’s Algiers—and after a series of warsagainst its rulers, such as Jugurtha and Juba I,Numidia was reduced to a Roman provinceafter 46 B.C. At the other end of their empire,after a series of wars against Mithridates VI inAsia Minor (mainly today’s Turkey) and hissuicide in 63 B.C., Rome extended its controlover Alexander’s old empire in Syria and AsiaMinor.

The Romans had assembled their empirein hardly more than 200 years, and they haddone so in the face of almost constant resist-ance by the conquered peoples and internalstruggles among various Roman leaders. Butthere can be no pretending that the Romanswho led the victorious forces had much morein mind than exploiting the conquered landsand peoples—plundering their possessions,taxing them, exporting their chief crops andproduce, and generally extracting as much aspossible. There is little to suggest that Romanshad much interest in these new and distantlands. There were no great Roman geogra-phers or historians, let alone explorers or eventravelers, during these centuries.

Perhaps the one major exception, Polybius(ca. 203 B.C.–120 B.C.), himself a Greek underthe patronage of a powerful Roman general,


After the Romans conquered much of Gaul—modern France—they constructed many public works. Amongthe most impressive that survive to this day is this aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, designed to bringwater into the Roman city of Nemausus (modern Nîmes) in southern France. It was built during the reign of Augustus (27 B.C.–A.D. 14). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-103327])

traveled throughout parts of Spain, Gaul(France), the Alpine region, and northwesternAfrica. His ambitious Universal History (partof which survives in the original, part of whichis known from later historians), althoughmostly devoted to Roman military history,does assign one section to the geography ofthe Mediterranean. Aside from that, and hisown travels into little-known parts of Africa—perhaps as far south as the Senegal River—Polybius expressed several views that placedhim apart from many ancients. For example,although he focused mostly on historicalevents, he was constantly describing the geo-graphic features of the settings of theseevents, because “what men want to know is,

not so much the fact that a thing took place asthe way in which it happened.” And his asser-tion that traveling to places was important toany historian or geographer—“for the eyes aremore accurate witnesses than the ears”—wasin effect an endorsement of exploration.

The first Roman who put this into practicewas a man who, for all his many achieve-ments, never thought of himself as anexplorer: Julius Caesar.

JULIUS CAESAR THE LEADERJulius Caesar was born into an aristocraticRoman family in 100 B.C. and, like many young


This mid-19th-century engraving is an artist’s version of Julius Caesar and his fleet landing on the shore ofEngland in 54 B.C. Although Caesar had landed in England the year before, this was his first ambitious invasion; after several battles, he returned to France. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-92891])

men of his class, went off to Athens to studyphilosophy and oratory. He next did whatyouths of his class did, put in some time withthe Roman army, first in Asia Minor, then Syriaand Spain. When he returned to Rome it waswith a burning desire to achieve public office.In 65 B.C. he was placed in charge of Rome’sdepartment of the public works and state-sponsored games, and he used this office togain favor with the masses, much to theannoyance of more conservative Romans. In62 B.C. Caesar moved up a notch to the posi-tion of praetor, a cross between a supremejustice and a military governor—in his case,over Spain. In 59 B.C. he was elected one of thetwo consuls, the most powerful position inRome, and not unexpectedly he made themost of his office and once more antagonizedmany conservatives. A man could only serveas consul in Rome for one year and after thatwas assigned the right to virtually absoluterule over one of Rome’s provinces, includingthe right to command an army there. Caesarmanaged to get assigned not only to CisalpineGaul—Gaul “this side of the Alps,” meaningnorthern Italy—but also Transalpine Gaul(Gaul beyond the Alps).

In 58 B.C. Caesar moved into TransalpineGaul, determined to once and for all suppressthe many rebellious peoples of Gaul—whichincluded not only France but parts of Bel-gium, Germany, and Switzerland. Caesarwould later write of this vast territory in one ofthe most famous opening sentences in all lit-erature: Gallia omnis divisa in partes tres—“AllGaul is divided into three parts.” For the nextnine years, Caesar conducted an almost con-stant series of campaigns and battles, puttingdown not only the Gauls west of the RhineRiver in France but at one point crossing theRhine—the first Roman general to do so—andpursuing some of the Germanic tribes, just tolet them know the power of Rome.

In 55 B.C. he did something even more dar-ing—he led a small force across the Strait ofDover to the island of Britain. This was merelya reconnaissance expedition, and he barely leftthe coast, spending much of the time repairingtheir ships damaged in a storm, although theBritons engaged the Romans in two fierce bat-tles. But in 54 B.C. he took a larger force—fivelegions (the basic Roman infantry unit) and2,000 cavalry—and this time moved inland,crossing the Thames River some 80 miles fromthe coast. He met little opposition and at onepoint captured a prominent British chieftain,Cassivelaunus, but after a few months hereturned to Gaul to pursue Rome’s enemiesthere. With his defeat of the Gallic chieftain,Vercingetorix, in 52 B.C., Caesar achieved hisgreatest victory, and he anticipated that hewould be welcomed back to Rome as the con-quering hero, but his rivals there had nowcome to distrust his ambition, and he was toldto give up command of his army on January 1,49 B.C. Instead, Caesar led 5,000 of his mostloyal men to the border between his provincesand Roman Italy, the Rubicon River (just northof Rimini, on the coast of northeastern Italy).Hesitating only momentarily, he crossed it,thus inspiring the expression used to this day,“crossing the Rubicon,” to describe some irre-versible and momentous decision.

From this point on, Caesar’s story becomesone of the great dramas of history: his rapidconquest of Italy, his appointment as dictator,his pursuit and conquest of his Roman ene-mies from Spain to Egypt, his affair withEgyptian queen Cleopatra (who would turnout to be the last of the Ptolemaic Dynasty torule Egypt), his numerous reforms and pop-ulist measures, his attempts to conciliate theconservatives—all swept aside by the strokesof the swords of the men who assassinatedhim on March 15, 44 B.C. Clearly, Caesar wasone of the most energetic, most talented,


most intelligent, most forceful individuals inall history, but he was also one of the mostambitious, most strong-willed, most manipu-lative, and most ruthless. He was not greatlycruel or inhuman like certain tyrants—butdefinitely a man who sought absolute power.

JULIUS CAESAR AND THEHISTORY OF EXPLORATIONJulius Caesar deserves a place in the history ofexploration because of one book he wrote: De

Bello Gallica (literally “On the Gallic War,” butusually referred to as “Commentaries on theGallic War”). Caesar’s own account of the cam-paigns from 58 through 52 B.C. (a trusted offi-cer, Aulus Hirtius, completed the workthrough the final campaign of 50 B.C.) isregarded as one of the masterworks of classi-cal literature because of its crystal-clear styleand the sheer precision of its observations.Caesar not only described his strategies, tac-tics, and the actual battles, he wrote of thenatural features and peoples of Gaul—and to


In 49 B.C. Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River in northeastern Italy, thus committing himselfto challenge the authorities in Rome. This episode is here depicted by an early 19th-century artist. (Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-115312])

a lesser extent, of Britain—in a way that for thefirst time illuminated them for the Mediter-ranean peoples. Greek and Roman traders andmerchants had been presences in Gaul forcenturies, but strangely even the more edu-cated Greeks and Romans seemed to knowmore about the lands and peoples to theireast. Caesar brought Western Europe into thecircle of the known.

Caesar eventually visited almost every dis-trict of Gaul, a region that the Romans up tothen had dismissed as “Hairy Gaul,” to expresstheir disdain for its “barbaric” inhabitants.

Caesar, however, described the Gauls with thekind of objectivity that demanded respect.Thus, he turned the Romans’ notion of theGauls’ “barbaric” ways inside out when hesaid of the Belgae, a group of northern Gauls: “They are the most courageous be-cause they are farthest removed from the cul-ture and civilization of [the Romans] and leastoften visited by merchants introducing thecommodities that make for effeminacy.” Cae-sar was one of the first to introduce theDruidic religion to the larger classical world.He wrote:


All Roads Lead . . . =

An old saying states that “All roads lead to Rome.” However, Rome was not thefirst ancient state to build roads—the Persian Empire was famed for its roads—but most of the pre-Roman roads outside cities were not paved. It was theRomans who built the most extensive system of intercity paved roads (althoughit should be admitted that dirt roads were easier on horses’ hooves). The firstgreat Roman road was the Via Appia, begun in 312 B.C. to lead from Rome toCapua (just north of Naples); by 244 B.C. it went to Brindisi on the eastern coastopposite Greece. In 220 B.C. the Romans built the Via Flaminia to lead north-eastward to the Adriatic coast; starting in 187 B.C. it was extended northwest toPlacentia (modern Piacenza), creating a stretch that became known as the ViaAemilia; eventually it was extended to Genoa as the Via Julia Augusta III. About130 B.C., Rome built the Via Egnatia, which stretched all the way from the mod-ern Albanian port of Durres (ancient Dyrrhachium) on the Adriatic coast acrossMacedonia and northern Greece to the great city of Byzantium (later Istanbul).Those were the great roads, but there were many more throughout the empire.And these roads were not just paved on the surface—with either flagstones,gravel, or concrete—they were solidly constructed, often with foundation layersthat were four feet deep. High-ranking officials were made responsible for theirupkeep, and they did their job so well that many stretches of the Roman high-way system remained in use 1,500 years later (and some can be traveled ontoday). True, they were built to move armed forces quickly to all points of theempire, but they also supported the Romans’ postal system. Some official mes-sengers traveled in horse-drawn carriages, others ran on foot; although theaverage speed has been calculated at 50 miles per day, there are accounts ofimportant messages traveling as fast as 160 miles a day.

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The Druids are concerned with divine wor-ship, the due performance of sacrifices,public and private, and the interpretation ofritual questions; a great number of youngmen gather about them for the sake ofinstruction and hold them in great honor. Infact, it is they who decide in almost all dis-putes, public or private; and if any crimehas been committed or murder done, orthere is any dispute about succession orboundaries, they also decide it, determin-ing rewards and penalties. . . . The Druidsusually hold aloof from war and do not paywar-taxes with the rest; they are excusedfrom military service and exempt from allliabilities. . . . The cardinal doctrine thatthey seek to teach is that souls do not die,but after death pass from one to another,and this belief, as the fear of death isthereby cast aside, they hold to be the great-est incentive to valor.

Romans would recognize some aspects of theDruids and perhaps disapprove of others, butthey would come away with a new respect forthese people.

Above all, Caesar described many basicgeographic features of the vast territory, oftenidentifying quite accurately mountains, rivers,coastlines, and plains that had always beenthe subject of false reports. Of course, he wasnot always correct in his details. Thus hedescribes the island of Britain:

A triangular island with one side, about 500miles long, opposite Gaul; one end of thisside, the one in Kent, faces east, the otherfaces south. The second side, 700 mileslong, faces Spain and the west; on this sideis Hibernia [Ireland], half as large as Britain,and between them is Mona [Isle of Man];there are thought to be several other islandswhere, according to some writers, at thetime of the winter solstice, night lasts for

thirty days. The third side of Britain, 800miles long, faces north and there is no landopposite; one end of this side is toward Germany.

Caesar was wrong both about the total lengthof Britain’s “sides” and about the orientationof the island in relation to continental Europe.And he really knew little about the land andpeople beyond the southeast corner. But theforce of his reputation was such that moreRomans than ever would become interestedin Britain, and eventually Romans wouldreturn to conquer much of the island.

AUGUSTUS AND THE PAX ROMANAAlthough Rome under Julius Caesar was, forall intents and purposes, an empire, it was notformally declared one until his adopted sonand chosen successor, Gaius Julius CaesarOctavianus, became emperor under the nameof Augustus in 27 B.C. Augustus continued toexpand the boundaries of the Roman Empire,although largely at its fringes—in NorthAfrica, northern Spain, and Asia Minor. Of histwo major additions, one was a large strip inEurope that extended Rome’s dominion up tothe Danube River and included most of whatis today Switzerland, southern Germany, Aus-tria, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, and Bul-garia. The other was Egypt, which he reducedto a Roman province after defeating the fleetsof Egypt’s queen Cleopatra and her Romanhusband, Marc Antony, in 31 B.C. at thefamous battle of Actium, off the west coast ofGreece.

But Augustus, during his long rule from 44 B.C. to A.D. 14, did something even moreimportant than enlarge the empire. He im-posed a relative peace and order by maintain-ing a disciplined army even at the mostremote frontier outposts, assigning responsi-


ble administrative officials, sending outcolonies of Romans, developing a postal sys-tem, and extending the Roman highway sys-

tem. The Romans had long recognized theimportance of maintaining a good road sys-tem, but now they also introduced more exact


PlacentiaPlacentia(Piacenza)(Piacenza)

VViiaa

JJuulliiaa

AAuugguussttaa

Panormus

Major Roman Roads in Italy, 312 B.C.–A.D. 14

Mediterranean Sea

TyrrhenianSea

Adriatic Sea

RomRomaaRome

Corfinium

Ariminum

Tarracina

Capua

BrundisiumBrundisium

SabatiaGenuaGenuaGenua

Aquileia

Fanam Fortunae

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Rhegium

Messana

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SaturniaSaturnia

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DyrrhachiumCorsica

Sardinia

Sicilia

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Via Latina

Via Minucia

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Nova

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VViiaa

AAuurreelliiaaVVeett uuss

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AureliaVet us

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Via Clod ia

Via Equatia

Via JuliaAugusta III

N

0 80 miles

0 80 km

After Augustus defeated Cleopatra and Marc Antony in 31 B.C., Egypt was reduced to a Romanprovince. Symbolizing Rome’s dominance is this Roman arch built on top of Egyptian columns ata temple at Biggeh on the Nile. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-8558])

measurements of the distances as well asmore precise location of towns. One of thefamous works of Augustus’s time was the so-called Wall Map of Agrippa. Agrippa was oneof Augustus’s most faithful subordinates,highly successful both as a military leaderand as a civil administrator. He compiled ageographical account of the empire of hisday; apparently a large map was based on itand Augustus had this map displayed on anew building, the Porticus Octaviae, namedafter his sister Octavia. Alongside this greatmap were the dimensions of Rome’s far-flungprovinces and the distances between major

places. (This map vanished among the ruinsof ancient Rome.)

