find themselves reaching the ocean in almost any direction in which
they travelled, either the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean,
or the Persian Gulf. Accordingly, the oldest map of the world which
has been found is one accompanying a cuneiform inscription, and
representing the plain of Mesopotamia with the Euphrates flowing
through it, and the whole surrounded by two concentric circles,
which are named briny waters. Outside these, however, are seven
detached islets, possibly representing the seven zones or climates
into which the world was divided according to the ideas of the
Babylonians, though afterwards they resorted to the ordinary four
cardinal points. What was roughly true of Babylonia did not in
any way answer to the geographical position of Greece, and it is
therefore probable that in the first place they obtained their
ideas of the surrounding ocean from the Babylonians.

[Illustration: THE EARLIEST MAP OF THE WORLD]

It was after the period of Homer and Hesiod that the first great
expansion of Greek knowledge about the world began, through the
extensive colonisation which was carried on by the Greeks around
the Eastern Mediterranean. Even to this day the natives of the
southern part of Italy speak a Greek dialect, owing to the wide
extent of Greek colonies in that country, which used to be called
"Magna Grecia," or "Great Greece." Marseilles also one of the Greek
colonies (600 B.C.), which, in its turn, sent out other colonies
along the Gulf of Lyons. In the East, too, Greek cities were dotted
along the coast of the Black Sea, one of which, Byzantium, was
destined to be of world-historic importance. So, too, in North
Africa, and among the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Greeks colonised
throughout the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and in almost every