On the World’s Seas and Oceans - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 28

THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
All our religion, almost all of our law, almost all our arts,
almost all that sets us above savages has come to us from the
shores of the Mediterranean.
— Samuel Johnson [26]
From the earliest times, first in Europe and then in the New World, the Mediterranean has
been a traveler's magnet, attracting those who seek the sources of western civilization.
Compared to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean is a small place. Its designation as a
sea marks its size. While the Atlantic encompasses 31.8 million square miles, the Medi-
terranean is less than a million square miles (965,000 square miles). The Med (to use its
familiar name) runs about 2,400 miles from west to east. It is 1,000 miles at its widest point
and narrows to a mere nine miles at its western end, the Strait of Gibraltar. At its eastern
end, it narrows into the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey, and from there it widens into the Black
Sea, bringing the commerce of Europe into northern Turkey and southern Russia.
Waters of the Mediterranean Sea wash ashore on three continents: Europe, Africa, and
Asia, offering sea-borne commerce to twenty-one countries, plus the two island countries
of Cyprus and Malta. Six more large islands and about 3,500 smaller ones dot the Med.
Each of the Med's countries has its own culture, history, and language, and almost all give
the Mediterranean Sea its own language-derived name. Early Arab cartographers called it
the Inner Sea. Ancient Egyptians called it the Great Green Sea. And Homer's Greeks called
it the wine-dark sea. As an expression of imperial ambition, the Romans called it Our Sea.
By the seventh century, mare Mediterranean (late Latin), a wonderfully expressive term,
had come into common use: The Middle Earth Sea.
The Middle Earth Sea is especially suited to Mediterranean man's earliest attempts at
maritime commerce and exploration. Tides are small. There are rough winds in winter, but
summer sailing is smooth. More important, thousands of beaches dot the sea, excellent for
dragging a small ship ashore at night or in a storm. And landmarks abound, many of them
visible for a hundred miles or more, excellent for those who navigated only from memory.
The countries of the Med range from prosperous (France, Monaco, Italy) to poverty-
stricken (Morocco, Albania, Tunis), from democratic (Spain, Israel) to dictatorial (until
recently, Libya), and from Roman Catholic (Malta, Croatia) to Orthodox (Serbia
/Montenegro) to Muslim (Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, Albania), and from those who have
known peace for more than a half-century to those either currently ravaged by war or bal-
anced on its knife's edge (Algeria, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia).
The Sea in the Middle of the Earth is the place (Spain, France) where our Cro-Magnon
ancestors refined their civilization, living in caves and hunting with flint-chipped arrow-