6
THE SEAS
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their accounts of oating seaweed it has been thought that
they“ may have-been drifted by easterly winds as far west
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across the Atlantic as. the Sargasso Sea.
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But few
the Phœnician records have been preserved
and we have no maps showing. what they imagined the
extent of the oceans to be.
It seems that the Phœnicians
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whose business lay on the sea were unwilling to part with
their knowledge and kept many of their trade routes secret.
Any knowledge handed on from them to the Greeks was
small and even that was vague.
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In the days of Homer it was thought that the world was
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at and that surrounding the Mediterranean was the land
of the few countries they knew, but outside the land dwed
an ever—running river which they called the ocean (Plate 4).
In the sixth century B.c. Pythagoras considered that the
earth was a sphere and in the fth century Herodotus
f
recorded further advances in knowledge.
He, however,
considered that the south and west of the then known
world were bounded by the ocean, but could say nothing
of the north and east (Plate 4).
By the third century the
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idea of parallels of longitude and latitude had been introduCed by Eratosthenes, and seventy-years later Hipparchus
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instituteda method of map projection. This ancient era
in map-making culminated in the description of the world by
.
_Ptolemy in A.D. 150, who imagined that the Atlantic ocean
and—Indian Ocean were great enclosed seas, and that if one
into the Atlantic from the westernmost point of land
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the countries of the east would soon be reached (Plate 7).
Thus we see that the world of these ancient civilizations
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consisted of the lands to which they—had access on foot
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and a few countries separated only by short distances of
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sea, andthef two oceans, the Atlantic and Indian, that
,
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bathed
of the known land.
They had no knôwledge of—the Pacic. '
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