It was the policies of Augustus that com-menced the famous Pax Romana—the RomanPeace that endured for some 225 yearsthroughout the empire. He himself was aneminently practical man, totally dedicated topreserving the Roman Empire. He would dis-patch military expeditions to quell insurrec-tions in or conquer known lands, but he doesnot seem to have shown any interest in spon-soring expeditions to unknown lands. ButRoman soldiers and sailors, merchants andtraders, craftsmen and entrepreneurs, spread


MAURETANIA

BAETICA

NARBONENSIS

FRISIANS

ARMENIA

CAPPADOCIA

SICILY

PONTUS

BITHYNIA

EPIRUS

MACEDONIA

THRACE

ASIA

LYCIA

CYRENAICA

ACHAEA

ARABIA(added to

Empire A.D. 68)

ITALIA

MediterraneanSea

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NorthSea

ATLANTICOCEAN

Black SeaAdriatic Sea

Balti

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MAURETANIANUMIDIA

CYRENAICA

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BAETICA

LUSITANIA

BRITANNIA(added to

empire A.D. 43)

DACIA(added to

empire A.D. 107)

ARABIA(added to

empire A.D. 68)

AQUITANIA

NARBONENSIS

BELGICA

ITALIA

DALMATIA

FRISIANS

GERMANIA

SUPERIOR

GERM

ANIA

INFERIO

R

TARRACONENSIS

SYRI

A

ARMENIA

CAPPADOCIA

SICILY

HIBERN

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RAETIA

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THRACE

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PAM-PHYLIA

LYCIAACHAEA

Crete

Corsica

Sardinia

Cyprus

Rome

Senatorial provinces

Imperial provinces

Client states

Unconquered states

0 300 miles

0 300 km

N Roman Empire in the Time of Augustus, ca. A.D. 14

out through the empire, introducing Romanways to other peoples and introducing otherpeoples’ ways to Romans. The Pax Romanaalso created the conditions that encouragedpeople from all over the vast empire to ven-ture forth. During the reign of Augustus, forexample, a man known only as Isadore ofCharax—probably somewhere in Persia—traveled overland from the Euphrates River allthe way to Afghanistan and described his tripin a work known as the Parthian Stations (be-

cause at this time, that territory belonged to apowerful tribe known as the Parthians).

After Augustus died in A.D. 14, he was suc-ceeded by a series of emperors who, in gen-eral, left the empire much as it had beenunder Augustus. One major exception, how-ever, was Rome’s gradual conquest of much ofBritain, beginning under Claudius, who ruledfrom A.D. 41–54. During the next 100 years theRomans extended their rule over Britain to thenarrow strip of land that lies just north of


The Romans had conquered much of Britain by the mid-second century A.D., and they set about introducingtheir culture and structures as they did throughout their empire. Famed for their public baths, this is a viewof the one the Romans built over a natural hot spring and which gave its name to the city of Bath,England. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsc-07996])

Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, and in thecourse of the almost 400 years that they dom-inated Britain, the Romans gained consider-able knowledge of that land. At the otherextreme of the empire, the Emperor Trajan(ruling from A.D. 98–117) annexed a regionknown as Dacia (which included most ofmodern Romania and a part of Hungary) andbrought under firm Roman control Armeniaand Mesopotamia, which had fallen prey toforeign tribesmen in the years since the disin-tegration of Alexander’s empire.

In fact, one way to look at Rome’s empirewas that it simply reassembled the pieces ofAlexander’s shattered empire, added severalmore, and then advanced even further thecosmopolitan spirit that had commenced inthe Hellenistic Age, as peoples from all overthe Roman Empire regarded themselves ascitizens of this new world. And if there are nomajor discoveries or great individual explorersduring this period, there were numerous writ-ings that advanced the knowledge of this greatempire. Often the authors were writing prima-rily to describe and glorify the Roman militaryconquests, but these accounts also included agreat deal of geographic detail.

Theophanes, for example, was a Greek ofthe first century B.C. from the Roman-con-trolled island of Mitilini, off the northeasterncoast of Asia Minor. He provided quite adetailed description of the Caucasus, themountainous region between the Black andCaspian Seas (now shared by Russia, Georgia,Armenia, and Azerbaijan). Theophanes notonly described features of its landscape butalso provided much new information aboutthe inhabitants of the Caucasus. Or there wasPomponius Mela, a Roman from Spain, whoin the first century A.D. wrote a geographicalsurvey of what he knew of the inhabitedworld. There was little original in this work—he subscribed to the prevailing view of the

time that there were only three continents(Europe, Asia, and Africa) surrounded by oneocean. But he did provide some details aboutthe physical features, climate, and customs ofthe lands.

The two great historians/geographers ofthis era, however, were Strabo (63 B.C.–A.D. 21),a Greek by descent, and Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–A.D. 79). Although Strabo seems to have donesome traveling simply to inform himself, Plinyseems to have traveled primarily on militaryor governmental assignments. But it is to theirwritings that future generations owe a great


Strabo (63 B.C.–A.D. 21), of Greek descent, traveledwidely throughout the Roman Empire. His Geographyboth surveyed much of the world known to Europeans and incorporated many of the only surviving accounts of early explorers. In this 16th-century engraving, he is shown holding the worldglobe. (Library of Congress, Prints and PhotographsDivision [LC-USZ62-99999])


A Roman Road Map =

One of the most extraordinary documents from the ancient world is the so-called Peutinger Table. This was essentially a road map for much of whatRomans knew of the world of the late third century A.D. Who was responsible forit is unknown, and the original was lost, but it was copied in the 13th century bya German monk. That copy was lost until it surfaced in the 16th century, thanksto a German scholar, Konrad Peutinger. It is in the form of a long strip—some 21feet long and one foot high—divided into 12 sections so it could be folded,much like a road map today. The continuous map extends from the southwest-ern corner of Britain to the mouth of the Ganges River, in the eastern corner ofIndia; the distances are greatly elongated, and only major roads, towns, rivers,and mountains are indicated. Whoever made it was not interested in accuratelyportraying the shape of geographic features but in showing the main route. Iteven uses symbols much as modern maps do—a house for a small town, walland towers for large towns, a bathhouse tank for watering places. Clearly, it wasone of a kind and very likely was made for some official use, but it communi-cates like an amazingly recognizable voice from the past.

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This is a small section of the Peutinger Table, a road map that was originally drawnfor the Romans of the late third century A.D. The section here shows central Italy,with Rome at the center and a network of roads that lead to adjacent countries.(from Classical Atlas, by Alexander G. Findlay. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849; printcourtesy of The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin)


deal about not only their contemporaries’ideas of the world but also of previousaccounts of the world by earlier explorers.Strabo’s Geography was a major survey of theworld, all the way from India in the east to theScilly Islands off Britain’s southwesternmostcoast, and from northern Europe to Ethiopiain Africa. He was by no means “scientific,” buthe is the sole source of many of the earlieraccounts of explorations.

The same can be said of Pliny the Elder(A.D. 23–A.D. 79), who combined a career in themilitary with that of a writer. Of his many vol-umes, only one work survives, the NaturalisHistoria, which drew from hundreds of otherauthors to present an encyclopedia of naturalhistory—geography, zoology, botany, mineral-ogy, anthropology, pharmacology, and more.In so doing, Pliny preserved many excerptsfrom older writers that would have otherwisebeen totally lost. Pliny was by no means anoriginal scientist, but he was a curious man,and his curiosity led to his death: When he sawthat the volcano Vesuvius was erupting inAugust 79, he sailed to the nearby coast to geta closer look and was asphyxiated by the poi-sonous atmosphere.

ROME AND THE EASTAs indicated before, the Romans took greatcare of and interest in their own empire butthey did not show much interest in reachingout beyond its borders, preferring instead toleave that to middlemen. Greeks, especially,were left to deal with peoples to the east.Sometime in the early part of the first cen-tury A.D., for example, a Greek merchant ofwhom nothing is known except his name,Hippalus, is said to have become familiarwith the lands bordering the Arabian Sea andalso with the seasons’ prevailing winds ofthat area. One summer he put his knowledgeto the test and sailed quite easily from the tip

of the Arabian Peninsula to the mouth of theIndus River; then in the winter, when thewind direction changed, he returned fromIndia to Arabia. After several such voyages,word of this strategy spread and helped toincrease trade between the Roman Empireand India.

Hippalus and his achievement are knownonly from another anonymous Greek’s work,the Periplus Maris Erythraei, or “Sailingaround the Erythraean Sea,” a navigator’sguide to the coasts of the lands that border theArabian Sea and Indian Ocean—Africa, Ara-bia, and India. Dated to somewhere betweenA.D. 50 and 90, it is a remarkable document,detailing not only the natural features of thecoasts but also the main ports and trading sta-tions and their exports and imports. It wasclearly a guide for merchants, but it alsoincluded a great deal of basic geographicalinformation, as exemplified by this descrip-tion of the extremely strong tidal flow of theMahi River along the west central coast ofIndia:

So great indeed is the violence with whichthe sea comes in at the new moon, espe-cially during the nightly flow of the tide,that, while at the commencement of itsadvance, when the sea is calm, a sound likethe shouting of an army far away reachesthe ears of those who dwell about the estu-ary, and shortly afterwards the sea itselfwith a rushing noise comes sweeping overthe shallows.

This Periplus, however, is notable for another feature. Although the author of thecoastal guide seems to have firsthand knowl-edge only down to about 500 miles northwestof the tip of the Indian peninsula, he mentionsreports of points much farther on—not onlyalong the eastern coast of India but even east-ward to what was most likely the peninsula of


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Trade Routes between the Mediterranean and Asia, 350 B.C.–A.D. 500

Early sea routes

Sea routes in Roman times

Main connecting land routes

Portages

0 500 miles

0 500 km

Rhapta

Aromata

Omana

Gerrha

Charax

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Barygaza(Broach)

Muziris

Poduca(Pondicherry)

Sopatma(Madras)

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Leuce Come

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Malay, and still farther. He reports a distantland where “there is a great inland city calledThina, from which raw silk and silk yarn andsilk cloth are brought overland.” Althoughscholars cannot agree on exactly what city hewas referring to, they tend to agree that thepeople producing the silk were Chinese, thusmaking this one of the earliest references tothe Chinese in Western accounts.

Silk itself was by no means an unknownproduct in the West at this time—late first cen-tury A.D.—at least in Rome. In the first centuryB.C., Roman historians reported, silk was used

to make awnings for Julius Caesar’s cere-monies and for Cleopatra’s dresses. Clearly,though, it was a luxury reserved for the mostpowerful. Just as clearly, even the Romanswho knew about silk remained uncertainabout its source as they obtained it throughmiddlemen at the fringes of their empire. Itwould not be long, though, before Romewould deal directly with China and Asia anddiscover a continent with its own distin-guished history and attainments in the field ofexploration.


China’s and Asia’s Role in Exploration

93

7{

By the time of the reign of Augustus(27 B.C.–A.D. 14), the Mediterranean—especially its capital, Rome—did

appear to be the hub of the earth. Not only did all roads—and sea routes—lead there, theproduce of the world was transported there.This included the basics such as grains andolive oil as well as luxury items, everythingfrom incense and ivory to precious stones and silk. Meanwhile, the troops and adminis-trators of Rome’s empire were stationed from the Atlantic to the Nile. It thus seems to makesense to trace the story of discovery andexploration as radiating out from there. Butthe fact is, peoples in other parts of the worldhad long been experiencing their own history.Many of these peoples did not have writingsystems, so there is little or no record of the many anonymous individuals who ven-tured forth into distant parts—merchants,mariners, hunters, traders, adventurers, sci-entists, and just plain curious travelers. Butone people in particular can boast of a historyas well documented, as far-reaching, and as

distinguished as any in the West. They are theChinese.

CHINA’S EARLY PHASEHuman beings, modern Homo sapiens,appeared in China as early as any place in theworld—about 50,000 B.C.—but China’s tradi-tional history does not begin until about 2800B.C. Even the first thousand or so years in-volved semilegendary individuals and events.It was not until the Shang dynasty (ca.1750–1040 B.C.) that historians begin to accepta relatively authentic version of events—asusual, because a written language had by thenappeared. For some 1,500 years, however—from 1750 to 221 B.C.—China remained a landin almost constant turmoil, by no means aunified nation and certainly not one thatembraced all the territory of modern China.

Even by this time, China had its own tra-dition of geographical writings. The oldest ofthese texts that has survived, the Shujing(Shu Ching) (Historical classic) is believed to

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date to the fifth century B.C.—that is, about450 B.C., the same time of the great Greek his-torian/geographer Herodotus. Although itincludes references to a legendary EmperorYu, said to have ruled about 2200 B.C., the ShuChing is basically a survey of the land andresources of China and sounds much like atextbook:

Between the Chi river and the Yellow River isthe province of Yen (the second province).The nine branches of the Yellow River wereled into their proper channels. The Lei-hsia

district was made into a marsh, and theYung and Chu rivers joined it. The mulberrygrounds were stocked with silkworms, andthe people descended from the hills anddwelt in the plains. The soil of this provinceis black and fat, its grass is luxuriant and itstrees are tall.

The point is that these early Chinese took ascientific interest in describing their world. Inits systematic detailing of geographic features,in fact the Shu Ching was more advanced thanany comparable text in the West.

Another well-known book from this era is the Shan Hai Ching (Classic of the moun-tains and rivers). Its contents appear to date from several periods, extending from at least 300 B.C. to as late as A.D. 200. Althoughit does contain a fair amount of detailed geographical information, this is combinedwith legend and myth and fantasy—wingedmen, dog-faced men, bodies with no heads, heads that fly about alone. There aresimilar tales in Herodotus, but whereasHerodotus’s travels can be traced alongknown routes, the journey described in theShan Hai Ching is regarded by scholars aspurely imaginary:

[I] have walked about three hundred li [1 li =approx. 1/3 of a mile] since Bald Mountain.Here, Bamboo Mountain is near the riverthat looks like a boundary. There is no grassor trees but some jasper and jade stones. . . .three hundred li to the south, Bald Moun-tain is found . . . wild animals are found herethat look like suckling pigs, but they havepearls. . . . Three hundred li farther south,Bamboo Mountain is found, bordering on ariver. . . . There is no grass or trees but thereare many green-jasper and green-jadestones.

This map is based on text in the Shujing (ShuChing); Book of History (dated to about the fifth century B.C.) and reflects the ancient Chinese viewof the world. At the center is the land of theemperor, and successive areas represent the landsof peoples the Chinese regarded as less and lesscivilized, until the last band represents the area ofcultureless savages. (Library of Congress)

China’s and Asia’s Role in Exploration B 95

There are people today who claim that thedescription of this journey fits the landscapeand natural resources of parts of the UnitedStates—in particular western Texas. Thus thepig with “pearls” is said to be the collared pec-cary, found in the southwestern United States.Serious scholars, however, reject any suchclaims.

THE HISTORIC PERIODThe Qin (Ch’in) dynasty that ruled China from221 to 206 B.C. was the first to impose a certainunity, and it did so in part by building high-ways and waterways to enable better commu-nication. It was the Qin dynasty that alsocommenced building the Great Wall alongChina’s northern border to hold back maraud-ing tribes.

