On the World’s Seas and Oceans - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 29

heads. Perhaps as early as 35,000 years ago, they celebrated their hunt or perhaps wor-
shipped their animal gods with pictures drawn on the walls of deeply recessed caves. On
the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, as early as 5000 BCE, the Egyptians farmed,
lived their lives around the flooding of the Nile, and believed in an afterworld presided over
by gods. By 3000 BCE, they were building great temples and developing an extensive rep-
ertoire of medicines. By 2500 BCE, they performed life-saving surgery, made beer, wove
linen cloth, invented paper, and wrote on it, leaving extensive records of their history and
accomplishments.
MEDITERRANEAN GIFTS
Mediterranean people gave us lasting gifts. High (some would say first) on the list of gifts
are monotheism and western civilization's moral compass. Sometime around 1250 BCE
Moses led his people out of Egypt's slavery. As he wandered in search of a Promised Land,
he received the revelation of monotheism and, at the same time, the gift of a universal
moral code governing the behavior of men and women for all times and all circumstances.
Then, some 1,200 years later, we have another divine revelation and an expanded moral
code from Jesus and His Sermon on the Mount. Centuries rolled on, and in a cave in Mecca
(culturally part of the Mediterranean world) in 610 BCE, Mohammed hears the command
of the Angel Gabriel summoning him to the worship of Islam's one true God and demand-
ing strict obedience to His demands.
A second great gift of the Mediterranean is a writing system based on the sound of
words. Other cultures used writing systems, but most used symbols, one or two for each
word or concept. These were and are cumbersome and difficult to master. China uses idea-
graphs (ideographs): to read a newspaper requires mastery of 5,000 ideographs, and to read
a book requires 50,000. The most important texts of ancient China contain nearly a half-
million ideographs. In contrast, the English phonetic alphabet uses only twenty-six letters
and sounds. The majority of the world's alphabets use between twenty and thirty symbols
based on the number of sounds in each language. Significantly, mastery of a phonetic al-
phabet opens reading and writing to almost everyone. It democratizes learning and permits
almost every person to take part in the printed world of thoughts and ideas.
Wind- and oar-driven ships that traveled long distances over water are another Medi-
terranean gift. At night or in storms, boats could be drawn up on a nearby shore for safety.
As sailing skills and ships improved, open-water sailing became more common. As early
as 2000 BCE the Phoenicians, from today's Lebanon, traded on the Mediterranean and later
ventured into the Atlantic to Cornwall for tin, an essential ingredient of bronze. The cities
they founded, notably Carthage, not only gave safe harbor for their ships; they also helped
bind the entire Inner Sea into a single trading area.