Mediterranean peoples

“ The French, Spanish, and Italian peoples of late years have been working to revive the idea of the Mediterranean as a Roman, or rather now a Romance, lake, and have spread their influence along the North African coast, Spain on the Moroccan coast. France into Morocco and Algeria, both France and Italy into Tunisia, and Italy into Tripoli and the Cyrenaica. These are fields of linguistic and cultural as well as administrative expansion, as the French and Italians, at least, appear likely to organize closer settlement and an economic life very different from that which they found. ”

“ The great oceans open up broad areas for historical movements, and through their instrumentality peoples are enabled to spread from coast to coast in all directions; the inland seas, on the contrary, cause the political life of the nations bordering upon them to be concentrated within a limited area. The Mediterranean will ever remain a focus towards which the interests of almost all European Powers concentrate. ”

“ New peoples who hitherto had only laved the territories of the states of the Mediterranean, as waves lave the beach, overflowed both its shores, severed the history of its south coast from that of the north, and transferred the centre of civilization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ The thin coastal fringe is a zone of Mediterranean life in which, already prior to classical times, hoe-culture and the tending of fruit trees had become one of the mainstays of life, but commerce was almost equally important. It is the home of the city-state, and in times of peace Greek became the chief language, with Latin, and later Italian, on the Adriatic coast. ”

“ About the same time a new Mohammedan sea power arose in the Moors of the African coast, and for a century and more the Mediterranean was a no-man's land between the rival peoples and the rival religions. ”

“ Estuary and delta states are far more a result of the Mediterranean culture. The latter led to the settlement of favourable districts on various coasts, all of which were finally swallowed up into the Roman Empire during the period of its northern and eastern expansion.
THE ORIGIN OF SEAFARING PEOPLES
It is not sufficient to have a favourable sea-coast in order to breed a race of sea-going people. The land behind the coast-line must be fertile and productive, else no inducement exists for seafaring. ”

“ The tide of immigration is almost entirely composed of Mediterranean peoples, because those Frenchmen themselves who emigrate to this regency belong mostly to the watershed of this inland sea. Italians were by far the most numerous of all foreigners before the French occupation, and since then they have retained, and even increased, their numerical superiority, thanks to the proximity of their country, and to the advantages which long-established currents of trade give to new-comers. In 1885 these Italian immigrants were numbered at about twelve thousand. ”

“ The Mediterraneans are the western members of a subspecies of man which forms a substantial part of the population of Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Hindustan with perhaps a southward extension into Ceylon.
The Aryanized Afghan and Hindu of northern India speak languages derived from Old Sanskrit and are distantly related to the Mediterranean race. Aside from a common dolichocephaly these peoples are entirely distinct from the Dravidians of south India whose speech is agglutinative and who show strong evidence of profound mixture with the ancient Negrito substratum of southern Asia. ”

“ No part of the earth’s surface can offer so marvellous an intellectual feast. Land where he may, the traveller is almost invariably struck with the beauty of the scenery, the richness of the vegetation, and the wealth of historical memories. For three thousand years the Mediterranean was the theatre of all history, the cradle of all culture, to which the whole of humanity more or less directly owes its modern civilization. ”

“ The Mediterranean has been the centre of the modern world, because it lay in the path of the extension of an older civilization, whose ships colonized its shores, as they did also the shores of America. Plato says, "the nations are gathered around the shores of the Mediterranean like frogs around a marsh." ”

“ The Mediterranean is, after all, the sea of the world: we associate it with everything classic and beautiful, either in art or climate; and although we know well that its lazy, saint-ridden seamen, and its picturesque, but dirty and ill-sailed, vessels would fly before a breeze which a North-sea fisherman or a Channel boatman would consider a mere puff,—still there is something racily and specially picturesque about the black-eyed, swarthy, copper ear-ringed rascals, and something dearly familiar about the high, graceful peaks of the sails around which they cluster. ”

“ The Mediterranean has given rise to so many great and powerful nations, only from the superior advantages which it afforded for commerce during the long infancy of navigation. The number and fertility of its islands, the serenity of its climate, the smoothness of its waters, the smallness of its entrance, which although of itself sufficient to indicate to the skilful pilot the proximity of the ocean, is still more clearly defined by the Pillars of Hercules, towering on each side of it, and forming land-marks not to be mistaken by the timid, the inexperienced, or the bewildered. ”

“ Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course—for it possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the other shores of that sea—because it was unknown to tourists and guide-books. ”

“ The ships were run ashore and pulled a few feet out of the water, and then they were pushed out to sea again whenever the sailors were ready.
Adventurous spirits have always turned towards the West, and it was westwards across the Mediterranean that the civilization we have inherited slowly advanced. The early Mediterranean civilization is sometimes given the general name of Aegean, because its great centres were in the Aegean Sea and on the adjoining mainland. ”

