COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

484 COSMOS.
into the peninsula of Asia Minor; the number of islands in the
Egean Sea, which have served as a means for
facilitating the
spread of civilisation * and the fissure between ;
Arabia, Egypt,
and Abyssinia, through which the great Indian Ocean penetrates
under the name of the Arabian Gulf or the Red Sea,
and which is separated by a narrow isthmus from the Delta
of the Nile, and the south-eastern coasts of the Mediterranean.
By means of all these geographical relations, the influence
cf the sea as a connecting element was speedily manifested
in the growing power of the Phoenicians, and subse-
quently in that of the Hellenic nations, and in the rapid
extension of the .sphere of general ideas. Civilisation in its
early seats in Egypt, on the Euphrates, and the Tigris, in
Indian Pentapotamia and China, had been limited to lands
rich in navigable rivers; the case was different, however, in
Phoenicia and Hellas. The active life of the Greeks, especially
of the Ionian race, and their early predilection for
maritime expeditions, found a rich field for its development in
the remarkable configuration of the Mediterranean, and in its
relative position to the oceans situated to the south and west.
The existence of the Arabian Gulf as the result of the
irruption of the Indian Ocean through the straits of Bab-el-
Mandeb belongs to a series of great physical phenomena,
which could alone have been revealed to us by modern
geognosy. The European continent has its main axis directed
from north-east to south-west ; but almost at right angles to
this direction, there is a system of fissures, which have given
occasion partly to a penetration of sea- water, and partly to the
elevation of parallel mountain chains. This inverse line of
strike directed from the south-east to the north-west is discernible
from the Indian Ocean to the efflux of the Elb? in Northern
Germany; in the Red Sea, the southern part of which is inclosed
on both sides by volcanic rocks ; in the Persian Gulf,
with the deep valleys of the double streams of the Euphrates
and the
Tigris ; in the Zagros chain in Luristan in the moun-
;
tain chains of Hellas and in the neighbouring islands of the
Archipelago, and, lastly, in the Adriatic Sea, and the Dalmatian
calcareous Alps. The intersection f of these two systems
*
Naxos, by Ernst Curtius, 1846, s. 11; Droysen,
Bildung des liellenistischen Staatensystems, 1843, s. 4-9.
t Leopold von Buch, Ueber die geognostischen System
d,a. xi.; Humboldt, Asie centrale, t. i. pp. 284-286.
Oescliichte der