THE MEDITERRANEAN 

 LOOKS WEST 



PERHAPS as early as three thousand years before Columbus 

 men of the ancient Mediterranean world were probing 

 the limits of their fear and ignorance by courageously pushing 

 their trading voyages ever westward from the settled civiliza- 

 tions of the Aegean Sea. There were many reasons for this 

 searching toward the west, not all motivated by noble intellec- 

 tual curiosity. The people who did most to open up new paths 

 for civilization to follow and expand were predominantly 

 traders and merchants, the Phoenicians, whose culture was a 

 grab bag of borrowings from the East, from Egypt and from 

 the Philistine remnants of the Crete or Minoan civilization. 

 Nevertheless these tough sailors and traders carried the ad- 

 vance for the men of ancient times, carried the spirit of the 

 pathfinders who were plagued by the challenge of the horizon 

 line and followed new sea paths looking for new worlds. 



And they did this in the face of a great barrier of fear and 

 legend that marked the waters beyond Gibraltar as a place of 

 death, an arctic waste, a coagulated sea of mud, in fact the 

 dangerous verge of the world itself, a swift current at the edge 

 of nowhere. It has been truly written that "a. dim disquieting 

 sense of the enveloping world formerly haunted the imagina- 

 tions of men as shown in mythologies, proverbs, legends and 

 superstitious practices throughout the world." But together 



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