Mediterranean region

“ This region has in all ages formed a centre for the reception of the culture and arts of the various nations of the Mediterranean, and from which these have again been radiated to the remoter countries of the West. ”

“ Syria, which may be regarded geographically and anthropologically as a kind of peninsula of the Mediterranean, thus forms a bridge between north and south, connecting Asia Minor and Mesopotamia with Arabia and Egypt, and bounded by the sea on the west and by the desert, only some 60 miles distant, on the east.
The Black Sea, which from the north-eastern angle of the Archipelago runs far into the interior of the Old World, lies outside of the Mediterranean regions. ”

“ They only approach the Mediterranean coast in Algeria, near Gibraltar, and in the region between the base of the Pyrenees and the Maritime Alps, and are very poor in species throughout Italy and Sardinia. ”

“ That the Mediterranean generally, and its beautiful boundaries of Alps and Apennines, with its deeply indented and irregular shores, forms the most delightful region of the known earth, in all that relates to climate, productions, and physical formation, will be readily enough conceded by the traveller. ”

“ The great central sea of the inhabited region was the Mediterranean. The farthest point known at the west was the Straits of Gibraltar, then called the Pillars of Hercules. The southern part comprised the north of Africa as far as the deserts; while the region north embraced the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean, and an unknown hyperborean land farther to the north, with the Euxine and Caspian Seas at the northeast. The farthest eastern point known was about the western limit of India. This was what would then be contained in a map as a representation of the earth. ”

“ A peculiar feature of the Mediterranean group, and one which may help to determine its significance, is the capricious and uneven distribution in the interior region of plants of the most decided characteristics, evidently outside of the range of common species, manifesting affinities with hot country types. ”

“ The Holarctic region, which comprises the whole of the land lying northward of the Mediterranean transitional zone in the eastern, and north of the Sonoran zone in the western hemisphere,Holarctic region is the largest of all the zoological provinces of the globe. The whole territory is extra-tropical, and it is inhabited at the present day neither by monotremes, marsupials, edentates, lemurs nor monkeys, although representatives of the three latter occur in portions of the Mediterranean transitional region. ”

“ The latitude of most of Europe is such that the sun's rays strike the soil too obliquely to act chemically upon it with sufficient rapidity to decompose fresh material for plant growth as fast as plants use it up. In the Mediterranean {8} region this is hardly the case, but in several parts the soil possibilities are very indifferent, so that our contrast is more between Europe and the Tropics than between north and south in Europe, though it is a valuable clue to many of the differences between the German plain and the Paris basin. ”

“ The desert on the east and the mountains in the north were the [8] homes of active, migrating peoples whose ever-recurring attacks gave the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine a constant stimulus.
Its Central Position and Lack of Unity. This region was also the isthmus lying between the sea and the desert that connected Asia with Africa, and the ancient empires of Egypt and Babylonia. The great caravan routes led across it from Arabia on the south and Babylonia on the east to Asia Minor and thence by sea to the ports of the northern Mediterranean. ”

“ In the beautiful and luxuriant gardens, especially in Italy, on the French Riviera, and in Algeria, the flora of almost every quarter of the globe is represented.
No less varied and interesting are the Inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands, who belong to three distinct continents, and who differ widely in race and language, in religion and culture. In remote mountain-regions there still exist peoples, like the Basques and the Albanians, who belong to the oldest races in Europe. ”

“ How comes it that all the civilizations of the Old World radiate from the shores of the Mediterranean? The Mediterranean is a cul de sac, with Atlantis opposite its mouth. Every civilization on its shores possesses traditions that point to Atlantis. We hear of no civilization coming to the Mediterranean from Asia, Africa, or Europe—from north, south, or west; but north, south, east, and west we find civilization radiating from the Mediterranean to other lands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While nominally belonging to three different quarters of the globe, the Mediterranean with its shores, being bounded on the north by a long wall of high mountains and on the south by a vast and even more impenetrable expanse of desert, possesses quite a unique individuality of its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During those three centuries the Mediterranean was a peaceful avenue of imperial administration, of trade, of civilizing intercourse. Its great ports teemed with a medley of people in whom the blood of all races from the Sahara to the German forests, and from Gibraltar to the valley of the Euphrates, was transfused. The little clans of high-bred men who had laid the foundations of this huge international empire had practically disappeared. ”