The Qin dynasty was soon replaced by theHan dynasty (202 B.C.–A.D. 220), generally rec-

Ancient Chinese geography texts often carriedreports and illustrations of fabulous creatures. Anexample of one such is this headless creaturedescribed in the Chan Haijing (Shan Hai Ching;Classic of the mountains and rivers), a Chinese text dating from between 300 B.C. and A.D. 200.Clearly, this is an imaginary creature, so the issuescholars debate is whether the Chinese had beeninfluenced by tales of similar creatures in earlierEuropean accounts, such as those of Herodotus.(From Shan Hai Ching, antique géographie chinoise.Paris: J. Maissoneuve, 1891)

A person similar to the headless creature depictedin the ancient Chinese text (opposite) wasdescribed in the work of the Roman geographer,Gaius Julius Solinus, who lived in the third centuryA.D. Solinus was mainly a collector and repeater ofstories widely known throughout the Mediterranean,and it is possible that some of these did get passedon via contacts in the Middle East to Central Asians and then to the Chinese. Some scholarsbelieve that the Chinese were influenced by theEuropean texts. (From Polyhistor, The Worthie Work of Iulius Solinus. London: I. Charleswood for ThomasHacket, 1587)


ognized as providing the foundations of mod-ern China. By the time Wudi assumed thethrone in 141 B.C., the Han had established astrong central government, and during his 54-year reign he expanded the dynasty’s power inall directions—including into Korea. In partic-ular, Wudi (Wu-ti) wanted to know moreabout the Yuezhi peoples far to the west, withthe goal of perhaps making an alliance withthem against the Xiongnu, a people who livedto the northwest of Han China (today’s Mon-

golia). In 139 B.C. he commissioned ZhangQian (transliterated also as Chang Chien), acourt official, to go on an expedition to thefarthest western reaches of China and eveninto Central Asia.

Zhang Qian proceeded west but was sooncaptured by the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). Theyheld Zhang Qian captive for 10 years—he evenmarried one of their women and had a sonwith her—but eventually he was able toescape. He continued making his way west to

Pre-Columbian Asians in the Americas? =

As it happens, there are a group of reputable scholars who believe that someChinese and other Asians may have made their way to the Americas many cen-turies before Columbus. These scholars believe that at four different points oftime, at least small numbers of Asians arrived on the shores of Middle or SouthAmerica on rafts or small boats that drifted or were blown across the Pacific.According to these scholars, the first of these trans-Pacific contacts occurredabout 300 B.C. when some Japanese landed in Ecuador; the scholars cite as evi-dence the type of pottery that appeared there at this time in Ecuador and wasmade with techniques and designs very similar to Japanese pottery of that time.The second contact occurred sometime between 1000 and 500 B.C., and thistime it was Chinese who landed in Mexico; according to the scholars, these Chi-nese introduced into the Olmec Indian culture various elements such as jadecarving and mirrors as ritual objects. The third period came about the beginningof what became known as the Christian Era; it involved more Chinese who cameinto Mexico and some Southeast Asians who came into Peru. The fourth periodthen occurred between about A.D. 500 and 700 when more Southeast Asiansmade contact with the Maya of Central America.

The evidence for these last two periods of contact, according to the schol-ars, is found in such cultural influences as the introduction of metalwork, types of pottery, certain architectural details, the use of ritual objects, andabove all in artistic motifs in sculpture and paintings. Most authorities on thisphase of history of the Americas do not accept the claims of “trans-Pacific contacts,” as this theory is known. Admittedly, there is a thin line separatingthe claims of these scholars and the claims made by so many who find pre-Columbian traces of virtually every people in the world. There is a claim, forexample, that black Africans got to the Americas before Columbus; the main

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a region today belonging to Uzbekistan andKyrgysztan. He was unable to persuade thepeople there to join the Han against theXiongnu, so after about a year with them heheaded back. Once again, he was captured bythe Xiongnu, but this time he escaped afteronly about a year and made his way back tothe capital, Chang’an.

Emperor Wudi rewarded Zhang Qian withthe post of a palace counselor. Although hehad failed to enlist allies against the Xiongnu,

he brought back a great deal of informationabout this region, including an account of alarger breed of horses than the Chinese hadavailable. He also brought back samples of atleast three natural products unknown to theChinese—grapes, walnuts, and pomegran-ates. (Not long after his return, the Chinesebegan to use the grape design on the backs ofmirrors.) If Zhang Qian wrote an account ofhis adventure, it did not survive; everythingthat is known about him comes from one of

proponent, a professor Ivan Van Sertima, relies on much the same kind of evi-dence as do the “trans-Pacific” proponents. About all that most people can dowhen it comes to pre-Columbian contacts is to keep an open mind but exam-ine all sides carefully.

The Chinese early developed adistinctive ship—flat-bottomed,with a high stern and sailsextended with strips of wood—that is known as a junk (basedon the Javanese word for theseships). The junk pictured herefrom the early 20th centuryprobably does not differ thatmuch from ships sailed by theChinese for thousands ofyears. (Library of Congress, Printsand Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-91255])

the most famous works of Chinese History,Records of the Grand Historian, by ZhangQian’s near-contemporary, Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Chien) (ca. 145–90 B.C.), the most authori-tative account of the lands to the west that theChinese would have for some time:

Anxi [Persia] is located several thousand liwest of the region of the Yuezhi’s land. Thepeople live on the land, cultivating thefields and growing rice and wheat. They alsomake wine out of grapes. They have walledcities. . . . the region contains several hun-dred cities of various sizes. . . . The coins ofthe country are made of silver and bear theface of the king, When the king dies, the cur-rency is immediately changed and newcoins are issued with the face of his succes-sor. . . . Tiaozhi {Mesopotamia] is situatedseveral thousand li west of Anxi and bordersthe Western Sea [Persian Gulf]. It is hot anddamp, and the people live by cultivating thefields and planting rice . . . When I was inDaxia [Bactria, now northern Afghanistan],I saw bamboo canes from Qiong [a Chineseregion] and cloth made in the province ofShu [another Chinese region]. When I askedpeople how they had gotten such articles,they replied, “Our merchants go to buythem in the markets of Shendu [India].”Shendu, they tell me, lies several thousandli southwest of Daxia. The people cultivatethe land and live much like the people ofDaxia. The region is said to be hot anddamp. The inhabitants ride elephants whenthey go into battle. The kingdom is situatedon a great river.

Zhang Qian’s description of these landsand their inhabitants aroused the interest ofWudi, and about 125 B.C. he commissionedZhang Qian to lead a second expedition toDaxia. This expedition was divided into four

groups in an attempt to find the best waythrough hostile peoples. None of the groupsmanaged to get as far as Zhang Qian hadreached on his first expedition. Some didmanage, however, to bring back a number ofthe larger horses that were quickly adopted bythe Han cavalry.

THE SILK ROADBut something even more important cameout of Zhang Qian’s journeys and report. The Chinese began to send caravans carry-ing goods overland to the west, in this wayavoiding the circuitous sea route throughsoutheast Asia and then the middlemen inIndia. Soon there developed what has cometo be known as the “silk road”—the routefrom eastern China across its westernreaches into Central Asia, and from thereacross the Middle East to the Mediterranean.That name is slightly misleading. (In fact, itwas a name not applied until the 19th cen-tury, and then by a German scholar, BaronFerdinand von Richthofen.) For one thing,there was no single road—there were at leasttwo major roads across China, one a north-ern route, one the southern route, and sev-eral branches off these two routes. But allroads tended to meet at Kashgar, todayknown as Kashi (or K’oh-shih), in the farthestwest of China and still a major commercialcenter for all Central Asia. There differentroutes west were possible. One led toSamarkand and along the south of theCaspian Sea; another reached the CaspianSea via Tashkent; still another went downacross the Karakorum into India.

The Chinese and other Asians who con-ducted these caravans—composed of horses,mules, camels, wagons—did not go all the wayto the West. At any point from Kashgar on,traders from other nations than China would



most likely take over the produce and eventhose merchants would probably turn overthe goods to at least one more middlemanbefore it reached the destinations along theMediterranean Sea and Western Europe. Cer-tainly there were no Chinese seen around theancient Mediterranean world, any more thanthere were Romans seen in China until per-haps the late second century A.D.

Another reason the name Silk Road is mis-leading is that silk was by no means the solecommodity that was transported and tradedalong this route. Caravans coming from Chinato the west also carried spices, other textiles,

furs, ceramics, lacquerware, jade, bronzeobjects, even iron objects, exotic plants, andanimals. Meanwhile, caravans heading eastfrom the West carried ivory, gold, preciousstones, and glass (one of the few technologieswhere the West was ahead of the Chinese).Also, along the road, goods were exchanged—often more than once—so that not all thegoods that finally reached one end of theroute had started out at the other end.

It is also true that Chinese silk was knownto some in the West even before Zhang Qian’sexpedition. This reached the Mediterraneanin small quantities and by the efforts of indi-

This is an early 20th-century artist’s painting of a caravan of camels resting outside the walls of Beijing, andit can be assumed that this is a common scene during the centuries that such caravans carried goods backand forth along the Silk Road. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-133695])


vidual traders. It most likely came via India,from where it was traded up through the Per-sian Gulf and then overland to the shores ofthe Mediterranean. Sometimes, though, it isclaimed that the Romans first saw silk whenthey were conducting a campaign against theParthians who lived in Persia (Iran)—this wasabout 53 B.C. Certainly it was about this timethat the Romans began to refer to the“Seres”—the Silk People. And it was from thispoint on that silk, with its soft texture andattractive colors and designs, became highlypopular among the wealthy elite of Rome. TheRomans soon began to send out agents to

explore the route by which silk and the otherexotic wares were coming to them.

What began as indirect contacts throughtrade soon led to more direct contacts be-tween the Chinese and Westerners. A famoushistory of China, composed by Fan Ye aboutA.D. 435, had a “Chapter on the Western Re-gions” that discussed China’s relations withthe Arab world of about A.D. 25–55, describingthe people of northern Saudi Arabia and Jor-dan. Between A.D. 92–102, Ban Chao (PanCh’ao), the protector-general of the Silk Road,while suppressing threats from people alongthe road, went almost to the Caspian Sea and

KhotanKhotan

SamarkandSamarkandKashqarKashqar

Tien Shan Mt.Tien Shan Mt.

TAK LA MAKHANDESERT

Yarkand

BokharaBokhara

N

0 600 miles

0 600 km

Main Routes of Silk Road, 125 B.C.–A.D. 200

HINDU KUSH

H I M A L A Y A S

Antioch

TyrePalmyra

HamadanMerv

Bokhara

SamarkandKashqar

Yarkand

Khotan NiyaEndere

Miran

Tun-huangLou-lan

Turfan Hami Karakhoto

Lanchou

Ch’ang-an(Sian)

Aksu

Kucha

LehSrindgar

Balkh

INDIAN OCEAN

ARABIAN

SEA

Black Sea

Casp

ian

Sea

RedSea

AralSea Lake Balkash

Tien Shan Mt.

TAKLA MAKHANDESERT


returned with information about the Romansto the west. Gan Ying (Kan Ying), a Chineseenvoy who traveled all the way to Antioch,Syria, about A.D. 97, wrote an account of thepeople living there, at that time a province ofRome; among other things, he reported that“the people there are honest in their transac-tions and do not double their prices.” Then, inA.D. 166, another Chinese account tells of howduring the reign of Emperor Huandi (Huan-ti), “the king of Ta-ts’-in, Antun sent an em-bassy that, from the frontier of Jih-nan[Annam, or central Vietnam], offered ivory,rhinoceros horns, and tortoise shell.” Ta-ts’-inwas the Chinese name for the Roman Empire,and Antun is “Antoninus,” the family name ofthe Roman emperor at this time, Marcus Aure-lius (A.D. 161–180). What is interesting is thatnone of these products came from Romeitself, and so they were not all that exotic tothe Chinese. In any case, the Chinese reportcontinued, “From that time dates our inter-course with this country.”

In fact, by the reign of Marcus Aureliusthere were many links between the Mediter-ranean and Asia—primarily because of theChinese and Romans, but often as notthrough middlemen and intermediary coun-tries. India especially provided an alternativeroute from the Silk Road and served as anintermediary for trade goods. In fact, it isknown that as far back as 3000 B.C., tradersfrom the Indus Valley in northern India weretrading in Mesopotamia. Trade and knowl-edge of the world outside India expanded overthe centuries; by the early centuries A.D.,Indian envoys began to visit the courts ofRoman emperors starting with Augustus him-self and were also maintaining contacts withSoutheast Asia. By A.D. 400, the Puranas, a col-lection of texts revered by the Hindus, con-tained references to places in Afghanistan,Persia, Russia (including Siberia), China, east-

ern and northern Africa, and even southernEurope.

So Roman or other European merchantsdid not need to travel to Asia. They couldcount on caravans making their way over-land between the Mediterranean and Chinaor on the sailors and traders who lived alongthe Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea and IndianOcean to bring these goods up to the shoresof Egypt or Arabia. (Roman coins from thisperiod have been found at places all alongthis route and even as far east as Cambodia,almost certainly carried to such distances bynon-Romans.) Likewise, the Chinese couldcount on obtaining wares from Africa, India,and the Middle East from middlemen in Central Asia or Southeast Asia. Mariners and merchants moved all along the coasts of India, Malaysia, the Indochina peninsula,and the East Indies islands, exchanging thewares of China and Europe. As a result, there were no known explorers making theirway between Europe and Asia during thisperiod.

ON THE TRAILOF BUDDHISMOne thing that was making its way to China,however, was the Buddhist religion fromIndia. By about A.D. 65, a half brother ofEmperor Mingdi (Ming-ti) of China adoptedBuddhism, and Buddhists were tolerated inthe capital. A later Chinese work claims thatMingdi, having seen the Buddha in a dream,sent envoys to India to learn about his teach-ings; the envoys returned about the year 67,bringing not only Buddhist texts and statuesbut two Buddhist monks who started translat-ing the Buddhist writings into Chinese. Thismay be only a legend, but in the year 166, thecult of Buddha was formally recognized at theimperial court. In 170 Lokakshema, a Bud-


dhist monk from the region of northern Indiaand Central Asia, arrived in China and formeda team that began to translate some of theBuddhist texts. Within 25 years, large Buddhistcommunities were flourishing in easternChina.

