Earnest A. Hooton

Up from the Ape, pp. 576-577

1. MEDITERRANEAN
(basic long-headed brunets)

Sorting Criteria:
a. Hair color: dark brown to black
b. Eye color: dark brown or medium brown
c. Head form: cephalic index less than 80

Morphological Types

1. Upper Palaeolithic (“Galley Hill,” “Combe Capelle,” “Atlanto-Mediterranean”)

a. Head form: very long, usually over 200 mm., very dolichocephalic, length-breadth index usually under 75; occiput protuberant
b. Brow-ridges: usually large
c. Forehead: usually receding
d. Nasion depression: deep
e. Hair form: usually very wavy or curly
f. Nose form: usually straight, medium breadth and height, rather coarse
g. Face form: often very long face, deep jaws, rather prominent malars
h. Stature: usually tall (over 170 cm.) but may be medium, rarely short
i. Skin color: generally dark

Distribution: sporadic in refuge areas of Europe and the Middle East; probably commonest in Ireland, Scotland, Wales

2. Iranian Plateau (“Indo-Afghan,” “Irano-Afghan”)

Differs from the Upper Palaeolithic type only as follows:
a. Nose form: always high, broad or medium wide in root and bridge, usually convex with thin to medium, depressed tip and recurved alae
b. Beard and body hair: usually heavy
c. Stature and body build: usually medium height (167 cm.) and slight build

Distribution: mostly in Iraq and Iran

3. Classic Mediterranean

(Reduced derivatives of the Upper Palaeolithic and Iranian Plateau subraces)

Two subtypes:
Characters:
(a) Skeleton: gracile, skull smooth with small brow-ridges and mastoids
(b) Beard and body hair: sparse
(c) Face narrow, oval; chin pointed
(d) Nose form: in the Upper Palaeolithic derivative, straight with medium thick tip, elevated or horizontal; in the Iran Plateau derivative, very thin, high-bridged, often aquiline nose, always convex, with thin, depressed tip and recurved alae
(e) Stature: usually under 166 cm.
(f) Body build: usually slender

Distribution: the hook-nosed type particularly in Arabia and the Near East among Arabs and Jews; the straight-nosed type there and in the whole Mediterranean basin and sporadically in eastern, central, and northwestern Europe.

Up from the Ape, pp. 582-585

The Mediterranean Subrace. Probably the name, Mediterranean, is as good as any for a designation of the great subrace of basic, long-headed brunets that constitutes the largest number of Whites, was certainly the earliest White subrace, and retains the full pigmentation of hair, skin, and eyes that was characteristic of early Homo sapiens. The name is adopted from the great Italian anthropologist Sergi, who used it however, as a racial rather than a subracial title.

Certainly, the most archaic morphological type of the Mediterranean subrace is that known as Upper Palaeolithic, sometimes also called Galley Hill or Combe Capelle (or, by Coon, the “Bruenn race”) from type fossil finds in Europe, and also frequently referred to as Atlanto-Mediterranean (Deniker). This exceptionally long-headed type is notable for the great size of the brain-case and its rugged bony construction. The face is commonly long and massive, but it may be rather short, perhaps oftenest when bodily stature is below medium. The jaws are nearly always deep and heavy. It seems improbable that this type, when identified in Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, or elsewhere, represents the pure lineal descendants of Upper Palaeolithic men. It is more likely to be due to recombination of genetic factors from old strains. It is hard to believe that anywhere in Europe there are inbred, unmixed survivors of Palaeolithic colonies. This type, which is easy to recognize, but does not easily lend itself to selection by any mechanical sorting process, is fairly common in Iran and Iraq an probably elsewhere in the Middle East. In Ireland, England, and the United States, a very closely similar type, that differs only in that eyes are mixed instead of dark, is sorted out as the residual Nordic-Mediterranean type, on the assumption that the lightening of eye pigmentation is due to admixture with the blond Nordic stock. This may or may not be the correct interpretation. There are virtually no pure dark eyes (medium brown, dark brown, or black) in Ireland, and hence, by sorting criteria, practically no pure Mediterraneans. However, the type, complete with dark eyes and dark hair, seems a little commoner in Britain and the United States.

