Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. | Page 9

of
the learned world two hundred years before Christ.

It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short; that his Ceylon
(Taprobane) is even larger than Ptolemy's; that Ireland (Ierne) appears
to the north of Britain; and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a
long and narrow channel; but the true shape of India, of the Persian
Gulf and the Euxine, of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean, is
marked rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the
elaborate completeness of Ptolemy's, but it is free from his enormous
errors, and it has all the advantage of science, however imperfect, over
brilliant guessing.
Of course, even in Ptolemy, this guess-work pure and simple only
comes in at intervals and does not so much affect the central and, for
his day, far more important tracts of the Old World, but we have yet to
see how, in the mediæval period and under Arabic imagination, all
geography seemed likely to become an exercise of fancy.
The chief Greek descriptions of the world, we must clearly remember,
were before the mediæval workers, Christian and Moslem, from the
first; these men took their choice, and the point is that they, and
specially the Arabs, chose with rare exceptions the last of these, the
Ptolemaic system, because it was the more ambitious, symmetrical, and
pretty.
Let us trace for a moment the gradual development of this geographical
mythology.
Starting with the notion of the world as a disc, or a ball, the centre of
the universe, round which moved six celestial circles, of the Meridian,
the Equator, the Ecliptic, the two Tropics, and the Horizon, the Arab
philosophers on the side of the earth's surface worked out a doctrine of
a Cupola or Summit of the world, and on the side of the heavens a
pseudo-science of the Anoua or Settings of the Constellations,
connected with the twelve Pillars of the Zodiac and the twenty-eight
Mansions of the Moon.
With Arabic astrology we are not here concerned; it is only worth
noting in this connection as the possible source of early Christian
knowledge of the Southern Cross and other stars famous in the story of

exploration, such as Dante shows in the first canto of his Purgatorio.
But the geographical doctrines of Islam, compounded from the Hebrew
Pentateuch and the theoretical parts of Ptolemy, had a more immediate
and reactionary effect on knowledge. The symmetrical Greek divisions
of land into seven zones or climates; and of the world's surface,[10]
into three parts water and one part terra firma; the Indian fourfold
arrangement of "Romeland" and the East; the similar fourfold Chinese
partition of China, India, Persia, and Tartary: all these reappeared
confusedly in Arabic geography. From India and the Sanscrit "Lanka,"
they seem to have got their first start on the myth of Odjein, Aryn, or
Arim, "the World's Summit"; from Ptolemy the sacred number of 360
degrees of longitude was certainly derived, beautifully corresponding to
the days of the year, and neatly divided into 180 of land or habitable
earth and 180 of sea, or unharvested desert. With the seven climates
they made correspond the great Empires of the world--chief among
which they reckoned the Caliphate (or Bagdad), China, Rome,
Turkestan, and India.
[Footnote 10: In which the habitable quarter of the world, situated
mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was just about twice as long as it
was broad.]
The sacred city of Odjein had been the centre of most of the earlier
Oriental systems; in the Arabic form of Arim ("The Cupola of the
Earth"), it became the fixed point round which circled mediæval
theories of the world's shape. "Somewhere in the Indian Ocean between
Comorin and Madagascar," became the compromise when the
mountain could not be found off any of the known coast-lines; it was
mixed up with notions of the Roc, and the Moon Mountains in Africa,
of the Magnet Island and of the Eastern Kingdom made out of one vast
pearl; and even in Roger Bacon it serves as an algebraic sign for a
mathematical centre of the world.
The enlargement of knowledge, though forcing upon Arabic science a
conviction of Ptolemy's mistake in over-extending the limits of the
world known to him, only led to the invention of a scholastic
distinction between the real and the traditional East and West, while the

confusion was made perfect by the travestied history always so popular
among Orientals. The "Gades of Alexander and Hercules," the farthest
points east and west, were named after the mythical conquests of the
real Iskander and the mythical hero of Greeks and Phoenicians. Arim in
the middle, with the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, and the north
and south poles at equal distance from it--the centre and the four
corners of the