Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/149

 CHAPTER V THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD AND THE EARLY GREEKS Section 20. The ^Egean Civilization The Mediterranean Sea was the ocean where the ancient The Medi world carried on its commerce by ship, its explorations of un- known shores, and the settlement of colonies in newly discovered regions, just as later, men of Europe explored and colonized the shores of the Atlantic. The Mediterranean is, moreover, a body of water so vast that it bounds a large part of Europe on the south. It is about twenty-four hundred miles long and, laid out across the United States, would reach from New York over into California. Nowhere else on the globe is there a great its shores landlocked inland sea with a coast so irregular and indented as to produce a whole series of smaller seas and sheltered basins. All this, as we have seen, favored the early rise of seagoing ships and made the Mediterranean the earliest home of naviga- tion, which is far earlier than historians formerly supposed. Nor have the current books yet taken knowledge of the fact that large fleets sailed the Mediterranean in the thirtieth century B.C. These earliest vessels transformed the Mediterranean from a separating barrier into a connecting link, joining together the surrounding lands which made up the ancient world. The food of the Mediterranean peoples to-day is chiefly bread, wine, and oil; wine is their tea, and oil their butter. It was