Having Thus Pointed Out The Sources From Which Herodotus Derived
His Geographical Knowledge, We Shall Now Sketch The Limits Of That
Knowledge, As Well As Mention In What Respects He Yielded To The Fabulous
And Absurd Notions Of His Contemporaries.
He fails most in endeavouring to give a general and combined idea of the
earth; even where his separate sketches are clear and accurate, when united
they lose both their accuracy and clearness.
He seems to doubt whether he
should divide the world into three parts; and at last, having admitted such
a division, he makes the rivers Phasis and Araxes, and the Caspian Sea, the
boundaries between Europe and Asia; and to Europe he assigns an extent
greater than Asia and Libya taken together. His knowledge of the west of
Europe was very imperfect: in some part he fixes the Cassiterides, from
which the Phoenicians derived their tin. The Phoenician colony of Gadez was
known to him. His geography extended to the greater part of Poland and
European Russia. Such appear to have been its limits with respect to
Europe; and such the general notion he entertained of this quarter of the
world. As to Asia, he believed that a fleet sent by Darius had
circumnavigated it from the Indus to the confines of Egypt; but though his
general idea of it was thus erroneous, he possessed accurate information
respecting it from the confines of Europe to the Indus. Of the countries to
the east of that river, as well as of the whole of the north and southern
parts of it, he was completely ignorant. He particularly notices that the
Eastern Ethiopians, or Indians, differ from those of Africa by their long
hair, as opposed to the woolly head of the African. In his account of India
he interweaves much that is fabulous; but in the same manner as modern
discoveries in geography have confirmed many things in Herodotus which were
deemed errors in his geography, so it has been ascertained that even his
fables have, in most instances, a foundation in fact. With regard to
Africa, his knowledge of Egypt, and of the country to the north of it,
seems to have been very accurate, and more minute and satisfactory than his
knowledge of any other part of the world. It is highly probable that he was
acquainted with the course of the western branch of the Nile, as far as the
11th degree of latitude. He certainly knew the real course of the Niger. On
the east coast of Africa he was well acquainted with the shores of the
Arabian Gulph; but though he sometimes mentions Carthage, and describes the
traffic carried on, without the intervention of language, between the
Carthaginians and a nation beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which we nave
already mentioned in treating of the commerce of the Carthaginians, yet he
seems to have been unacquainted with any point between Carthage and the
Pillars of Hercules.
In the history of Herodotus, there is an account of a map constructed by
Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, when he proposed to Cleomenes, king of
Sparta, to attack Darius, king of Persia, at Susa; from this account, the
vague, imperfect, and erroneous ideas entertained in his time of the
relative situations and distances of places, as well as of the extremely
rude and feeble advances which had been made towards the construction of
maps, may be inferred.
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