“ The Mediterranean is a great gulf running from west to east, penetrating the old world almost to its very centre, and separating its most civilized from its most savage communities. Its southern shores are inhabited, for the most part by an anti-commercial and thriftless people. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ For there is not even here what represents the life of the Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the connexion of the central peninsula, that of Italy, with the eastern one or Greece, is far closer than its connexion with the western one, or Spain. Italy and Spain are much further apart than Italy and Greece, and between the Alps and the Pyrenees the mountain chain is nearly lost. We might almost say that a piece of central Europe breaks through at this point and comes down to the Mediterranean. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Along the south coasts of Italy the shore-hills for hundreds of miles present the same dreary aspect of monotonous barrenness. Greece is a naked rock; forests have almost disappeared from the plains of Spain and Asia Minor; in northern Africa millions of square miles, once teeming with cities and castles, have been reduced to a state of hopeless aridity. The Mediterranean, once a forest-lake of paradise, has become a Dead Sea, surrounded by barren rocks, and sandy or dust clouded plains. ”

“ The Nile greatly relieves this monotony, but its sources lie within tropical regions far beyond the limits of the desert. Alexandria possesses almost the only natural harbour on this flat coast of early formation. The old-world characteristics of the land, its inhabitants, and their language at once strike the traveller on landing at Tripoli. Yet even this part of the Mediterranean, especially the Levant Basin, beyond the passage between Crete and Barca, contains recent formations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fixing our eyes, then, on the Mediterranean basin, with its Black Sea extension, it is easy to perceive that we have here a well-defined geographical province, capable of acting as an area of characterization as perhaps no other in the world, once its various peoples had the taste and ingenuity to intermingle freely by way of the sea. ”

“ The sea inshore will be of that rippling blue that one associates with the Mediterranean of the poets and painters, while perhaps a league distant it will roll up into those choppy whitecaps which only the Mediterranean possesses in all their disagreeableness. Truly the wind-broken surface of the Mediterranean in, or near, the Golfe de Lyon is something to be dreaded, whether one is aboard a liner bound for the Far East or on one of those abominable little boats which make the passage to Corsica or Sardinia. ”

“ The Mediterranean held its place as an inland sea, as one might well expect, since it was sea during the Permian times when most of the world was high, but all through the Triassic—which is the first Period of the Mesozoic Era—the land began to fall, and before it was over, the Mediterranean joined the Atlantic once again. ”

“ So it has come about that the only practicable history of geographical exploration starts from the Mediterranean centre, the first home of that civilization which has come to be known as European, though its field of activity has long since overspread the habitable land of both temperate zones, eastern Asia alone in part excepted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No traveler can find greater variety in scene and life, in language and habit, in climate and condition, than he gets in the course of a full Mediterranean tour. Few travelers make the whole circuit of the Mediterranean. This great inland sea is usually visited only in parts, and while the traveler is in transit from one point to another. There is no general description that can apply to the whole of this interesting body of water. On every shore there is something that is new and different, and somewhere on these shores there is something to delight each one. ”

“ The former represents the shield of Achilles as depicting the countries of the globe; on it the earth was figured as a disk surrounded by the ocean; the centre of Greece was represented as the centre of the world; the disk included the Mediterranean Sea, much contracted on the west, and the Egean and part of the Euxine Seas. The Mediterranean was so much contracted on this side, that Ithaca, and the neighbouring continent, or at the farthest, the straits which separate Sicily from Italy, were its limits. ”