THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I
BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN

The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are.

You must first look at the world map to understand the story properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole. And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so far as we know it, was made up to—what date shall we say?—only a few hundred years ago—say the date of Columbus' discovery of America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the Mediterranean Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does know of the really important things that men did in the world up to the date of our Queen Elizabeth.

"But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the time?"

And so there were things happening, and things which made a very great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great differences within the borders of the countries in which they happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had anything to do with the making of it.

For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye just a little—not far—to the east again of the eastern shore of that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin levare, to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by those who gave the name—that is to say, the East.

A very short way, as it looks on the map of the Western Hemisphere, to the east of that Levant shore, you may see the two rivers Euphrates and Tigris, rising very near together only a little south of the Black Sea, yet not finding their way out into the sea till they have gone a very long way south. Then, after coming together, they go out in each other's company into the Persian Gulf. A great part of that space between the two rivers is called Mesopotamia, and is the country where our armies had hard fighting in the Great War. Mesopotamia is from Greek μέσος, meaning the middle, and πόταμος, a river, and means the land in the middle of, or between, the two rivers. Mediterranean, the name of the big sea, is from Latin medius, meaning, again, the middle, and terra, the earth; that is to say, the sea in the middle of the land. It is almost entirely shut in by the land, its only way out being by the narrow Straits of Gibraltar at the western end.

The great rivers

So there you see those two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, running south and making the land in the neighbourhood of their course very rich and fertile, producing splendid crops and vegetation of all kinds. And now, if you will carry your eye just a little to the west and south of these, across Arabia and the Red Sea, you will see another great river, only this time it is a river running, not from the north to the south, but from the south to the north. It is the Nile, the river of Egypt. It goes out into the Mediterranean past a city called Alexandria. At its mouth it spreads out into a number of channels, making an area intersected by water channels. This area has something of the shape of the letter in the Greek alphabet which corresponds to our "d" and is drawn thus Δ. That is roughly the shape of the space occupied by these many mouths of the Nile, and the region is therefore called the "Delta," which is the name of that letter of the Greek alphabet.