A variant of this Upper Palaeolithic type in which the face is short and broad with laterally jutting cheek bones and square, flaring gonial (hinder jaw) angles is often identified as a modern Cro Magnon type. It was first thus designated by Collignon in the Dordogne region of central France, where Upper Palaeolithic man and the original Cro Magnon skeletons were found. Even here it seems probable that we are dealing with recombinations rather than pure line descendants. Other writers have recognized these so-called Cro Magnons in Scandinavia, central Europe, and elsewhere. The present writer still inclines to the belief, set forth in connection with a study of the Guanches of the Canary Islans (other alleged modern Cro Magnons), that this long-headed, short, broad-faced type orginarily arises as a ubstable hybridization product, the result of a cross between long-heads and brachycephals with short, broad faces, which latter are sometimes hafted to the long, narrow skulls of the Upper Palaeolithic type. A Mongoloid admixture often produces this combination. It may be seen in American Indians and also in the skulls of mediaeval Icelanders who are not without suspicion of having acquired a dash of Eksimo blood in connection with their colonization of Greenland. Lappish admixture might produce this type in Scandinavia.

The second morphological type of the Mediterranean subrace has recently been recognized by Henry Field under the name of the Iranian Plateau type (according to usage here it is called a type and not a race.)⁸¹ The definition of this type, based upon very extensive anthropometric surveys of Iran and Iraq, seems to me the most important addition to the knowledge of the contemporary White race that has been made in the last few decades. It is true that Deniker recognized a somewhat similar type, which he designated as Indo-Afghan, but the pure and characteristic form of type is not Indian, nor (in all probability) Afghan, but Iranian and Mesopotamian.⁸² Nor did Deniker describe and isolate the type in any really satisfactory manner. The Iranian Plateau type differes from the Upper Palaeolithic type particularly in its long, high-bridged, and boldly jutting nasal promontory. It has the same huge dolichocephalic head and massive, usually long face. The great nose may be either straight or convex, more often the latter. I have no doubt that archaeological research in the Middle East will reveal the Upper Palaeolithic antiquity of this type, which, in my opinion, is the most probable fons et origo of all the exuberant nasal convexity that has been distributed, not only through several White subraces and types, but by hybridization among such composite races as the American Indian, and even, perhaps the Papuan type of Melanesia. For, high nasal elevation and convexity behave as Mendelian dominants. I incline to the theory that the original form of this magnificent nose is straight bridged and that the convexity arises initially in a bowing or buckling that takes place when it is grown on a somewhat too short face as a possible disharmonic feature. However, that is merely an interesting possibility. The Iranian Plateau type is occasionally encountered in Europe, where it may be an effect of recombination.

The brunet, long-headed, delicate and gracile type that is ordinarily thought of under the name Mediterranean, I propose to call Classic Mediterranean. There can be little doubt that it is a reduced, refined, smaller-boned derivative of either or both of the massive dolichocephals - Upper Palaeolithic and Iranian Plateau. As both J.R. de la H. Marett and Carleton Coon argue, there has been an evolutionary tendency toward a fineing down, almost an effeminization, of early forms of man discernible in many modern races, both in general body build and particularly in skeletal structure. Marett ascribes it to calcium economy (in a brilliant book at which it is the fashion for cautious and unoriginal scientists to sniff but which contains more strimulating ideas and provocative therories, more suggestions for research on the relation of nutrition to human evolution, than are encompassed in any other half-dozen books on physical anthropology written in the last half-century).⁸³

There are two variants of the Classic Mediterranean type - straight-nosed and hook-nosed. The former is the more primitive and the more widely distributed. It extended in prehistoric times along both shores of the Mediterranean, into central, western, and northern Europe and down into the Horn of Africa. Its area of characterization and source of dissemination cannot have been far from the traditional Garden of Eden - Mesopotamia, which archaeologists include in “the Fertile Crescent.” There is not much doubt that the eastward extension of straight-nosed Mediterraneans of the Classic type provided the White basis of the early populations in southeastern Asia and Indonesia. They probably were the main carriers of the Aryan language into India at a much later date.

The expansion of the aquiline or hook-nosed Mediterranean type seems to have been somewhat more limited and probably later than that of the straight-nosed variant. In historical times, it was carried into North Africa and Spain principally by the Arabs, but other Semitic-speaking and non-Semitic peoples of prehistoric times may well have possessed this variation. Some of this type may have reached India, but nasal convexity there seems largely the result of infusions of the Iranian Plateau type.

