Note 568 — Chapter II
Reading edition
How Europe, which on a modern map would seem to be but one continent with Asia, became one of three great continents known to the ancients, is manifest from the world as it was conceived by Eratosthenes in the third century. In his map the Caspian Sea was a gulf indented from the Northern Ocean, so that only a small land-connection existed between Asia and Europe, spanned by the Caucasus Mountains, with the Euxine on the west and the Caspian on the east; just as the isthmus at the head of the Arabian Gulf also joined Libya, or Africa, to Asia. Cf. Bunbury’s History of Ancient Geography, i. 660.