With the end of the Han dynasty in A.D.220, China entered into a long period of

unrest. Along the Silk Road, trading trafficdeclined somewhat because the Chinese werenot able to maintain order. In China itself,Buddhism spread among the masses becauseit offered consolation during a time of earthlysufferings, and many Chinese Buddhistsmade pilgrimages to India, much as Chris-tians would later travel to Jerusalem or Mus-

Buddhism across Asia =

The religion of Buddhism had been founded in India about 500 B.C. by SiddharthaGautama, who came to be known as Buddha, “the Enlightened One.” Its basictenet was that human existence was a continual cycle of death and rebirth andthat the way to escape from this was to eliminate attachment to earthly thingsand so to achieve nirvana, perfect peace and happiness. Beyond shunning thedesire for material possessions, Buddhism asked its adherents to respect allforms of life, to free their mind from evil, to control their feelings and thoughts,

and to practice concentration ofmind and body. What might seemcurious at first glance is that theBuddhist religion, which appearsto call for a rather passive ap-proach to the world, spread sorapidly all the way to China. Yet

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This sculpture depicting a Dhyani,or meditative adherent of Buddhism, in a typical attitude isat Taxila, an ancient center of Buddhist studies in what is nownortheastern Pakistan. Pakistanwas then a part of northeasternIndia, the region where Buddhismfirst took hold. (Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-116439])


lims to Mecca. In the year 399, however, a 65-year-old Chinese Buddhist, Faxien (Fa-Hsien),accompanied by several other Buddhistmonks, set off for India expressly to obtainsome of the sacred Buddhist texts. He walkedacross central China, across the TaklamakanDesert in far western China, then across Tajik-istan and into India, reaching Tamluk (near

modern Calcutta), a stronghold of Buddhism.The trip had taken several years, and he spentseveral more in India before boarding a shipfor home. He spent three more years on histrip, sailing by way of Sri Lanka and across theIndian Ocean to Sumatra, then north throughthe China Sea, arriving home in northernChina in 413.

the true believers in Buddhism,mostly monks who devoted theirentire existence to their faith,were active in promoting theirfaith by their presence and theirwritings. So Buddhism spread rel-atively quickly from India intoneighboring lands such as Nepal,

Indonesia, Burma, and Sri Lanka. By the first century A.D., foreign converts wereintroducing Buddhism to the peoples living along the Silk Road, and from thereit began to attract Chinese. Buddhism did not always find it easy going in China,which had its “homegrown” faiths, Confucianism and Taoism, and these wouldeventually contribute to creating a particularly Chinese variety of Buddhism. Inthe course of moving into China, Buddhism also drew many Chinese to explorethe world beyond their own land’s boundaries. By the mid-sixth century, Bud-dhism had spread to Japan.

Buddhism did not arrive in Japanuntil about A.D. 535, but it spreadquickly and by the end of the century was accepted as an officialreligion. This large (42-foot-high)bronze statue of Buddha is atKamakura, in Japan, whichbecame a center of Buddhism in the 13th century. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-95822])


Faxien carried back with him Buddhisttexts and images, but more important, he car-ried his notes and memories of his travels.

These he set down in 414 as the Record of Bud-dhist Countries (more widely known today asTravels of Faxien). This work was not just a

Area of origin of Buddhism

Approximate Chinese cultural area in first century A.D.

Spread of Buddhism

Major Buddhist center

Rock carved temple

Sacred mountain

0 600 miles

0 600 km

N

Spread of Buddhism, 300 B.C.–A.D. 100

YarkandYarkand

Y A

Pyongyang

Chang'an (Xi'an)

Changsha

Guangzhou

Hua ShanHua Shan

Binglingsi

GongxianLuoyang

KKOREAOREA

rna

Heng Shan

Hua Shan

KUNLUN SHAN

TIAN SHAN

HINDU KUSH

ALTUN SHAN

HI M A L A Y A S

Kyoto

NaraKaesong

Pyongyang

Hangzhou

Wanfosi

Amaravati

KandyAnwadhapura

Sarnath

Bodh GayaSanchi

Mathura

Meerut

Chang'an (Xi'an)

Changsha

Taxila

Ushkur

Ghazni

HaddaPeshawar

Kashgar

Yarkand

Khotan

Ayutthaya

Angkor

Palembang

Borobudur

Pagan

Guangzhou

Hanoi

Lhasa

Kyongju

CAMBODIA

VIETNAM

BURMA

INDIA

TRANSOXIANA

SOGDIANAMONGOLIA

JAPAN

KOREA

PHILIPPINES

BORNEO

JAVA

MALAYA

SUMATRA

CEYLON

Dunhuang

BinglingsiMajiShan

Khocho

Kumtura

Elephanta

Ajanta

Gongxian

Yungang

Luoyang

Sokkuram

Yang

ziR.

Yello

w R.

Indus R.

Ganges R.

Mekong

R.

SalweenR.Brahmaptura R.

Lake Balkhash

Lake Baikal

Manchuria

Inner Mongolia

Seaof

Japan

EastChinaSea

YellowSea

South ChinaSea

ArabianSea

INDIANOCEAN

Bay of Bengal

Gulf ofTongking

Taiw

anSt

rait

TIBETAN PLATEAU

G O B IALTAI

TAKLIMAKAN

Taiwan

Hainan

RyukyuIs.


report of the geographic features of the landsseen during his journey but also a carefullyobserved account of the history and customsof the peoples he passed through in CentralAsia and India, especially of the role of Bud-dhism in their lives. Thus he says of Yu-teen(Khotan, modern Hotien [Ho-t’ien], in farwestern China):

Yu-teen is a pleasant and prosperous king-dom, with a numerous and flourishing pop-ulation. The inhabitants all profess our Law[that is, Buddhism] and join together in itsreligious music for their enjoyment. Themonks amount to several thousand, most ofwhom are students of the Mahayana [one ofthe major branches of Buddhism]. They allreceive their food from the common store.Throughout the country the houses of thepeople stand apart like stars, and each fam-ily has a small stupa [a small Buddhistshrine] erected in front of its door. . . . In themonasteries they provide rooms for monkstraveling from all quarters and who are pro-vided with whatever else they require.

But he remained a man of his time in hismixture of careful science and mythology, asseen in his description of the Pamir Moun-tains in Tajikistan:

The Pamirs are covered with snow bothwinter and summer. They are inhabited bypoisonous dragons. If one arouses the illhumor of the dragons, they will at once callforth poisonous winds, cause snows to fall,or send showers of sand, gravel, and stoneflying. Of the persons who have encoun-tered such difficulties, hardly one in tenthousand has escaped without injury.

Whatever his limitations, Faxien was one ofthe most adventurous travelers of his time,and by his example and his writings he helped

to inspire even more Chinese to travel toIndia. This increased traffic between India andChina contributed not only to opening upthese two vast countries but also many otherlands between and around them.

By this time—the fifth century A.D.—theChinese had begun to compile quite an im-pressive number of texts on geography, someof them dealing with foreign lands on theirborders. They were also showing a great inter-est in making maps. At the same time, therewas still a tradition of mixing the fabulouswith the real. One of the more curious storiesfrom China’s history is said to have beenrecorded in the Liang-shu (Records of theLiang dynasty), an account of the dynasty thatbriefly ruled southern China in 502–557. Thestory tells of a Buddhist priest, Hwui Shan(Hsuan-Chuang), who in 499 arrived at thecourt of the Liang king. He claimed that hehad just come from a kingdom he called Fu-sang, which lay far to the east of China—thatis, way off across the Pacific Ocean. Hisaccount of this place went on as follows:

It produces many fu-sang trees from whichit derives its name. . . . Its fruit resembles thepear, but is red; the bark is spun into clothfor dresses and woven into brocade. Thehouses are made of planks. There are nowalled cities with gates. The people usecharacters for writing, making paper fromthe bark of the fu-sang. There are no sol-diers wearing metal armor for they do notcarry on war.

Hwui Shan went on to describe much elseabout Fu-sang—its criminal justice system,the ruler’s clothing, social classes in greatdetail, wedding and burial customs. He alsoclaimed that the people of Fu-sang had notknown of Buddhism until the year 458, whenfive Buddhist priests had visited them andtried to convert them.


This was difficult enough to relate to anyknown land or historical episode. But alongwith Hwui Shan’s account, there were tales ofplaces that seemed to be part of or nearby Fu-sang. One was called the “Kingdom ofWomen,” where there was a “black canyon,” a“smoking mountain,” a “sea of varnish,” and a“sea the color of milk.” Here, too, the peoplelived in round houses, some men had dogheads, and some women married snakes.Most scholars consider these things alongwith the whole story of Fu-sang as sheer fic-tion, a story in the age-old and universal tradi-tion of fabulous places. But that has notstopped many people from insisting that allthis proves that the Chinese got to the Ameri-cas at this time. They locate Fu-sang and theKingdom of Women in places from British

Columbia to Mexico and find analogies inNative American cultures. Thus the fu-sangtree is said to be anything from the pricklypear to the agave plant, known in Mexico asthe maguey. The “black canyon” is today saidto be the Black Canyon of the GunnisonNational Monument in west-central Col-orado; the “smoking mountain” is the still-active Volcán de Colima in Mexico; the “sea ofvarnish” is the La Brea Tar Pits near Los Ange-les; the sea “the color of milk” could be one ofseveral dried-up salt-bed lakes in California;the round houses are the adobe houses of theNavajo or Pueblo Indians of the AmericanSouthwest; the men with dog heads referredto the masks worn by the Hopi in theirKachina ceremonies; and the women whomarried snakes referred to a Hopi legend of

The maguey of Spanish-speaking Middle Americans (agave or century plant to North Americans) is claimedto be the fu-sang tree by those who insist that Fu-sang was actually America. It is cultivated for its fiber andsap, but it does not otherwise fit the description of the fu-sang tree. The farm shown here was in El Salvadorin the early 20th century. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-97811])


the origin of their Snake Clan. Scholarsdemand more evidence than such possiblesimilarities, but this has not stopped somepeople from believing that Chinese got toAmerica by about A.D. 500.

Interestingly, it is mostly Westerners, notChinese, who have chosen to promote thistheory. Long ago, the Chinese came to calltheir country Chung-kuo, which means “Mid-

dle Kingdom,” indicative of their sense ofChina as the geographical center of the worldand the true center of civilization. For all theircareful work in the fields of geography andmapmaking, they saw little need to go forthand explore the world. Instead, they withdrewbehind their borders and expected the worldto come to them.

A World Closes In

108

8{

By the second century A.D., greatchanges had taken place in the worldsince the first civilizations emerged in

both the Middle East and Asia some 3,000years earlier. New lands had been discoveredand explored and settled, kingdoms anddynasties and empires had come and gone.Now the world was divided into several mainpower centers: The Roman Empire dominatedfrom Western Europe across to the MiddleEast; China dominated from its homelandwell across into Central Asia and down intoparts of Southeast Asia; India, although inconstant turmoil, played the central role inSouth Asia. Due to the exertions of marinersand merchants, envoys and missionaries,travelers and adventurers, these regions wereaware of one another’s existence, even if muchof the knowledge was sketchy and false. Mostespecially, there were still large gaps in eventhe most informed people’s knowledge ofwhat composed the entire earth.

PTOLEMY’S WORLDOne of the major centers of the world in the second century A.D., outranked in the

Mediterranean region only by Rome, wasAlexandria, Egypt, the city founded by Alex-ander the Great. Although Rome now ruledEgypt, Alexandria continued to be a highlycosmopolitan city, and its library probablyexcelled anything in Rome as a center ofintellectual activity. Basically the library was a university research center for all branchesof the sciences, literary studies, and histori-cal texts. One of its most distinguished as-sociates in the middle of the second centurywas Claudius Ptolomaeus, famed for hiswork in astronomy, mathematics, optics, andgeography.

Virtually nothing is known about this man,who has come down in history as Ptolemy. Hisname suggests he was Greek—he wrote hisworks in Greek—and he may have beenrelated to the Ptolemies who had ruled Egyptfor almost 300 years until the last of thedynasty, Cleopatra, died in 30 B.C. Ptolemymust have been born about the year A.D. 1 forhe is known to have started his astronomicalobservations about the year A.D. 21. He pub-lished a series of groundbreaking works in thesciences, but almost all the original texts were lost and are known only because Arabic

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A World Closes In B 109

scholars translated them; these were eventu-ally translated into Latin and later into otherEuropean languages.

The work that had the greatest influenceon the Western world was his Geography andthe maps that accompanied this. The originalGreek text was the only work of its kind fromthe classical world that survived. The text pro-vides a good sense of how Ptolemy viewed theearth, and his maps incorporated all that peo-ple outside Asia knew of the earth. He used asystem of lines indicating latitudes and longi-tudes much like those in use today, and he

even knew enough to curve them to accountfor the spherical shape of the Earth. Unfortu-nately, these lines become increasingly lessaccurate as he moved farther and fartherbeyond the Mediterranean area.

Ptolemy’s understanding of the world wassurprisingly accurate in some instances. Heseemed to have quite detailed knowledge ofthe coastline of Britain (although he hadScotland turned on its side!). He recognizedthat the Caspian was a landlocked sea, notjoined to the ocean as so many before himbelieved. He knew about the Carpathian

Between about 200 B.C. and A.D. 500, Buddhist monks carved some 30 temples and monasteries into theinterior of a rocky hillside at Ajanta in western India. Inside the temples were painted frescoes and elaboratesculptures. During much of this time, India was in turmoil, and about A.D. 500 Huns and other CentralAsians moved down into northern India. (© Philip Baird www.anthroarcheart.org)


Mountains in eastern Europe, the Volga Riverin Russia, the sources of the Nile in twoAfrican lakes, the overland trade route fromthe Euphrates River to northern China. At thesame time, there were many major errors. Hedid assume that there was some unknownTerra Australis—“southern land”—but he hadit connecting the southern end of Africa tothe southern corner of China (thus turningthe Indian Ocean into a lake). Much of Ger-many, eastern Europe, and Russia were leftblank; Scandinavia was an island; Sri Lankawas 14 times larger than it is; Africa wasbisected by an east-west chain he called“Mountains of the Moon.” Then he extendedthe Eurasian landmass eastward almost 40

percent farther than it is. And, most seriouslyof all, he misjudged the total circumference ofthe earth, making it almost 30 percent smallerthan it is. Needless to say, he had no place onhis maps reserved for the Americas.

Yet despite all these errors, Ptolemy’s writ-ings on geography and his maps were themost accurate to come out of the ancientworld, and such was his reputation that theywould remain the standard for centuries. Thisis not to say that the mass of people onearth—even in the non-Asian world—wereeven aware of Ptolemy’s work. His writingsvanished into obscure libraries, and his mapsdisappeared altogether. It was not until the1400s, in fact, that European scholars began to

The Original Tourist =PAUSANIAS

Many Romans were widely traveled and many wrote down vast amounts ofinformation about the known world. But it was left to a Greek from one of theempire’s distant provinces to display a particular type of curiosity that has cometo be associated in the modern world with tourists and their guidebooks. Thiswas Pausanias, a Greek of whom little is known except that he probably camefrom Asia Minor (a region now part of modern Turkey) and flourished about A.D.150. Judging from various remarks in his only known book, he may have been adoctor; he was also interested in bird watching. It is clear that he traveled atleast through Palestine, Egypt, and parts of Italy, but above all, he visited all themajor sites in central and southern Greece before he started setting down hisobservation about A.D. 155 in his Itinerary of Greece (often translated as ADescription [or Guide] to Greece). Although written in Greek, this was the lan-guage known by most people who would have been in a position to travel inGreece—much as English has become the international travel language oftoday. It was filled with detailed descriptions and historical background aboutall the important classical sites but also with practical information about theroad conditions and hints about how to save time or see lesser-known curiosi-ties. The reason it stands out from other works of its time is that it is based noton others’ books but on Pausanias’s actual visits to every one of the places hedescribes. To this day, people can still visit these sites in Greece and use Pau-sanias’s work as a guidebook.