The little and lithe brunets of this Classic Mediterranean type have disseminated their blood and their culture throughout the ancient and modern world. Obsessed with no bigoted prejudices as to “racial purity,” they have promiscuously bestowed upon the peoples with whom they have come into contact whatever of their civilization these could absorb and as many as their physical features as the recipients could retain. 

At least as early as 5000 B.C. Mediterranean race peoples in Mesopotamia and Egypt had reached a very respectable level of Neolithic civilization, had domesticated plants and animals, and were making substantial progress in arts and industries. 

In Mesolithic times, we find these ubiquitous and vivacious long-heads squatting on the beaches of the Baltic and the strands of the Tagus, leaving vast residues of their shore dinners in heaps of shells and bones. In the Neolithic period, they have become skillful farmers, dexterous craftsmen, and monumental builders in stone. During the Age of Copper and Bronze, they advanced in the more favored areas to cultures of such perfumed sophistication as to involve the use of bath-tubs and drains. Crete was not only the birthplace of Zeus, but apparently also of Aesculapius and Hygeia. The first plumber probably forgot his tools in the Palace of Minos.

Madison Grant on the mediterranean race

THE MEDITERRANEAN RACE

THE Mediterranean subspecies, formerly called the Iberian, is a relatively small, light boned, long skulled race, of brunet color becoming even swarthy in certain portions of its range. Throughout Neolithic times and possibly still earlier, it seems to have occupied, just as it does to-day, all the shores of the Mediterranean, including the coast of Africa from Morocco on the west to Egypt on the east. The Mediterraneans are the western members of a subspecies of man which forms a substantial part of the population of Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, and Hindustan, with perhaps a southward extension into Ceylon.The Aryanized Afghan and Hindu of northern India speak languages derived from Old Sanskrit, and are distantly related to the Mediterranean race. Aside from a common dolichocephaly these peoples are entirely distinct from the Dravidians of south India whose speech is agglutinative and who show strong evidence of profound mixture with the ancient negrito substratum of southern Asia. Everywhere throughout the Asiatic portion of its range the Mediterranean race overlies an even more ancient negroid race. These negroids still have representatives among the Pre-Dravidians of India, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula, and the natives of the Andaman Islands. This Mediterranean subspecies at the close of the Paleolithic spread from the basin of the Inland Sea northward by way of Spain throughout western Europe, including the British Isles, and, before the final expansion of the Alpines, was widely distributed up to and touching the domain of the Nordic dolichocephs. It did not cross the Alps from the south, but spread around the mountains across the Rhine into western Germany. In all this vast range from the British Isles to Hindustan, it is not to be supposed that there is identity of race. Certain portions, however, of the populations of the countries throughout this long stretch do show in their physique clear indications of descent from a Neolithic race of a common original type, which we may call Proto-Mediterranean. Quite apart from inevitable admixture with late Nordic and early Paleolithic elements, the little brunet Englishman has had perhaps ten thousand years of independent evolution during which he has undergone selection due to the climatic and physical conditions of his northern habitat. The result is that he has specialized far away from the Proto-Mediterranean race which contributed this blood originally to Britain, probably while it was still a part of continental Europe. On the other end of the range of the Mediterranean species, this race in India has been crossed with Dravidians and with Pre-Dravidian negroids. The Mediterraneans in India have also had imposed upon them other ethnic elements which came over through the Afghan passes from the northwest. The resultant racial mixture in India has had its own line of specialization. Residence in the fertile but unhealthy river bottoms, the direct rays of a tropic sun, and competition with the immemorial autochthones have unsparingly weeded generation after generation, until the existing Hindu has little in common with the ancestral Proto-Mediterranean. It is to the Mediterranean race in the British Isles that the English, Scotch, and Americans owe whatever brunet characters they possess. In central Europe it underlies the Alpine race, and, in fact, wherever this race is in contact with either the Alpines or the Nordics, it appears to represent the more ancient stratum of the population. So far as we know, this Mediterranean type never existed in Scandinavia, and all brunet elements found there are to be attributed to introductions in historic times. Nor did the Mediterranean race ever enter or cross the high Alps as did the Nordics, at a much later date, on their way to the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic coasts. The Mediterranean race with its Asiatic extensions is bordered