VOYAGE OF SCYLAX.

Xerxes, however, did not accept this account for true; and so Sataspes, as he had failed to accomplish the task set him, was impaled by the king's orders in accordance with the former sentence. One of his eunuchs, on hearing of his death, ran away with a great portion of his wealth, and reached Samos, where a certain Samian seized the whole. I know the man's name well, but I shall willingly forget it here.

44. Of the greater part of Asia, Darius was the discoverer. Wishing to know where the Indus (which is the only river save one that produces crocodiles) emptied itself into the sea, he sent a number of men, on whose truthfulness he could rely, and among them Scylax of Caryanda, to sail down the river. They started from the city of Caspatyrus,9 in the region called Pactyïca, and sailed down the stream in an easterly direc

CHAP. 43-45.

BOUNDARIES OF EUROPE.

37

tion' to the sea. Here they turned westward, and, after a voyage of thirty months, reached the place from which the Egyptian king, of whom I spoke above, sent the Phoenicians to sail round Libya. After this voyage was completed, Darius conquered the Indians, and made use of the sea in those parts. Thus all Asia, except the eastern portion, has been found to be similarly circumstanced with Libya.*

5

45. But the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and there is not a man who can say whether any sea girds it round either on the north or on the east, while in length it undoubtedly extends as far as both the other two. For my part I cannot conceive why three names, and women's names especially, should ever have been given to a tract which is in reality one, nor why the Egyptian Nile and the Colchian Phasis (or according to others the Mæotic Tanais and Cimmerian ferry) should have been fixed upon for the boundary lines; nor can I even say who gave the three tracts their

1 The real course of the Indus is somewhat west of south. The error of Herodotus arose perhaps from the Cabul river being mistaken for the true Indus. The course of this stream, before its junction with the Indus at Attock, is from N.W. by W. to S.E. by E. Herodotus's informants probably knew this, and imagined the easterly bearing of the river to continue. Still both they and Herodotus must have known that the main direction of the stream was southerly; otherwise it could never have reached the Erythræan or Southern Sea (supra, ch. 37). (Niebuhr's map (Geography of Herod.) is particularly unsatisfactory on this point. According to it Scylax on reaching the sea must have turned not westward, but southward.

2 Vide supra, ch. 42.

3 The conquest of the Indians, by which we are to understand the reduction of the Punjaub, and perhaps (though this is not certain) of Scinde, preceded (as may be proved by the Inscriptions) the Scythian expedition.

India, which is not contained among the subject-provinces enumerated at Behistun, appears in the list upon the great platform of Persepolis, where there is no mention of the Western Scythians. These last are added upon the tomb inscription at Nakhsh-i-Rustam, under the designation of "the Sacæ beyond the sea." (Compare Beh. Inscr. col. i. par. 6, with Lassen's Inscript. I. p. 42, and Sir H. Rawlinson's Inser. No. 6, pages 197, 280, and 294 of the first volume of Sir H. Rawlinson's Behistun Memoir.)

4 Limited, that is, and circumscribed by fixed boundaries.

5 See Book iii. ch. 115, sub fin.

6 Here again, as in ch. 12, Larcher translates "la ville de Porthmies Cim. mériennes." How a town can serve as a boundary-line he omits to explain. Herodotus undoubtedly intends the Strait of Jenikaleh.

7 The earliest Greek geographers divided the world into two portions only, Europe and Asia, in the latter of which they included Libya. This was the division of Hecatæus. (See

38

DERIVATIONS OF THE THREE NAMES.

9

Book IV.

names, or whence they took the epithets. According to the Greeks in general, Libya was so called after a certain Libya, a native woman,8 and Asia after the wife of Prometheus. The Lydians, however, put in a claim to the latter name, which they declare was not derived from Asia the wife of Prometheus, but from Asies, the son of Cotys, and grandson of Manes, who also gave name to the tribe Asias at Sardis. As for Europe, no one can say whether it is surrounded by the sea or not, neither is it known whence the name of Europe was derived,1 nor who gave it name, unless we say that Europe

Müller's Preface to the Fr. Hist. Gr. vol. i. p. x.; and compare Mure's Lit. of Greece, vol. iv. p. 147. See also above, ch. 36, and note ad loc.) Traces of it appear among Greeks later than Herodotus, as in the Fragments of Hippias of Elis, who seems to have made but these two continents (Fr. 4), and in the Panegyric of Isocrates (p. 179, ed. Baiter). The threefold division was, however, far more generally received both in his day and afterwards. (Vide supra, ii. 16, 17, and see the geographers, passim.) It is curious that in Roman times we once more find the double division, with the difference that Africa is ascribed to Europe. (Sallust. Bell. Jug. 17, § 3. Comp. Varro de Ling. Lat. v. 31, and Agathemer, ii. 2, ad fin.)