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As an indication of Ptolemy’s reputation, the title page of Galileo’s major work (1632) depictsPtolemy between the most-revered ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and Copernicus, the16th-century astronomer who had established that the earth revolved around the sun.Galileo’s book was composed as a dialogue between supporters of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-95172])


Atlantic Islands =Among the more problematic examples of assigning priority to discoveries arethe four island groups that lie off Europe and Africa out in the Atlantic Ocean: theCanaries, the Madeiras, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands. There is somesupport for the belief that the ancient Greeks may have heard rumors of the exis-tence of the Madeira or Canary islands, for they located their version of Heavenin the Islands of the Blessed, or Fortunate Islands, off there in the Atlantic. Thatmay be dismissed as mythology, but these four island groups did play majorroles in the history of exploration, both in the ancient world and in later history.

The Canaries make up 13 islands; the closest of which is only 68 miles off thecoast of northwestern Africa. The discovery of these islands is assigned to a kingof Morocco, Juba, who flourished about 25 B.C. to A.D. 25. Juba, a North AfricanBerber, wrote a book on the geography of North Africa (known only from Plinythe Elder) that reported he sponsored an expedition that came back with quitedetailed and accurate information about the Canaries. (Ptolemy used theseislands as the prime meridian—the starting point for his longitude lines of hismap.) Juba’s expedition identified six of the seven habitable islands and evenreported signs of previous human habitation—including dogs and goats. Atsome time after this visit, people known as the Guanches came over from NorthAfrica, but they were wiped out when the Spanish moved in early in the 1400s.

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reconstruct his maps on the basis of his verydetailed texts. By that time, scholarship inEurope had fallen into such a low state thatPtolemy was regarded as an absolute author-ity—something, by the way, he never claimedto be. His maps and texts would influencealmost all the early explorers, includingColumbus, and contribute to their miscalcu-lations about the distances to be traveled andthe location of lands.

THE DECLINE OF EXPLORATIONOne of the reasons Ptolemy stood out so fromthe second century on was that, during thenext 1,200 years, there were so few others who were doing anything comparable in the

way of mapping the earth. At least in the West. From the third century, China wasdeveloping its own quite scientific system ofmapmaking. But the Chinese shared the samelimitation of Ptolemy’s work: Their “scientific”maps were based on their astronomical obser-vations and mathematical calculations, noton firsthand knowledge of the world, nor onthe reports of mariners or travelers. In otherwords, they were not based on the informa-tion of explorers.

This was not necessarily the fault of thescholars. Not only were there very fewlibraries, there were no newspapers or period-icals in which to report current findings. Forthat matter, only a small elite was literate.There was a fundamental “disconnect” in allsocieties in that era—a lack of connection


between the theoretical and the actual,between the intellectual and the practical.Again this cannot be blamed entirely on theintellectuals, the literate elite; there was sim-ply a lack of scientific knowledge, of technol-ogy, of inventions. They lacked the means toknow exactly where rivers and mountains andlakes were located, to calculate precisely thedistances between places on land as well as sea.

Rome, for instance, certainly countedmany highly intelligent individuals within itsfar-flung boundaries. But few of them seem tohave been interested in breaking new ground.Instead, they were more devoted to whatmight be called “secondhand scholarship.”Some of the writers on geography and explo-ration during the early centuries of Roman

power have already been quoted—Posidonius(second century B.C.–first century B.C.), Strabo(first century B.C.–first century A.D.), Pompo-nius Mela (first century A.D.), Pliny the Elder(first century A.D.), Arrian (2nd century A.D.),Avienus (fourth century A.D.). Much is owed tothese men—in many instances, they providethe sole accounts of early explorers and someof them even traveled to distant points in theRoman Empire.

But there does seem to have been anotherlevel to this “disconnect”: Even people in aposition to do so did not seem to be moti-vated to send forth or go forth to seek out newlands. Or if they did, and if they did write upreports, no records survived them. There werea few exceptions, among them the several sur-viving periploi (plural of periplus), meaning

The Madeiras are a group of two major and several smaller islands lyingabout 350 miles west of Morocco. It is possible that Carthaginian sailors dis-covered the main island of Madeira as early as 500 B.C. The next reference tohuman presence is in Plutarch, the Greek historian of the first century A.D.; hetold about some sailors who in 80 B.C. sailed to “Atlantic Islands” that soundlike the Madeiras. Nothing came of this, however, and the first known settlerswere the Portuguese who came after the rediscovery of the islands by Por-tuguese in 1418–20.

The Azores comprise nine main islands located some 835 miles west of Por-tugal. There is a possibility, as mentioned previously, that Himilco, theCarthaginian who sailed out into the Atlantic about 500 B.C., may have comeacross the Azores. There has long been the claim that some ancient Phoeniciancoins were found on Cuervo Island in 1749, but most scholars do not take thisas solid evidence. In fact, the first sign of their being known to Europeans wason a 14th century map, and Portuguese sailors only started visiting the Azoresin 1427.

Finally, the Cape Verde islands include 10 main islands located about 350miles west of Senegal, Africa. There is no evidence that they were known to theancients; in fact, they do not seem to have been discovered until the Por-tuguese arrived there in 1460 and found them uninhabited.


“circumnavigations.” A few of the earlier oneshave been drawn on already: the Massaliancaptain claimed by Avienus to have left anaccount of a sixth century B.C. voyage alongthe coast of Spain and all the way to theBritish Isles and Ireland; the account ofHanno’s voyage down the northwestern coastof Africa; Nearchus’s voyage from the IndusRiver to the Euphrates River; the account ofPytheas’s voyage to Britain and the NorthAtlantic; the so-called Periplus of Scylax, de-scribing the coasts of the Mediterranean andBlack Seas; the second century B.C. Agath-archides’ description of the coasts of the RedSea; the first century A.D., Periplus of the Ery-thraean Sea, describing the route from Egyptto India and along the east coast of Africa.

There were several more of these in thelater part of the Roman Empire. In A.D. 131,Arrian, the Roman historian who preservedthe story of the epic voyage of Nearchus,Alexander’s admiral, also wrote a Periplus ofthe Euxine Sea, a guide to the coast of theBlack Sea. The Stadiasmus of the Great Sea,dated to sometime in the third or fourth cen-turies, was a guide to a large section of thecoast of the Mediterranean Sea; it not onlygave fairly exact distances but provided infor-mation about harbors and depths of wateralong the way. Another such work of this era,dated about A.D. 400 and attributed to a Mar-cianus of Heraclea, a Greek city, was a guide tothe “Outer Seas,” which referred to the Indianand Atlantic oceans.

The land-based equivalent of theseperiploi were “road-books.” The Parthian Sta-tions of Isadore of Charax has been mentionedas recording the route from Mesopotamia toIndia during the reign of Augustus. The Itiner-arium Antonini of about A.D. 200 records themain routes and towns throughout the RomanEmpire at that time. The Jerusalem Itinerarydated to the fourth century A.D., provides

detailed instructions for Christian pilgrims tomake their way from France across Italy toConstantinople and then down as far as Anti-och, then a center of Christianity in Syria.

SHUTTING DOWNAs remarkable and informative as the manyperiploi and road-books were, these were allguides to known places. They all “wrapped up”the world rather than left it open-ended. Whatis notable, too, is that almost none of the his-torians or compilers of guides were them-selves Romans, nor did the stories thehistorians preserve or recount about explorersinvolve Romans. The Chinese of this era werethe opposite in the sense that they wroteabout and charted only Chinese expeditions,but they were like the Romans in that theywere not interested in striking out into theunknown. In fact, for all their careful work inthe fields of geography and mapmaking, theChinese did not show much interest in explor-ing the world far beyond their borders. Per-haps the symbol of this was the Great Wall:True, it was designed to hold off potentiallyhostile neighbors, but by A.D. 500 it had cometo symbolize China’s determination to remainisolated.

It was almost as though the world neededto take a break about the year 500. By thistime, all the world’s major landmasses wereinhabited—the exception, of course, beingAntarctica, which would not be inhabiteduntil the 20th century. The world’s populationaround the year A.D. 500 has been estimated tohave been about 300 million to 500 million atmost. This was not that many by today’s stan-dard, but plenty of people to go around.Mountain ranges and deserts remained off-limits—again, as most are to this day—andmany large expanses of land were still unin-habited. Many isolated islands far off in the


oceans were still unknown and uninhabited;the most outstanding instance was NewZealand, for it would probably not be untilsometime between A.D. 750 and 1000 that thefirst humans came ashore there—Maoris fromPolynesian islands to the north of NewZealand. Some ancestors of modern Inuit hadmade their way to Greenland centuries before

A.D. 500, but there is some question as towhether they were permanent inhabitants atthat time; in any case, it was still unknown toEuropeans. Iceland may have been known toEuropean sailors but was still uninhabited byanyone. But Madagascar, the last of theworld’s largest islands to remain unsettled,now had people who had come over from

Construction of the Great Wall of China had begun about 220 B.C. during the Qin dynasty and continued foranother 1,700 years. Designed to hold off tribes from the north, it never fully succeeded in doing so, but it did come to symbolize China’s desire to isolate itself. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-70830])


Well populated

Moderately popluated

Lightly populated

Unpopulated

0 1000 miles

0 1000 km

A F R I C A

S O U T HA M E R I C A


A F R I C A

E U R O P E

S O U T HA M E R I C A


ATLANTICOCEAN

PACIFICOCEAN

ARCTIC OCEAN

The Inhabited World, ca. A.D. 500

N


E U R O P E

A F R I C A

A S I A

A U S T R A L I AINDIAN OCEAN

ARCTIC OCEAN

PACIFIC OCEAN

E U R O P E

A F R I C A

A S I A

A U S T R A L I A


Indonesia, and Africa. Virtually every cornerof Africa, Asia, and Europe were known to andsettled by at least some people, even if theywere only nomadic tribes. And although it wasunknown to the rest of the world, the entireWestern Hemisphere, from the Arctic regionto the tip of South America, was at leastsparsely inhabited.

By the year 500, much of the world didseem to be in disarray, if not in complete tur-moil. The Roman Empire had split into West-ern and Eastern empires in 395, and by 476,

after decades of being battered by varioustribesmen, the last Western emperor wasremoved by a Germanic leader, Odoacer. Warbetween the tribes of Europe and the Easternempire soon followed. China, too, wasdivided into northern and southern king-doms, which in turn were under attack fromboth internal and foreign forces. India, whichhad flourished under the Gupta Empire sinceA.D. 320, was likewise being torn apart byboth invaders from Central Asia and com-peting Indian kingdoms. It was not a time

By A.D. 500, human beings were living in some of most remote and inhospitable regions of the world, including the Alaskan coast inhabited by the ancestors of the modern Aleut people. This drawing of the late1700s, which accompanied Captain James Cook’s account of his voyage to the region, depicts the people ofOonalashka on the Alaskan peninsula in their canoes. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-102244])


conducive to setting out for new lands. Newgenerations and new peoples would have totake up the search.

But ancient peoples were handing over animpressive legacy. Their view of the world wasgreatly flawed—full of gaps, misconceptions,errors; even the best-informed people stillhad no conception of the true locations and

dimensions of most of the earth’s territoriesbeyond their immediate regions. Ancientpeoples’ motives for moving into new territo-ries, moreover, were often less than noble,their methods even brutal. Yet people todayshould hesitate before finding fault withthese ancients. Just consider what theyendured to travel to distant points! The

The Great Serpent Mound is located in south-central Ohio and, although scholars differ as to exactly whichgroup of Native Americans built it, it almost certainly existed by A.D. 500. Some 1,340 feet long and aboutthree feet high on average, it represents both the advanced technological skills and mythological/religiousthinking of North Americans of this time. (Library of Congress)


By A.D. 500, the Maya were flourishing across Central America, and one of their chief centers was Copán (inpresent-day Honduras). Ball courts like this in Copán were found at many Maya (and Aztec) sites, and thegame—which involved knocking a small rubber ball through a vertical hoop—clearly had some religious significance. In some instances, in fact, it appears that the losers were decapitated as sacrifices. (© PhilipBaird www.anthroarcheart.org)


discomforts and dangers of sea voyages andoverland treks can hardly be imagined bypeople accustomed to modern travel. Theancient world definitely deserves recognitionfor contributing its share to the history of dis-coveries and explorations.

WHAT CHARACTERIZESANCIENT EXPLORERS?If many ancient peoples—both individualsand societies—deserve great credit for theircontributions to the discovery and explo-ration of new lands, it is also true that manyothers did not engage in this activity. Just whyhave some peoples shown no interest in seek-ing out new lands? This is a question thatarises not only in the ancient world but thatalso hovers across all of history.

Even several of the ancient peoples en-countered in this book have shown lesserinterest than others in exploring new lands.The Egyptians, for example, were largely con-tent to stay close to the Nile and trade withnearby neighbors. The Romans, for all theirfar-flung conquests, for all the vast territorythey dominated, did not seem to take muchinitiative in seeking out the unknown. The Chi-nese are yet a different case: For many cen-turies they did send out expeditions—andthen they stopped this and drew within theircircle.

Meanwhile, there are those ancient peo-ples who seem to have shown no interest inmoving outside their own culture’s base—people such as the Maya of Central America.The Maya began to emerge as a distinctiveculture as early as 1500 B.C., attaining theheight of their civilization between about A.D.200–800. During this long period of time theymade astronomical observations that allowedthem to work out extremely precise calendars;they developed a system of numbering that

was sophisticated enough to include some-thing like a zero; they developed a system ofwriting more advanced than any used by con-temporaneous Native Americans; they devel-oped technically sound architecture and builtambitious ceremonial centers; they con-structed stone-surfaced roads and irrigation

systems; they traded a variety of products overgreat distances, primarily with their fellowMaya, often using large canoes that movedalong the coast.

Yet for all these accomplishments, theMaya do not seem to have ever ventured veryfar from their own homeland, a relatively con-fined region extending from Mexico’s YucatánPeninsula in the west to the highlands ofGuatemala in the east. Even their wars—andthere were many—were conducted amongthemselves: They seemed to show no interestin expansion. By the same token, they showedno interest in exploration. They are one of theprime examples of a self-contained society.

