It is again beyond the scope of the present summary of the development of geographical knowledge among European peoples to attempt to give any detailed history of exploration; it is only possible to deal with the salient episodes, and these mainly in so far as they have influenced man’s general conception of the earth. Nevertheless, ages before the existence of any documentary evidence of its development geographical knowledge must have advanced far in other lands. America was “discovered” probably thousands of years before Columbus stumbled against the New World, or even the Norsemen had set foot in “Vineland”; it had time, before the Spaniards swarmed over it, to become the seat of civilizations whose origin is far beyond knowledge. It is worth noticing for our particular purpose that the European conquerors found evidence of highly developed geographical methods both in Central America and in Peru; the native maps were intelligible to them, and the Peruvian Incas had even evolved the idea of relief maps. China, again, a great power in early ages, possessed knowledge of much of central Asia; India was the seat of powerful States and of a certain civilization; Babylonia and Egypt were working out their destinies, and had their own conceptions of the earth and the universe, long before the starting-point of the detailed investigation within our present view. But the names of Babylonia and Egypt bring us nearer to that starting-point. The history of Europe dawns in the eastern Mediterranean, and so does the history of geography. It has, however, to be premised that connection existed, in very early times, between the eastern Mediterranean circle and the lands far beyond. When princes of Iranian stock (to cite a single illustration) are found established on the confines of the Levant as early as the fifteenth century B.C., it may be realized that the known radius from the Mediterranean centre was no short one. Much earlier than this--even in the fourth millennium B.C.--astronomy, a science of the closest affinity to geography, was well organized in Babylonia, and there is evidence for a cadastral survey there. Clay tablets dating from more than two thousand years B.C. show the work of the Babylonian surveyors. The Egyptians worked along similar lines. Examples of their map-work include a plan, in the museum at Cairo, showing the basin of the lake Mœris, with its canal and the position of towns on its borders, together with notes giving information about these places; and, in Turin, a map of the Wadi Alaiki, where the Nubian goldmines were situated; and this map may date from the earlier half of the fourteenth century B.C.