of
Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their
respective continents. The idea of a European state has a different
content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state; it
includes a different race or combination of races, different social and
economic development, different political ideals. Location, therefore,
means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civilization and
political status at the other.

[Sidenote: Intercontinental location.]

This larger conception of location brings a correspondingly larger
conception of environment, which affords the solution of many otherwise
hopeless problems of anthropo-geography. It is embodied in the law that
the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the
physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of
lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location. Almost
every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of
Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to
emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece's
location at the threshold of the Orient. This location has given to
Greek history a strong Asiatic color. It comes out in the accessibility
of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is
conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the
achievement of independence in 1832 and the recent efforts for the
liberation of Crete. This outpost location before the Mediterranean
portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to
every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had
in it always an element of weakness. In comparison with the shadow of
Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832
enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to
advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history.

It is a similar intercontinental location in the isthmian region between
the Mediterranean on the west and the ancient maritime routes of the
Red Sea and Persian Gulf on the east, which gave to Phoenicia the office
of middleman between the Orient and Occident,[240] and predestined its
conquest, now by the various Asiatic powers of Mesopotamia, now by the
Pharaohs of Egypt, now by European Greeks and Romans, now by a
succession of Asiatic peoples, till to-day we find it incorporated in
the Asiatic-European Empire of Tur