Herodotus of Halicarnassus (_c._ 484–425 B.C.) was a historian, but was widely travelled, and understood the importance of a knowledge of the geography of a country, and its bearings on the history of its people. He only introduces geographical information in so far as it throws light on the history with which he is dealing, or because it seemed to him of special interest, or as a report of curious information obtained from the countries which he visited; but he has certainly some more exact information about the restricted world of which Greece was the centre than any of his predecessors. He visited Egypt and the Greek colony of Cyrene, on the coast of what is now Tripoli. There is reason to believe that in Asia he got as far as Babylon on the Euphrates, and perhaps as far as Susa beyond the Tigris. He crossed the Euxine to the northern shore as far as Olbia on the Borysthenes, and probably went round to the south-east coast to the country of the Colchians, whose characteristics he describes as if from personal knowledge. He does not seem to have got very far west in the Mediterranean, though he spent the latter part of his life in southern Italy. There is little doubt that he visited several of the Grecian islands. But apart from the information about the countries round the Mediterranean which he collected personally, his history contains material from various sources concerning the countries and peoples in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This information, on the whole, is of the vaguest kind, and shows that the Greeks whom Herodotus may be taken to represent were only groping their way with regard to a knowledge of the world outside the limits of their own restricted sphere. This vague knowledge included a considerable section of western Asia as far as the Caspian Sea and the river Araxes. Herodotus had also heard of India and of the Indus river, and had a fair knowledge of the Persians, the Medes, and the Colchians, as also of part at least of Arabia. Eastwards, in what might be called Central Asia, he had heard of the Bactrians and Sogdians to the south of the Jaxartes (Syr-darya, the northern of the two great affluents of the Sea of Aral), and of the Massagetæ, Issedones, Arimaspians, and other races or peoples; those to the north of the Jaxartes being included, according to Herodotus, in Europe, which he took to extend from the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Hellespont and up the Phasis (Rion) river, from its mouth in the Black Sea, to the Caspian. He also divided Asia from Libya (Africa) along the axis of the Red Sea, and was thus in conflict with others who had divided Europe from Asia at the Tanais, and Asia from Libya at the Nile. He would not permit a theoretical boundary-line to “bisect a nationality,” as the Nile does. [Illustration: Fig. 3.--The World according to Herodotus B.C. 450.]