With respect to the boundaries of the continents, it appears that in the earliest times, when only Europe and Asia were recognised, the Phasis, which was regarded as running from the Caspian-a gulf of the circumambient ocean-into the Euxine, was accepted as the true separator between the two continents. Agathemer calls this "the ancient view" (i. 1), and it is found not only in Herodotus, but in Eschylus (Prom. Solut. Fr. 2, T μὲν δίδυμον χθονὸς Εὐρώπης μέγαν ἠδ ̓ Ασίας τέρμονα Φάσιν). We may gather from Dionysius (Perieg. 20, 21) that it continued among the later Greeks to dispute the ground with the more ordinary theory, which Herodotus here rejects that the Palus Mæotis and

the Tanais were the boundary. This latter view is adopted, however, almost exclusively by the later writers. (Cf. Scylax, Peripl. p. 72; Strabo, ii. p. 168; Plin. H. N. iii. 1; Arrian, Peripl. P. E. p. 131; Ptolem. ii. 1; Dionys. Perieg. 14; Mela, i. 3; Anon. Peripl. P. E. p. 133; Agathemer, ii. 6; Armen. Geograph. § 16, &c.) Ptolemy with his usual accuracy, adds to it, that where the Tanais fails the boundary is the meridian produced thence northwards. In modern times Europe has recovered a portion of what it thus lost to Asia, being extended eastward first to the Wolga, and more recently to the Ural river. The question of the boundary line between Asia and Africa has been already treated (see Book ii. ch. 17, note 10).

8 Of the Libya here mentioned as a" native woman we have no other account. Andron of Halicarnassus made Libya, like Asia and Europé, a daughter of Oceanus (Fr. 1). Others Iderived the three names from three men, Europus, Asius, and Libyus (Eustath. ad Dion. Per. 170). There was no uniform tradition on the sub. ject.

9 See vol. i. Essay i. p. 341, 342.` This was the view of Lycophron (Eustath. ad Dionys. Perieg, 270).

1 The name of Europe is evidently taken from the Semitic word ereb (the Arabic gharb), the "western" land sought for and colonized from Phoenicia. (See note1 on Book ii. ch. 44.) -[G. W.]

CHAP. 45, 46.

DERIVATIONS OF THE THREE NAMES.

39

was so called after the Tyrian Europé,2 and before her time was nameless, like the other divisions. But it is certain that Europé was an Asiatic, and never even set foot on the land which the Greeks now call Europe, only sailing from Phoenicia to Crete, and from Crete to Lycia. However, let us quit these matters. We shall ourselves continue to use the names which custom sanctions.

8

46. The Euxine sea, where Darius now went to war, has

3 The question of whence these names, two of which still continue in use, were really derived, is one of some interest. There are grounds for believing Europe and Asia to have originally signified "the west and "the east" respectively. Both are Semitic terms, and probably passed to the Greeks from the Phoenicians. Europe is the Hebrew 7y, the Assyrian ereb, the Greek, 'EpeBos, the Arabic Gharb and Arab. It signifies "setting," "the west," ""darkness." Asia is from the Hebrew (whence Nyi, "the east"), Assyrian azu, to rise," or "go forth." It is an adjectival or participial form from this root (comp. , 2 Chron. xxxii. 21); and thus signifies "going forth," "rising," or "the east." The Greeks first applied the title to that portion of the eastern continent which lay nearest them, and with which they became first acquainted coast of Asia Minor opposite the Cyclades; whence they extended it as their knowledge grew. Still it had always a special application to the country about Ephesus. With regard to Libya, it is perhaps most probable that the Greeks first called the south or southwest wind Aißa, because it brought

the

The derivation of the Latin term 'Africa," which we use instead of Libya, is peculiarly obscure. Alexander Polyhistor quotes a Jewish writer whom he calls Cleodemus, and appears to identify with the prophet Malachi, as deriving the word from Epher, y, a grandson of Abraham and Keturah (Fr. 7; cf. Gen. xxv. 4). Josephus adopts the same view (Antiq. Jud. i. 15). Leo suggests two derivations : one from the Arabic root furak, Heb.

,פרק

"to break off, separate, rend asunder;" the other from a certain Arabian king Iphric or Iphricus, who was driven out of Asia by the Assyrians. These accounts do not deserve much attention. Perhaps the term Afri was the real ethnic appellation of the tribe on whose coast the Carthaginians settled, and hence the Romans formed the word Africa: or more probably it was a name which the Phoenician settlers gave to the natives, connected with the Hebrew root &, and meaning " nomads," or savages." (Compare the terms Numidæ and Numidia.) It is to be noted that the name was always applied especially to the tract bordering upon Carthage. (Plin. H. N. v. 4; Mela, i. 7; Agathemer, ii. 5; Leo. Afric. i. 1, &c.)

40

DARIUS'S INVASION OF THE SCYTHIANS.

BOOK IV.

nations dwelling around it, with the one exception of the Scythians, more unpolished than those of any other region that we know of. For, setting aside Anacharsis and the Scythian people, there is not within this region a single nation which can be put forward as having any claims to wisdom, or which has produced a single person of any high repute. The Scythians indeed have in one respect, and that the very most important of all those that fall under man's control, shown themselves wiser than any nation upon the face of the earth. Their customs otherwise are not such as I admire. The one thing of which I speak, is the contrivance whereby they make it impossible for the enemy who invades them to escape destruction, while they themselves are entirely out of his reach, unless it please them to engage with him. Having neither cities nor forts, and carrying their dwellings with them wherever they go; accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback; and living not by

6

In later times Ephorus made them the subject of a laboured panegyric. (See the Fragm. Hist. Gr. vol. i. p. 74, Fragm. 76; and compare Nic. Dam. Fr. 123.) Herodotus intends to mark his dissent from such views.

6 It is curious that the Scythian remains discovered at Kertch do not give an example of a Scythian horsearcher, although they show the mode in which the Scyths used the javelin on horseback, and in which they shot their arrows on foot.