A totally different type of society wasembodied by the Huns. They were a nomadicMongol people originally based in the steppesof Mongolia. Some scholars believe that theywere the people known to the Chinese as theXiongnu (Hsiung-nu) who began to invadenorthern China as early as the second centuryB.C. In any case, by the fourth century A.D. thepeople known to Europeans as the Huns werebased in Central Asia, over near the CaspianSea. As early as 350 they crossed the VolgaRiver and moved into what it now Hungary.Led by Attila between 433 and 450, Hunsmoved westward into Europe, and eventuallyAttila ruled an empire extending from theCaspian Sea in the east to the Rhine River inthe west. Not satisfied with this, Attila invadedGaul (modern France) and northern Italy, buta combination of local peoples, Romantroops, famine, and disease stopped the Huns.After Attila was killed in a battle north of pres-ent-day Venice in 1453, the Huns retreated toAsia. It is possible that some of these retreat-ing Huns were the same people known as theHuna who invaded northern India startingabout A.D. 500. Driven out of India by about550, the Huna, as well as the Huns, prettymuch vanish from history.


About A.D. 500, northern India was invaded by anaggressive people from Central Asia known as theHuna in Indian history and as Huns in Europeanhistory. The Huns had invaded the Roman Empirein the 300s and 400s before finally being expelled.Although they were also expelled from India by about 550, they opened the way for other CentralAsian peoples to invade northern India. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-72759])

The Huns, then, were the complete oppo-site of the Maya. They were almost always onthe move over a vast territory, establishing nomajor cities, developing no important culture,and leaving no material remains. Instead ofbeing self-contained, they exist almost en-tirely as a people who intruded on other peo-ples. Yet like the Maya, they seem to haveshown no interest in sending out individualsto find or explore new lands: The Huns wereinterested only in taking over land inhabitedby others.

Whether the Maya and the Huns repre-sent the only two types of ancient societies—settled/self-contained and nomadic/expan-sive—that showed no interest in discoveringand exploring new lands is not the point here.Certainly many other instances might be citedto establish that not all ancient peoples were

interested in the discovery and exploration ofnew lands. Just why this is so, just what distin-guishes explorer cultures from nonexplorercultures, whether there are some underlyingand unifying factors—these are all questionsthat might lead to stimulating discussions.

Attempts to find some single factor to “ex-plain” the success or lack of success of pre-vious societies have always ended up beingdiscarded. This would certainly be the case ifthere were a claim about some single factorthat “makes” a society engage in exploration.But one thing is clear: The ancient people—again, both individuals and societies—described in this volume’s chapters do seemto have shared at least one characteristic: The ability to consider the unknown, to recog-nize that something must lie beyond familiarborders.


astrolabe An instrument invented as earlyas 200 B.C. to measure the level of elevation,or altitude, of the sun, stars, or planets.Originally used by astronomers (astrolabein Greek means “star taker”), it would even-tually be adapted for use in navigation.

cauldron A large vessel usually used forboiling liquids.

circumnavigate The term is from the Latinfor “sailing around,” and refers to sailingaround a large body of land, whether anisland, a continent, or the entire earth.

cuneiform The system of writing employingsmall wedge-shaped (Latin cuneus means“wedge”) elements pressed into wet claytablets by a stylus (see stylus). It wasinvented by the ancient Sumerians about2500 B.C. and adopted by many of the peo-ples who lived across Mesopotamia andPersia during the next 2,500 years.

dead reckoning A method long used bynavigators to estimate the position of a ship at sea based on such factors as thetime in passage from a known point, the(estimated) speed of the ship, and changesof direction in relation to (noninstrumentaided) observations of celestial bodies. Theterm dead is thought to come from theword deduce, meaning to trace from abeginning.

Druid A member of an order of priests in thereligion practiced in ancient Gaul andBritain. The word has come to be applied toanyone who practices that religion.

dynasty A succession of rulers from thesame family or line that maintains a certaincontinuity of practices.

estuary The point at which a river’s mouthmeets the sea and so the ocean’s tides affectthe river’s current.

fossil The remains—usually only a part butthey could be complete—of a plant or ani-mal that had lived in the distant past.(Skeleton is usually used to refer to bonesless than many thousands of years old.) Theterm may also refer to traces of livingorganisms, such as footprints or outlines ofa plant. Often it refers to bones of human orother animals that have been embeddedand preserved in earth or rock.

gnomon A device that casts a shadow fromthe sun and is used as an indicator of timeor location; a sundial is the most familiarexample.

head When used in connection with a bodyof water, it refers to the top, or closed end,of a gulf or bay.

hominid A member of the family thatincludes the direct ancestors of humanbeings as well as all living human beings. It

125

Glossary{

is generally recognized that the hominidline began about 5 million years ago.

Homo erectus Latin for “upright man,” thisterm refers to the stage in human evolutionextending from about 1,750,000 to 750,000years ago, the time when the ancestors ofmodern humans first began to walk in anerect position.

Homo sapiens Latin for “knowledgeable” or“wise” man, this term refers to the speciesof human being that first appeared about160,000 years ago and to which all modernhumans belong.

homogeneous All of the same or similarkind.

insurrection An open revolt or uprisingagainst a civil authority or established gov-ernment; often it is begun by a small andrelatively unorganized group, and it may atleast start with civil disobedience ratherthan warfare.

interstices In the context of mining, it refersto narrow spaces in rocks where the desiredmineral is located.

Inuit The major group of Arctic people liv-ing across northern Canada and Green-land. This name is now preferred insteadof Eskimo, which among other problemsfails to distinguish among various otherArctic peoples such as the Aleut andYup’ik.

jade One of two minerals—jadeite ornephrite—that are usually pale green orwhite stones. When polished, jade is usedeither as gemstones or for carvings.

kybernetes A Greek word for “governor” or“controller,” it was the ancient Greeks’ termfor a ship’s helmsman. In the 20th century,it was adopted for cybernetics, the study ofcontrol processes in biological, mechani-cal, and electronic systems, and from thisthe word cyber was spun off to be applied tomany things related to computers.

lacquerware Objects whose surface hasbeen treated with lacquer, originally a nat-ural resin from the lacquer tree found onlyin Asia. In modern times, a lacquer finishmay be applied with synthetic com-pounds. Lacquerware has a hard, shinysurface.

latitude The angular distance north orsouth of the earth’s equator and measuredin degrees. Sometimes referred to as a par-allel, there are 90 degrees between theequator and each of the poles.

li A standard ancient Chinese unit of meas-urement of distances; although there issome disagreement as to its exact equiva-lent, most scholars consider it to equalabout 1/3 a mile.

longitude The angular distance east or westof the modern prime meridian, Greenwich,England. It is measured in degrees; thereare 360 degrees altogether, measured as upto 180 degrees east or west of Greenwich.

middleman In commercial transactions, anindividual who buys from producers orother traders and then sells to othertraders, merchants, or consumers.

monsoon A major wind system that reversesdirections seasonally and thereby affectslarge climatic areas. In southern Asia inparticular, it is a wind from the south orsouthwest that brings heavy rains in thesummer, and the first mariners fromEurope had to learn about the monsoon inorder to plan their voyages in the region.

nomadic Describing a group of people whohave no permanent home but move—usu-ally according to the seasons—in search offood and water for themselves or grazinglands for their animals.

pathogen Any biological agent that causesdisease; it usually refers to living microor-ganisms such as bacteria or fungi or toviruses.


periplus (plural periploi) From the Greekword for “sailing around,” this term is usedfor the published directions for marinersfor coastal routes and points of interestalong these routes.

pilgrimage A trip undertaken to a sacredplace or religious shrine.

praetor A Roman official, originally a super-visor of the administration of justice. Overtime, the position changed, becomingmore like a military magistrate in theprovinces. Under the empire, the praetorsreturned to being administrators of the law,but their power declined and the titlebecame little more than honorary.

quern A stone, usually with a recessed sur-face, on which grain or other crops areground by a hand-held tool.

rationalist An individual who believes inrelying on reason as the best guide tounderstanding and activity. In ancientGreek history, this was applied to the

school of intellectuals who first appeared inIonia, the Greek-based region along thecoast of Turkey, and it characterized manyGreek philosophers’ approach to life.

reed The stalk of various tall perennialgrasses, hollow stemmed and usually fairlytough, that can be used to make anythingfrom a shelter to a boat.

stylus The instrument used to write cunei-form, its sharp end is wedge-shaped—that is, slightly wider at one tip than theopposite.

truss A rigid framework designed to supporta structure; in the case of shipbuilding, itwould be a horizontal beam extendingbetween the two sides of a hull to maintainthe ship’s shape.

wattle A structure made of poles inter-twined with branches, twigs, or reeds; theterm may also refer simply to the materialsused to make such a structure.

Glossary B 127

129

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Further Information{

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Pary, J. H. The Discovery of the Sea. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1981.

Pausanias. Guide to Greece. Trans. by Peter Levi. 2Vols. Baltimore: New York: Penguin Group(USA), 1971.

Roseman, Christina Horst. Pytheas of Massalia: Onthe Ocean: Text, Translation and Commentary.Chicago: Ares Publishing, 1994.

Scarre, Chris, ed. Penguin Historical Atlas ofAncient Rome. New York: Penguin Group (USA),1995.

Shoff, Wilfred H. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea:Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Mer-chant of the First Century. New York: LongmansGreen, 1912.

———. The Periplus of Hanno: A Voyage of Discov-ery Down the West Coast of Africa. Philadelphia:Commercial Museum, 1912.

Sorenson, John L., and Martin Raish. Pre-Columbian Contact with the Americas Across theOcean: An Annotated Bibliography. 2nd ed. rev.Provo, Utah: Research Press, 1996.

Spekke, Arnolds. The Ancient Amber Routes and theGeographic Discovery of the Eastern Baltic.Chicago: Ares Publishing, 1976.

Stockwell, Foster, and Sharon L. Lechter. Westernersin China: A History of Exploration and Trade,Ancient Times Through the Present. Jefferson,NC: McFarland & Co., 2002.

Strabo. The Geography. Trans. by H. L. Jones. 8 vols.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–67.

Thomson, J. Oliver. History of Ancient Geography.Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1948.

Tozer, Henry F. A History of Ancient Geography. 2nded. rev. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1935.

Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus.New York: Random House, 1976.

Warmington, E. H. The Commerce between theRoman Empire and India. London: OctagonBooks, 2nd rev. ed., 1974.

Wachsmann, Shelley. Seagoing Ships and Seaman-ship in the Bronze Age Levant. College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1998.

Wauchope, Robert. Lost Tribes & Sunken Conti-nents. Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

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Early HumansHOMO SAPIENS EVOLUTION

Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Nat-ural History, Human Origins Program. Availableonline. URL: http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/. Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

HOMO SAPIENS DISPERSALEarly Modern Homo sapiens. Available online. URL:

http://www.anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/modern_humans.htm. Updated on May 5, 2003.

Early ExplorersPYTHEAS OF MASSALIA

American Hellenic Educational Progressive Associ-ation, Fifth District, Articles. Available online.URL: http://www.ahepafamily.org/d5/pytheas.html. Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

EXPLORERS FROM PRE-GREEK LANDSThe First Explorers. Available online. URL: http://

www.win.tue.nl/~engles/discovery/ancient.html. Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

PHOENICIANSA Bequest Unearthed, Phoenicia. Available online.

URL: http://phoenicia.org. Downloaded onJune 19, 2003.

GreeceEXPLORERS FROM GREECE

Greek Explorers. Available online. URL: http://www.win.tue.nl/~engles/discovery/greece.html.Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

GREEK SHIPS AND SEAFARINGShips of the Ancient Greeks on the World-Wide Web.

Available online. URL: http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/grkship.html. Downloaded on June19, 2003.

RomeROMAN EMPIRE HISTORY

Illustrated History of the Roman Empire. Availableonline. URL: http://roman-empire.net. Down-loaded on June 19, 2003.

AsiaSILK ROAD

Silk Road. Available online. URL: http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html. Downloaded on June19, 2003.

CHINESE HISTORYChina the Beautiful: Chinese History. Available on-

line. URL: http://www.chinapage.com/history1.html. Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

History Link 101, Ancient China. Available online.URL: http://www.historylink101.com/china_history.htm. Downloaded on June 19, 2003.

Further Information B 131

133

AAchaeans 45Achilles 60Actium, battle of 82Adriatic Sea 46, 51adventurer, Pytheas as 12–13Aegean Sea 34Afghanistan

and Alexander’s expedition63

and Cretan trade 34Isadore of Charax and 86Persians and 39Sumerians and 28

Africa/Africans. See also NorthAfrica

and earliest explorers 17emergence of Homo sapiens

16and Eudoxus of Cyzicus 68extinctions in 25and Hanno’s voyage 37and Homo sapiens sapiens

16Polybius’s travels in 78pre-Columbian American

arrival claims 96–97

references in Ptolemy’sGeography 110

Roman conquests in 77Sataspes’s voyage around 43Sneferu’s expedition 31–33

Agatharchides 73, 114agave 106agriculture, Neolithic Revolu-

tion and 25–26Agrippa, Wall Map of 85Ajanta (India) monastery 109Akkad (Agade) 29Alaska 18, 27Alexander the Great 42, 59–67,

65m, 70Alexandria 61–62, 66, 67, 108Alexandria, Library of 66, 70Alexandria, Lighthouse of 66alphabet 34amber routes 46–47, 47mAmerican Indians 20, 121–122the Americas

alleged references Liang-shu105–107

alleged references Shan HaiChing 95

claims of pre-Columbian

discoveries of xiii–xiv,96–97

first humans on continent18–23

and Lost Atlantis 52Phoenicians and 39sites associated with

humans before 8,000 B.C.21m

amphorae 10, 11Anabasis (Xenophon) 56–58Anaku-ki 29Anaximander 50ancient explorers 28–43The Ancient Explorers (Cary and

Warmington) xiiiancient period, end of xiancient world xi–xii, 14Andes 27animals, large. See megafaunaanimal skins 23Antarctica 114Antioch (Syria) 101, 114Antiochus III 75Antony, Marc 82Aornus, fortress of 63, 63aqueduct (Pont du Gard) 77

Index{Page numbers in italics indicate a photograph. Page numbers followed by m

indicate maps. Page numbers followed by g indicate glossary entries.Page numbers in boldface indicate box features.