“ The history of the ancient world is, for us, to a large extent, the history of civilisation among the nations around the Mediterranean Sea. Its name perpetuates the recognition of it from remote times as the great inland sea which kept apart and yet united, in intercourse and exchange of experience and culture, the diverse branches of the human family settled on its shores. ”

“ In olden times it was thought that all the world centred round the Mediterranean Sea, that the earth consisted only of those lands bordering the Mediterranean. In bygone days, long before the dawn of history, it is possible that Crete dominated the known world of that day just as the Island of Great Britain dominates the world of our own day. ”

“ In this same Azilian Period there appear, coming this time from the South, the first forerunners of the Mediterranean race. The descendants of this earliest wave of Mediterraneans and their later reinforcements occupy all the coast and islands of the Mediterranean and are spread widely over western Europe. They can everywhere be identified by their short stature, slight build, long skull and brunet hair and eyes. ”

“ It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on the strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre and 'medium' of the western world, binding its many nations together. ”

“ THE MEDITERRANEAN.
“The Mediterranean is beautiful above all in two respects—harmonious setting and transparency of light and atmosphere. Such as it is, it is an admirable temperer of man. It gives him a hard, unyielding strength: it produces the most substantial races.” ”

“ Graves of this type, containing the skeletons of long-headed men, believed to be of the race which we have called Mediterranean, occur not only in western Great Britain, but also in France, in Scandinavia, in Germany, in the Mediterranean basin, and elsewhere. There seems reason to believe that they prove that in Neolithic times the Mediterranean race was widely distributed, especially in the west; it seems, further, tolerably certain that Mediterranean man himself was an immigrant from the north of Africa, and established himself first in the Mediterranean basin. ”

“ On the shores of the Mediterranean are two races with a surplus population of hard-working, intelligent cultivators, both of them belonging to countries which had themselves in the past been responsible for the government of the doomed lands covered by the Turkish Empire. Greece and Italy could claim that under their rule this vast territory throve and prospered mightily. They now pour their overflow of population into lands far away from the motherland. ”

“ It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. ”

“ Concerning modern Europe north of the Alps, culture came from the south and not from the east and to the Mediterranean subspecies is due the foundation of our civilization. The ancient Mediterranean world was for the most part of this race; the long-sustained civilization of Egypt, which endured for thousands of years in almost uninterrupted sequence; the brilliant Minoan Empire of Crete, which flourished between 3000 and 1200 B. C. and was the ancestor of the Mycenæan cultures of Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Sardinia ”

“ The sky is dull and sad to-day, and so the Mediterranean is grey. Even where the low-lying horizon clouds have parted a little to let through a far-away memory of sunlight, it is only a whiter grey light that outlines the margin of water and sky, and where the sea’s surface is broken into ripples by the softest of stirring breezes, the harmonies of shadows and relief are still in faint and faded colour-scales. ”

“ Indeed, with the old-fashioned study of the humanities, which tended to keep the Mediterranean too exclusively in the centre of one's field of vision, it was not always easy to get one's historical perspective correctly adjusted. Scenes and events that come within the direct line of our spiritual ancestry, which until yesterday was all in the Old World, thus become unduly magnified, so as to deaden our sense of the interest and importance of the things that have happened since our forefathers went forth from their homesteads to grapple with the terrors of an outlying wilderness. ”

“ However, fully admitting the truth of the lesson which history and experience thus offer to us—admitting that no one can presume to declare which of the great Mediterranean powers is doomed to be the next to suffer—or what new point is next to burst into importance; yet if a man were forced to select a position which, in spite of fate or fortune, feuds or animosities, has been, and ever must be, the nucleus of commerce, he would find that in the Mediterranean Sea that point, as nearly as possible, would be the little island of Malta ”

“ The west coast of Italy had long been neglected by civilisation. Whereas in Greece all the good harbours faced eastward and enjoyed a full view of the busy islands of the Ægean, the west coast of Italy contemplated nothing more exciting than the desolate waves of the Mediterranean. The country was poor. It was therefore rarely visited by foreign merchants and the natives were allowed to live in undisturbed possession of their hills and their marshy plains. ”

“ From Crete and Cythera they sent their gaze afar, and fixed it midway in the Mediterranean, at the western extremity of the eastern basin, on the shores of Sicily, and the vast projection from the coast of North Africa which goes forth to meet them. They knew the harbourless character of the African coast west of Egypt, and the dangers of the Lesser and Greater Syrtes. They knew the fertility of the Tunisian projection, the excellence of its harbours, and the prolificness of the large island that lay directly opposite. ”

“ The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea spread indeed very far inland, and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. ”

“ Looking down, the Mediterranean is at your feet. There go the ships, with boats from either shore which dip their long lateen-sails as sea-gulls dip their wings, and sometimes fly over the waves as a bird flies through the air, even while large ships labor against the wind. As the current from the Atlantic flows steadily into the Mediterranean, if perchance the wind should blow from the same quarter, it is not an easy matter to get out of the Straits. Ships that have made the whole course of the Mediterranean are baffled here in the throat of the sea. ”