CHAPTER I BEFORE HISTORY WAS WRITTEN The greatest story in the world is the story of mankind around the Mediterranean Sea. The reason why it is so great a story for us is that it is really our own story. It is the story of the doings of mankind from the earliest date at which we know anything at all about man; and it is the story of the doings which have made you and me what we are to-day, and have made our lives what they are. You must first look at the world map to understand the story properly. Take out the atlas or the globe of the world, and have a look at the Mediterranean Sea as shown upon it. You will see how very little space this sea occupies in comparison with the whole. And I want you to observe this very particularly, because, as I hope to show you, small though this space is, it is the space in, or closely around, which nearly the whole story of man on the world, so far as we know it, was made up to--what date shall we say?--only a few hundred years ago--say the date of Columbus' discovery of America. If you know the story of what happened in and about the Mediterranean {2} Sea, you will know nearly all that anybody does know of the really important things that men did in the world up to the date of our Queen Elizabeth. "But," you may say, "surely things were happening in other places, as in China and in Peru, and in Mexico, and all over the world, all the time?" And so there were things happening, and things which made a very great difference, no doubt, to the people to whom they happened; but they were things that made scarcely any difference at all, so far as we are able to see, to the history of the world. They made great differences within the borders of the countries in which they happened, but not beyond. The happenings that went on round the shores of the Mediterranean were the making of the world as we know it to-day: I mean, of course, in so far as men's actions have had anything to do with the making of it. For the first part of the story we shall be occupied with the eastern end only of the Mediterranean; and I must ask you to carry your eye just a little--not far--to the east again of the eastern shore of that sea. That shore is called the Levant, from the Latin _levare_, to rise, and it means the region in which the sun was seen to rise by those who gave the name--that is to say, the East.