Aquileia 46Arabia 67Arabian Peninsula 42, 89Arabian Sea 41, 64, 101archaeology

and first humans in NorthAmerica 18–20

the Kyrenia 10–11and Phoenician colonies 37and pre-history 14

Arctic North America 27Aristarchus 70Aristotle 54, 60–62, 70, 111Armenia 28, 56, 57, 87Arrian 64–65, 68, 113, 114Artaxerxes (king of Persia) 56,

58artifacts 10, 14, 18Asia

Alexander’s exploration of62–63

China. See Chinaearly hominid travels 17and first humans in North

America 18Huns’ retreat to 122Mediterranean trade routes

90m–91mSilk Road 98–101spread of Buddhism in

101–107, 102–103, 104mAsia (Hecataeus) 50Asia Minor 33, 77, 79, 82astrolabe 5, 125gastronomer/astronomy 12, 50,

112, 121Athens (Greece) 44, 53, 79Atlantic Islands 112–113Atlantic Ocean 37Atlantis. See Lost AtlantisAttica 45Attila the Hun 122attitude, of Greeks 59, 62Augustus 82–86, 85m, 101Australia 18, 22

Avella (Pennsylvania) 19Avienus 51, 113Azores 27, 113

BBabylon/Babylonians 38, 61,

64, 66Bactria 63, 98Baffin Island (Greenland) 25Balearic Islands 37ball court (Copán, Honduras)

120–121Baltic Sea 46, 47mBan Chao 100–101banyan trees 64“barbarians” 59, 62, 81barbaros 59barges 30Bath, England 86Beijing, walls of 99Belerion 4Belgae (Gauls) 81bematists 63Beringia 18bias, European/Western xi–xiiBible 38Biggeh (Egypt), temple at 84birch bark 23Biscay, Bay of 4bison 24, 25“black canyon” 106Black Sea

Egyptian missions to 30Greek exploration of 48and Ionian trade 51routes of 40m–41mXenophon and 56

“blue earth” 46Bluefish Cave (Alaska) 19boats. See also ships

Asian explorations of Ameri-cas 96

Egyptian 22, 31and first humans in North

America 18

of Mesopotamians 29–30and Pacific Islands 26

Boethius 71bone, as material 25bones, human 18Britain

Bath, England 86Caesar and 79, 81, 82Claudius and 86Pytheas circumnavigation of

7–8references in Ptolemy’s

Geography 109and Roman Empire 86–87

British Isles xii, 5Brittany 4, 37bronze 5bronze coins 10Bucephalus (city) 64Bucephalus (horse) 60, 64Buddha, statue of 103Buddhism 101–107, 102,

102–103, 103, 104m, 109Burma (Myanmar) 18Burton, H. E. xiiiByblos 31, 35Byzantium 81

CCactus Hill (Virginia) 19Cadiz. See GadesCaesar, Julius 66, 78, 78–82, 80Calico (California) 18Cambodia 18camels 99Canaanites (Phoenicians) 34Canary Islands 27, 112canoe 122. See also dugoutscanoemakers 22–23Cape Verde Islands 113caravans 98, 101cargo ship 3–4cargo vessel, Phoenician 35Caria 42–43, 51Carpathian Mountains 109–110


Index B 135

Carthagecapture by Romans 75founding of 37and Greeks 3and Madeiras 113and Punic Wars 74–75and tin trade 12

Cary, M. xiiiCaryanda 42–43Caspatyrus 42Caspian Sea 63, 68, 98, 109Cassiterides 5Cassivelaunus 79Caucasus 87cauldron 125gcave paintings (Lascaux,

France) 24cedar 31, 35Central America xiCentral Asia

arrival of Homo sapiens 16Huns and 122and Silk Road 98Sumerians and 28

Ceprano (Italy) 16Chandragupta Maurya 68Chang’an 97changes, in early inhabited

world 24–27Chan Haijing 95characteristics, of ancient

explorers 121–123China 93–107

arrival of Homo sapiens 16Buddhism See Buddhismclassical period xi–xiidivision into northern and

southern kingdoms 118and expeditions into the

unknown 114, 121exploration of Mexico 96Great Wall 115historical map of world 94Homo erectus and 15Huns and 122

mapmaking 112Periplus Maris Erythraei and

92Phoenicians and 39questionable journeys xivreferences in Ptolemy’s

Geography 110Christian Era 96Christianity 114Chukchi people 18Chung-kuo 107circumnavigate 43, 125gCisalpine Gaul 79cities, Near East/eastern

Mediterranean 28city-states 28, 44classical literature 80–81classical period, of civilizations

outside of Europe xi–xiiClaudius 86clay 25, 28–29clay pots 23Cleopatra 79, 82climate change 24climate zones 70Clovis culture 20, 22–23Clovis points 20, 20Cnidos 58, 73coins 10, 60Colaeus 51Colchis 48colonies 35, 37Columbus, Christopher 8, 10,

112communication, and limita-

tions on knowledge 59Confucianism 102Constantinople 114controversy, over trustworthi-

ness of standard historicalaccounts xiii–xiv, 37–38

Copernicus, Nicolas 70, 111copper 5, 25coracle 23Corinth 77

Cornwall (England) 4–6, 37, 51Corsica 37, 74cosmopolitanism 67, 87courage 13Craterus 64Crete

and amber 46Dorians and 45Egyptian trade 33and Minoan trade 34Mycenaeans and 45settlement of 26–27

Critias (Plato) 52crocodiles 51–52Ctesias 58culture, Greek 60Cunaxa, Battle of 56cuneiform 28, 125gcybernetics (root of term) 5Cyprus 34, 45Cyrus the Great 39Cyrus the Younger 56

DDacia 87Dalmatian coast 75Danube River 46, 82Dardanelles, Strait of 61Darius (Persian emperor) 42,

51Dark Ages xi. See also Middle

Agesdead reckoning 4, 125gdebate, over trustworthiness of

standard historical accountsxiii–xiv, 38–39

De Bello Gallica (Julius Caesar)80–81

Deir el-Bahri temple 33Denmark 8depth, of water 5Dhyani 102Diodorus Siculus 10Dionysus of Halicarnassus 58diplomatic missions 33, 68


diplomatic relations, as goal ofexploration xiii

discovery, concept of xiiDiscovery of the Ancient World

(H. E. Burton) xiiiDniester River 46Dorians 45Dover, Strait of 79dragons 105drought 20Druid 81–82, 125gdugouts 16, 18, 22Durres 81dyes 34dynasty 125g

EEarth

circumference of 70, 73,110

Ionians’ view of 50–51map of 50nature of 70spherical 109

the East 89–92. See also AsiaEast Indies 39eclipse, solar 50Ecuador 96ego 13Egypt/Egyptians

Alexandria 61–62and amber 46Caesar and 79Cretan trade with 34early hominid travels 16expansion of Roman Empire

82exploration by 30–34, 121and fictitious explorations

38Herodotus and 53, 55oldest known boats 22and Persian expansion 39under Ptolemy 67and ships 30–31

trade 33–34voyages by 36m

Egyptian texts, debate on landsreferred to in xiv

electricity 46elektron 46elephants 67emperor, first 29encyclopedia 53England 4entrepôt 2Ephesus 72

temple at 72epic poems 48, 50equinox 50Eratosthenes 70errors, in Greek descriptions of

world 58Erythraean Sea 73. See also Red

Seaestuary 125gEthiopia 73Eudoxus of Cyzicus 67–68Euergetes. See Ptolemy VIII

Euergetes IIEuphemus 51Euphrates River

Alexander’s fleet and 64Egypt and 33Isadore of Charax and 86Mesopotamia 28references in Ptolemy’s

Geography 110Xenophon and 56

Europearrival of Homo sapiens 16and Dark Ages xiearly hominid travels 17and first humans in America

19and Pytheas’s journey 4–5, 8

Europe, Western 80–81, 99European/Western bias xi–xiiEurope (Hecataeus) 50Euthymenes 51–52

excavations. See archaeologyexplorare 17exploration

and amber route 46–47Augustus’s lack of interest in

85Caesar’s contributions to

80–82Chinese lack of interest in

107decline of 112–114Egyptian lack of interest in

34end of 114–115, 118–119,

121by Faxien 103–105fictitious 38Greek tales of 51–52and Hellenic culture 48lack of recognition for

ancients xiiMesopotamians’ lack of

interest in 29–30The Odyssey and 50and Pax Romana 85–86Phoenicians and 39under Ptolemies 67Seleucus I Nicator and 68Sumerians and 28of world, ca. 3000 B.C. 27

exploration (contemporary) 53explorer. See also specific explor-

ersAlexander the Great 62–66characteristics of 121–123definition of xiiiearliest 14–18, 26early ancient 28–43Herodotus as first 54–55and Ionians’ view of earth

51Latin root of term 17necessary talents/strengths

of 13original 14–27

Index B 137

Pytheas as archetype 11–12Romans as 74

explorer/nonexplorer culture123

export trade, Phoenician 35extinctions 24–25extraction, of tin 7

Ffables. See tales/fablesfalsified reports xiiFan Ye 100“Father of History” 54Faxien 103–105Fell’s Cave (Patagonia) 20fibers 25fictitious explorations 38, 52–53first-hand experience, impor-

tance of 78, 112Foca (Turkey) 2Folsom cultures 20, 22–23food/food gathering 17, 20,

22–23fossil 16, 17, 125gFrance

and amber route 46cave paintings 24Posidonius and 73Roman authority in 75and tin trade 12

Fu-sang 105–107

GGades (Spain) xii, 3, 35Gaius Julius Solinus 95Gallic tribes 75Gan Ying 101Gaul 79–81, 122geography

Caesar’s accounts of 82Chinese texts 105Greeks and 70–71, 71Hecataeus and 50Herodotus and 53in The Odyssey 50

in Periplus Maris Erythraei89

Posidonius and 73in Records of the Grand His-

torian 98in Shujing 94in Universal History 78and writing in Roman

Empire 87, 89Geography (Ptolemy) 109–110Geography (Strabo) 89geometry 50Germanic tribes 79Germany 110giant fauna. See megafaunaGibraltar, Rock of 1Gibraltar, Strait of 1, 1

and Carthaginian colonies37

Colaeus’s journey 51and Eudoxus of Cyzicus 68and Lost Atlantis 52Sataspes’s journey 37, 43

Gilgamesh 38glaciers 18, 24gnomon 50, 125ggoals, of explorers xiiiGolden Fleece 48grapes 97Great Serpent Mound (Ohio)

119Great Wall of China 95, 114,

115Greece, ancient 44–58

and amber 46, 47and Atlantic Islands 112and Carthaginian colonies

37and Crete 34earliest people known as

Greeks 45early history of 45–48and exploration as part of

scholarship xii–xiiigeographers 70–71, 71

Ionians 50–51and the Kyrenia 10–11limitations of knowledge

58, 59and Lost Atlantis 52–53and Massalia 2and Persian Empire 40Persian expansion 39references to Pytheas 10Roman conquest of 77as Roman emissaries to the

East 89, 92Scylax 42, 51shared stories of 48–49trade with Egyptian 33voyages by 40m–41mXenophon 56–58

Greek alphabet 34Greek army 56–58Greek culture, spread of 67Greek language 50, 110Greenland 27, 115Guanches 112Guatama, Siddhartha 102Guatemala 122guidebooks 110

HHallicarnassus 52Han dynasty 95–98, 102–103Hanno 37–38, 114Harkhuf 31–32Hatshepsut (queen of Egypt)

31, 33Hawaiian Islands 26hazards, on Mediterranean 5head 125gheadless creature 95Hecataeus 50heliocentric view of universe 70Hellas/Hellenes 44Hellenistic Age 67Hellenistic culture 48, 67, 69mHellenistic Empire 75Hellespont 61


Heraclides Ponticus 70Herakles (Hercules) 1, 48Herodotus 52–56

on Asia 63and Colaeus 51Darius’s voyage 42Necho’s voyage 39Sataspes’s voyage around

Africa 43similarity of work to Shan

Hai Ching 94world as seen by 56m

heroic myth 48highway system 83, 95Himalayas 27, 69Himilco 37, 113Hindu Kush 63Hindus 101Hippalus 89Hirtius, Aulus 80historians 57, 58. See also spe-

cific historianshistorical truth, of early

accounts of discovery xiihistory, written records as start-

ing point of xiA History of Ancient Geography

(Henry Tozer) xiiiHistory of Ancient Geography (J.

Oliver Thomson) xiiiHomer 50hominid 14–16, 15m,

125g–126gHomo erectus 15, 126g. see also

hominidHomo explorans 17homogeneous 126gHomo sapiens 16–18, 17, 93,

126gHomo sapiens sapiens 16–18horses 97Huandi 101human being. See Homo erectus;

Homo sapiens sapiensHuna 122

Hungary 122Huns 122, 122–123hunting 17, 20, 22–25Hwui Shan (Hsuan-Chuang)

105–106Hydasoes River, battle near 64

IIce Age 18ice caps 18, 24Iceland 115igloo 25The Iliad 50, 60illustrations, problems with

xivIndia

Alexander’s expedition into63–64

as alternative to Silk Road101

arrival of Homo sapiens in16

and Buddhism 101and Caspian Sea expedition

68and Cretan trade 34Ctesias’s history of 58and Eudoxus of Cyzicus 67,

68and Faxien’s writings 105and Hellenistic culture 67Hippalus’s journey 89Homo erectus and 15Huna invasion of 122invasions and civil strife

118and Land of Punt 33Periplus Maris Erythraei and

89pilgrimages by Chinese

Buddhists to 102–103in Records of the Grand His-

torian 98Scylax and 51and Silk Road 98

and silk trade 100Sumerians and 28

Indian Ocean 33, 39, 42Indica (Megasthenes) 68–69,

74Indonesia 26Indus River 28, 42, 63, 69, 89Indus Valley 68, 101information, transmission of

38inhabited lands, “discovery” of

14inhabited world, ca. A.D. 500

116m–117minscriptions 29instinct, travel as 16insurrection 126g“intellectual journeying” 70Internet xiii, xivinterstices 126gInuit 20, 115, 126gIonians 45, 48, 50–51Iran 29, 39Isadore of Charax 86, 114Islam xiiisolation, of China 114Israel 34Italy 45, 53, 74, 79Itinerarium Antonini 114Itinerary of Greece (Pausanias)

110ivory 67

J

jade 126gJapan 96, 102Jason and the Argonauts 48Java 15Jaxartes River 63Jerusalem Itinerary 114Jordan 100Juba (king of Morocco) 112junk (Chinese) 97Jupiter, Temple of 76

Index B 139

KKabul River 42Kalaadit 20Kapptara-ki 29Kashgar (Kashi) 98Khyber Pass 62, 63knowledge

Greek limitations 58guarding of xiiinterest in, in ancient

Greece xiilack of interest in xiiquest for, by Greeks xii–xiiiRomans’ contribution to

74spread of, and amber route

46–47Korea 96Kurdistan 56kybernetes 5, 126gthe Kyrenia 10–11Kyrgysztan 97

Llacquerware 126gLand’s End (Belerion) 4languages, trade and 47Laos 18large animals. See megafaunaLatini 74latitude 12, 70, 109, 126gleadership, of expeditions 12,

13Lebanon 3, 34legends 38, 48. See also mythsli 126gLiang-shu (Records of the Liang

dynasty) 105Library of Alexandria. See

Alexandria, Library ofLibya 39Lighthouse of Alexandria 66logistics, of expeditions 13logs, watercraft and 22Lokakshema 101–102

longitude 109, 112, 126gLost Atlantis xiv, 52–53, 53

MMacedon/Macedonia 59–60,

75, 77, 81Madagascar 27, 115, 118Madeiras 27, 113maguey 106Mahi River 89Malay 92Malta 37Maoris 115maps xiv

