Note 556 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

Enclosed or marginal seas were historically the most important sections of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further advantage of constituting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization from the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions of this sea.556 The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts, which crossed and criss-crossed from shore to shore. Phoenicia's trade ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from Venice, Genoa and Marseilles anchored in the ports of Mohammedanized Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea establishes between the coasts which it washes.