COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

PHYSICAL CONTEMPLATION OP THE UNIVERSE. 505
are the most cultivated of all the Iberians ; they employ the
art of writing, and have written books containing memorials of
ancient times, and also poems and laws set in verse, for which
they claim an antiquity of six thousand years .
"
I have dwelt on
these separate examples in order to show how much of ancient
cultivation, even amongst European nations, has been lost
without our being able to discover any trace of its existence,
and how the history of the earliest contemplation of the universe
must continue to be limited to a very narrow compass.
Beyond the 48th degree of latitude, north of the Sea of Azof
and of the Caspian, between the Don, the Wolga, and the Jaik,
where the latter flows from the southern auriferous Uralian
mountains, Europe and Asia are, as it were, fused together by
flat
steppes. Herodotus, in the same manner as Pherecydes
of Syros had previously done, regarded the whole of northern
Scythian Asia (Siberia), as belonging to Sarmatian Europe,
and even as forming a portion of Europe itself.* Towards
the south, our quarter of the globe is sharply separated from
Asia, but the far projecting peninsula of Asia Minor, and the
richly varied .^gean Archipelago (serving as a bridge between
the two separate continents), have afforded an easy passage
for different races, languages, customs, and manners. Western
Asia has, from the earliest ages, been the great thoroughfere
for races migrating from the east, as was the north-west
of Greece fbr the Illyric races. The ^Egean Archipelago,
which was in turn subject to Phoenician, Persian, and Greek
dominion, was the intermediate link between Greece and the
far East.
When Phrygia was incorporated with Lydia, and both
merged into the Persian Empire, the contact led to the general
extension of the sphere of ideas amongst Asiatic and
European Greeks. The Persian rule was extended by the
warlike expeditions of Cambyses and Darius Hystaspes
from Cyrene and the Nile to the fruitful lands of the
Ucber die UrbewoJiner Hispaniens, 1821, s. 123 and 131-136. The
Iberian alphabet has been successfully investigated in our own times by
M. de Saulcy ; the Phrygian, by the ingenious discoverer of arrow-headed
writing, Grotefend; and the Lyeian, by Sir Charles Fellowes. (Compare
Boss, Hellenika, bd. i. s. xvi.)
* Herod., iv. 42 (Schweighauser ad Herod., t. v. p. 204). Company
Humboldt, Asie centrale, t. i. pp. 54 and 577.