Chinese 105of earth 50in Ptolemy’s Geography 109,

110, 112of Roman world 88Wall Map of Agrippa 85

Marcianus of Heraclea 114Marcus Aurelius 101maritime voyages 64Marseilles (France) 2–3Massalia/Massalians 2–3

founding of 2and Hellenistic culture 67and Ionian trade 51and periplus 51Pytheas and 8, 11, 12and tin trade 5, 11–12

masts 31materialism 52, 102mathematics 51, 112, 121–122Maya xi, 96, 120–121, 121–123Meadowcroft Rock Shelter

(Avella, Pennsylvania) 19, 19meat 17media (contemporary) xivMedia (region) 63Mediterranean

amber routes 46, 47mAsian trade routes

90m–91mCarthage and 3

and Chinese trade 101eastern 29, 35navigation in 4Polybius’s study of geogra-

phy of 78sea routes 40m–41mand Silk Road 98, 99western 35, 37

megafauna 20, 24, 25Megasthenes 68–69, 73, 74Melanesians 26Memphis (Egypt) 61merchants 11, 12merchant ships 3Mesopotamia/Mesopotamians

28–30and Alexander’s expedition

65and amber 46battle of Cunaxa 56early India trade 101Egyptian military cam-

paigns into 33Herodotus and 52–53and Persian expansion 39in Records of the Grand His-

torian 98Sargon of Akkad and 29Seleucus I Nicator and 68Trajan and 87

metal, Neolithic Revolution and25

Mexico 96Micronesians 26Midacritus 51Middle Ages xiMiddle East 16middleman 126g

and Asia trade 101and Roman—Chinese trade

101and Silk Road 98, 99and tin trade 5, 12

Miletus 50, 51military campaigns xiii, 33, 56


Mingdi 101Minoan Palace of Knossos 46Minoans 34, 34, 45mirror, bronze 49Mithridates VI (king of Pontus)

77Mitilini 87Mongolia 96Mongols 122monsoon 126gMoon, effect on tides 12, 73moral, of fiction 52Morocco 38motives, for exploration xiii, 28,

77, 121–122Mycenae 34, 45myths. See also legends;

tales/fablesand fictitious explorations

38Hellenic culture and 48in Shan Hai Ching 94in Travels of Faxien 105

NNarmer (king of Egypt) 30Native Americans 106–107natural history 60–61, 89Naturalis Historia (Pliny the

Elder) 89natural resources, as goal of

exploration xiiinavigation, ancient 1–2, 4–5,

12. See also periplusNearchus 64–65, 114Necho (king of Egypt) 39Neolithic Revolution 25–26Neshi 33New Zealand 26, 27, 115Nile River 30, 31, 55–56nomadic 122, 123, 126gNora (Sardinia) 35North Africa

and Carthage 3, 37Colaeus and 51

expansion of Roman Empire82

Herodotus and 53North America 20North Pole 12North Sea 8Nubia 31–33Numidia 77

Ooars 3, 30Oceania 26Octavius, Gaius Julius Caesar.

See AugustusOdacer 118Odeon of Herodes Atticus 44Odoacer (Germanic leader) xiOdysseus 49, 50The Odyssey 38, 50Old Testament 38Olmec Indians 96Onesicritus 64Oonalashka 118Orce (Spain) 16original explorers 14–27Orogrande Cave (New Mexico)

18“Outer Seas” 114Out of Africa Hypothesis 16outriggers 23Oxus River 63

PPacific Islands 26, 27Pacific Ocean 26Pactyike 42Pakistan 39, 63Paleo-Eskimos 27Paleo-Indians 20, 22, 24–25Palestine 29Pamir Mountains 105parallels. See latitudeparchment 66the Parthenon 44, 54–55Parthia 63, 100

The Parthian Stations (Isadoreof Charax) 86, 114

Pataliputra 68pathogen 126gPatrocles 68Pausanias 51, 110paved roads 81, 122Pax Romana 85–87, 89Pedra Furada (Brazil) 18Peloponnesus 45periplus 5, 127g

circa sixth century B.C.113–114

and Massalia mariner 51Scylax and 43

Periplus Maris Erythraei (Sailingaround the Erythraean Sea)89, 92, 114

Periplus of Scylax 43, 114Periplus of the Euxine Sea

(Arrian) 114Persepolis 61–63Persian Empire 61–62Persian Gulf

and Asia trade 101limit of Mesopotamians’

travel 29and Nearchus’s sea journey

65and Persians 41and Scylax’s voyage 42, 51Sumerians and 28

Persia/Persians 39–43and Alexander’s expedition

64, 65and Cnidos 58in Records of the Grand His-

torian 98Seleucus I Nicator and 68Xenophon and 56

Peru 96Peutinger table 88, 88Philip II (king of Macedonia)

59, 60Philippines 18, 26

Index B 141

Philip V (king of Macedonia) 75Philo 67Phocaea 2, 51Phoenicia/Phoenicians 34–39

cargo vessel 35Egyptian military cam-

paigns into 33and guarding of exploration

knowledge xiiand Persian Empire 39, 40and tin trade xiivoyages by 36m, 40m–41m

physical anthropology 14Pikimachay (Ayacicho Valley,

Peru) 19pilgrimage 102–103, 114, 127gPillars of Hercules. See Gibraltar,

Strait ofPlacentia 81plant life 64Plato 52Pliny the Elder 113

and geography 87, 89Himilco’s voyage 37and Midacritus 51references to Pytheas 10

Plutarch 113poetry 29, 48, 50Polybius 37, 77–78Polynesians 23, 26pomegranates 97Pomponius Mela 87, 113Pont du Gard aqueduct 77populating, of American conti-

nents 20population, movement of 17population, of world

ca. A.D. 500 114,116m–117m

ca. 3000 B.C. 27ca. 8000 B.C. 23

Porticus Octaviae 85Portugal 4, 75Portuguese 113Posidonius 67, 73, 113

postal system, Roman 81, 83pottery 23, 96praetor 79, 127gpragmatism xiipre-Columbian American visi-

tors xiii–xiv, 96–97. See alsothe Americas

pre-history xi, 14, 18prime meridian 112propulsion, of Egyptian ships

31Ptolemaic dynasty 67Ptolemies 66, 67–68Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolomaeus)

108–112, 111, 112Ptolemy I (king of Egypt) 66, 67Ptolemy II Philadelphus (king of

Egypt) 66, 67Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (king

of Egypt) 67Punic Wars 74–75Punjab 63Punt, Land of 33, 38Puranas 101pygmies 32Pythagoras 70, 71Pytheas 1–13, 9m, 67, 114

QQin (Ch’in) dynasty 95quern 10, 127g

Rrafts 18, 22, 96rationalist 50, 127gRecord of Buddhist Countries

(Faxien) 104–105Records of the Grand Historian

(Sima Qian) 98Red Sea 17, 28, 33, 42, 67reed 22, 127greed boat 23, 30Regional Continuity Hypothesis

16–18reliefs 33

remains, of Homo sapiens 16reports, falsified xiiresin 46revision, of standard historical

accounts xiii–xivRhine River 79rhinoceroses 25Rhodes 45, 48Rhone River 2Richthofen, Baron Ferdinand

von 98rivercraft 30“road-books” 114road map, of Roman world 88,

88roads

and expansion of RomanEmpire 83

and Maya 122and Persian empire 41Roman 81, 83m

Roanoke Indians 16Rocky Mountains 27Roman alphabet 34Romans/Roman Empire 74–92

Augustus 82–86Julius Caesar 78–82capture of Carthage 75Chinese references to 101and the East 89–92end of xiexpansion of empire 74–78Indian trade 89Itinerarium Antonini 114lack of expeditions into the

unknown 121lack of historians of explo-

ration 114Pax Romana 85–87, 89and Phoenician tin trade xiipostal system 81roads 81, 83mand “secondhand scholar-

ship” 113and silk trade 100


splitting of 118during time of Augustus

85mand trade items 93

rowing 31Rubicon River 79Russia 53, 55

Ssailing vessels/sails 31–33

design of 3Egyptian ships 30, 31, 31in Indian Ocean 42Mesopotamian boats 29–30Minoan 34in Pytheas’s time 12

St. Michael’s Mount 7salvaging, of the Kyrenia 10–11Samarkand 98Samos 51Sardinia 35, 45, 74Sargasso Sea 37Sargon of Akkad 29Sataspes 43Saudi Arabia 100Scandinavia 110scholarship

in ancient Greece xiicontemporary xiiiHerodotus and 55and Library of Alexandria

66and The Odyssey 50and Ptolemy’s Geography

112science

and Alexander’s expedition62–63

Ionians and 50and Library of Alexandria

66Ptolemy’s texts 108–109Shujing (Classic of history)

94Scotland 8

script. See writing systems, ear-liest

scrolls 66Scylax 42–43, 51sea level, in ancient world 18“sea-lung” 8seas, open, Egyptian navigation

of 30–31second-hand accounts xii“secondhand scholarship” 113Seleucus I Nicator (founder of

Seleucid dynasty) 68self-contained society 122, 123Seres (Silk People) 100settlements 26Shang dynasty 93Shan Hai Ching (Classic of the

mountains and rivers) 94–95shipbuilding, Egyptian 30–31ships 30–31, 48, 64. See also

boatsshipwreck xii, 10–11Shujing (Classic of history)

93–94, 94Siberians 18Sicily 37, 45, 74Sidonians (Phoenicians) 34Sierra de Atapurca 16Sierra Leone 38silk, in Roman Empire 92Silk Road 98–102, 100m, 102silver 51Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien) 98Sinai Peninsula 30sites associated with Hominids

15msites associated with humans in

the Americas before 8,000 B.C.21m

slavery 61, 73Sneferu (king of Egypt) 31, 35Sogdiana 63Somaliland 33, 38Sostratos 66sounding rod/line 5

Southeast Asia/SoutheastAsians 18, 96

SpainCaesar and 79and Canary Islands 112and Carthaginian colonies

37and Cretan trade 34and Eudoxus of Cyzicus

68expansion of Roman Empire

82and Punic Wars 74and Pytheas’s journey 4Roman authority in 75and tin imports 5

spear points 20specialized tasks 25sponsors, of expeditions xiispring tides 73Sri Lanka 18, 103, 110The Stadimus of the Great Sea

114standard histories xiiistatic electricity 46stone 25, 30Stone Age 52Stonehenge 8stories, of ancient Greeks

48–49Strabo 87, 113

and Eudoxus of Cyzicus 67,68

and geography 87, 89on Phoenicians guarding of

knowledge xiireferences to Pytheas 10and segments of Indica 68

stylus 28, 127gsub-Saharan Africans 25Sudan 33Suez (Egypt) 42Sumatra 103Sumerians 28Sun 12, 70, 73

surveyors 63Syria

Caesar’s military experiencein 79

Egyptian military cam-paigns into 33

Gan Ying’s accounts of 101Mycenaeans and 45and Phoenicians 34Posidonius and 73Roman conquest of 77Sargon of Akkad and 29

TTaber (Alberta, Canada) 18tablets 28–30Taima Taima (Venezuela) 19Taiwan 18Tajikstan 103Taklamakan Desert 103tales/fables. See also myths

and Ctesias’s history of India58

of Greek exploration 51–52Herodotus and 55

Talmuk 103Tang dynasty xiiTaoism 102Tartessus 51Tashkent 98tasks, specialized 25Taurus Mountains (Turkey) 28taxation, in Persian Empire 40television, historical debates

and xivTerra Australis 110textiles 25, 34. See also silkThailand 18Thales 50Thebes 61Theophanes 87Thomson, J. Oliver xiiiThule 8Thutmose III (king of Egypt)

33

tides 73Tigris River

Egypt and 33Mesopotamia 28and Nearchus’s sea journey

65watercraft on 29Xenophon and 56

Timaeus (Plato) 52Tin Routes 6mtin trade xii, 5–7, 10–12, 51tools 18, 22–23, 25tourism 110Tozer, Henry xiiitrade

Carthage and 3, 37between Egypt and Land of

Punt 33Egyptian 33–34and Eudoxus of Cyzicus 68as goal of exploration xiiiand guarding of knowledge

xiiIndia and 101Ionians and 51and language 47and Massalia 2Mayan 122Minoan 34Mycenaeans and 45and Persian empire 40Phoenician 34, 35under Ptolemies 67and Roman Empire 93between Rome and India

89and Silk Road 97–101and Sumerians 28tin xii, 5–7, 6m, 10–12, 51

trade routes, between theMediterranean and Asia, 350B.C.—A.D. 500 90m–91m

trading ships 32–33Trajan 87Transalpine Gaul 79

translations, of Buddhist texts101–102

trans-Pacific contacts 96–97travel 15–21. See also explo-

rationTravels of Faxien 104–105Trojan War 45, 50truss 127gtruth, historical xiiTunisia. See CarthageTurkey 29, 34, 45, 50Turkish Armenia 56Tyre 61, 61

Uulterior motives, for exploration

xiiiUniversal History (Polybius) 78universe, Anaximander’s theory

of 50urban areas. See citiesurns 10Ushant 4Utica 35Uzbekistan 16, 97

Vvanished civilizations xiii. See

also Lost AtlantisVan Sertiman, Ivan 97vase (Egyptian) 31vase (Greek) 11Vercingetorix (Gallic chieftain)

79Vesuvius 89Vietnam 18village life 26Vistula River 46volcano 89Volga River 110, 122voyages, maritime 64

WWall Map of Agrippa 85walnuts 97

Index B 143

Warmington, E. H. xiiiwarships 3watercraft 16, 18, 22–23, 29,

118. See also specific water-craft, e.g.: boats

waterways, in Qin dynasty 95wattle 127gweather, on Mediterranean 4Web sites. See InternetWestern Hemisphere 18, 118Western Roman Empire 118whales 8, 64–65wood, early Egyptian ships and

30woolly mammoth 25world, history of 53world, inhabited

ca. A.D. 500 116m–117mca. 3000 B.C. 27

writing systems, earliest xiand early explorers 28and Maya 122Phoenician 34Sumerian cuneiform 28–29

written records. See also specificworks

of Agatharchides 73of Alexander 60, 64, 66Alexander the Great’s

destruction of Persianrecords 42

and ancient world 14Caesar’s rule of Gaul 79and concept of discovery xiiof Eudoxus of Cyzicus 68of Hanno’s voyage 37by Harkhuf 31–32Herodotus and 55of Nearchus’s sea journey

64–65of Phoenicians 35of Posidonius 73of Pytheas’s journey 4, 7–8,

10–11, 13, 14and Roman Empire 87by Sargon of Akkad 29second-hand accounts xiiShang dynasty 93

as starting point of historyxi

Xenophon and 57Wudi 96–98

XXenophon 56–58, 57Xerxes 43Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu) 96, 97, 122

YYemen, Agatharchides’s writings

on 73Yucatán Peninsula 122Yu (emperor of China) 94Yuezhi people 96Yuha Desert (California) 18Yu-teen (Khotan) 105

ZZagros Mountains 63zero, concept of 122Zeus 48Zhang Qian (Chang Ch’ien)96–99


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