The emergence of the Persian Empire had consequences as well for the Greek view of the world. It inspired a view that saw the known world divided between east and west, or Asia and Europe. The man who thus split the known world into two continents was Hecataeus of Miletus (second half of the 6th century). What was later to be considered a third continent was called “Libue” by Hecataeus and presumably considered a part of “Asie.” Hecataeus’ ideas were taken over by others, and the opposition between the Persian Empire and the Greeks resulted in a permanent division of Eurasia into two continents. This geographical division, therefore, was from the start associated with a cultural and political opposition between the two. Hecataeus outlined his ideas in a book (now lost) that was probably called Description of the Whole World. It was one of the very first Greek books in prose.
In the Dark Age and in the early Archaic period, the Greek view of the world had been simpler and limited mainly to Greece and its immediate vicinity; the world beyond was inhabited by strange peoples and creatures of myths and fables. Moreover, the world in the time of Homer had been a simple flat surface, a big “pancake” surrounded by the waters of Okeanos, the world-ocean. Above, there was the dome of heaven with the stars and the planets, and below Earth there were the realms of Hades and the rest of the underworld. In essence, this view of the world and of the universe did not differ very much from the representations of the cosmos in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the time of Hecataeus, Greek knowledge of the actual world had increased substantially, but in essence the view of the world as a whole had not developed. There still existed fabulous peoples, but now they lived farther away, toward the edges of Earth: the wise and blessed Ethiopians in the south, the pious and wealthy Hyperboreans in the far north beyond the Scythians, and the just and long-lived Indians in the extreme east. But apart from these happy peoples, there were also cannibals and ogres, and all sorts of barbarians, and Amazons somewhere in the east. Here, we may assume the work of an imagination that wished to see ideas realized that were suppressed in contemporary Greek society, as well as the influence of a tradition that had preserved names and images that were not firmly fixed so that they could become located and relocated over time. However, for the first time we can detect a desire to know and to research. In the time of Hecataeus, a certain Scylax from western Asia Minor, in the service of the Persian king Darius, explored the course of the Kabul River and then sailed down the Indus, which marked the eastern border of the king’s realm, from where he reached Egypt through the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea. He wrote a short book about his exploits, which was almost certainly consulted by Hecataeus, who himself must have traveled in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus, a scientific method was born: to assemble facts both by first-hand experience and by information gathered from others, including reading what someone else had written on a subject, and then to organize all these facts/“facts” in an all-encompassing framework. With Hecataeus, this method presented itself, albeit in a rudimentary form, for the first time.
World History
