Note 416 — Chapter IX · SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

As early as the second millennium before Christ they worked from Iceland and the North Sea past Finisterre to the Canaries and West Africa. An echo of these voyagings lingers in the Atlantis-saga of the Greeks. The realm of Tartessus (at the mouth of the Guadalquivir) appears to have been a centre of these movements (see Leo Frobenius, Das unbekannte Afrika, p. 139). Some sort of relation, too, there must have been between them and the movements of the “sea peoples,” Viking swarms which after long land-wanderings from North to South built themselves ships again on the Black Sea or the Ægean and burst out against Egypt from the time of Rameses II (1292-1225). The Egyptian reliefs show their ship-types to have been quite different from the native and the Phœnician; but they may well have been similar to those that Cæsar found afterwards among the Veneti of Brittany. A later example of such outbursts is afforded by the Varyags or Varangians in Russia and at Constantinople. No doubt more light will shortly be thrown on the courses of these movement-streams.