everywhere on the north of its enormous range from Spain to India by round skulls, but there does not seem to be as much evidence of mixture between these two subspecies of man as there is between the Alpines and the Nordics. Along its southern boundary the Mediterranean race is in contact with either the long skull negroes of Ethiopia, or the ancient negrito population of southern Asia. In Africa this race has drifted southward over the Sahara and up the Nile valley, and has modified the blood of the negroes in both the Senegambian and equatorial regions. Beyond these mixtures of blood, there is absolutely no relationship between the Mediterranean race and the negroes. The fact that the Mediterranean race is long skulled as well as the negro, does not indicate relationship as has been suggested. Overemphasis of the importance of the skull shape as a somatological character can easily be misleading, and other unit characters than skull proportions must also be carefully considered in all determinations of race. Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians and the ancient Egyptians and their modern descendants, the fellaheen, are merely clearly marked varieties of this Mediterranean race.  On the east in Arabia we find an ancient and highly specialized subdivision of the Mediterranean race. To-day the Mediterranean race forms in Europe a substantial part of the population of the British Isles, the great bulk of the population of the Iberian Peninsula, nearly one-third of the population of France, Liguria, Italy south of the Apennines, and all the Mediterranean coasts and islands, in some of which, like Sardinia, it exists in great purity. It forms the substratum of the population of Greece and of the eastern coasts of the Balkan Peninsula. Everywhere in the interior, except in eastern Bulgaria and Rumania, it has been replaced by the South Slavs and by the Albanians, the latter a mixture of the ancient Illyrians and the Slavs. In the British Isles the Mediterranean race represents the Pre-Nordic population and exists in considerable numbers in Wales and in certain portions of England, notably in the Fen districts to the north of London. In Scotland it is nearly obliterated, leaving behind only its brunetness as an indication of its former prevalence, though it is now often associated there with tall stature. This is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycensean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State. To what extent the Mediterranean race entered into the blood and civilization of Rome, it is now difficult to say, but the traditions of the Eternal City, its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as the Roman ideals of family life, loyalty, and truth, point clearly to a Nordic rather than to a Mediterranean origin. The struggles in early Rome between Latin and Etruscan, and the endless quarrels between patrician and plebeian, arose from the existence in Rome, side by side, of two distinct and clashing races, probably Nordic and Mediterranean respectively. The northern qualities of Rome are in sharp contrast to the Levantine traits of the classic Greeks, whose volatile and analytical spirit, lack of cohesion, political incapacity, and ready resort to treason, all point clearly to southern and eastern affinities. While very ancient, present for probably ten thousand years in western and southern Europe, and even longer on the south shore of the Mediterranean, nevertheless this race cannot be called purely European. The route of its migration along the north coast of Africa, and up the west coast of Europe, can be traced everywhere by its beautifully polished stone weapons and tools. The Megalithic monuments also are found in association with this race, and mark its line of advance in western Europe, although they extend beyond the range of the Mediterraneans into the domain of the Scandinavian Nordics. These huge stone structures were chiefly sepulchral memorials and appear to have been based on an imitation of the Egyptian funeral monuments. They date back to the first knowledge of the manufacture and use of bronze tools by the Mediterranean race, and they occur in great numbers, vast size, and considerable variety along the north coast of Africa and up the Atlantic seaboard through Spain, Brittany, and England to Scandinavia. It is admitted that the various groups of the Mediterranean race did not speak, in the first in stance, any form of Aryan tongue. These Aryan languages we know were introduced into the Mediterranean world from the north. We have in the Basque tongue to-day a survival of one of the Pre-Aryan languages, which were spoken by the Mediterranean population of the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of the Aryan-speaking Gauls of Nordic race. The language of these invaders was Celtic, and replaced over most of the country the ancient speech of the natives, only in turn to be superseded, along with the Phcenician spoken in some of the southern coast towns, by the Latin of the conquering Roman, and Latin, mixed with some small elements of Gothic construction and Arabic vocabulary forms the basis of modern Portuguese, Castilian, and Catalan. The native Mediterranean race of the Iberian Peninsula quickly absorbed the blood of these conquering Gauls, just as it later diluted beyond recognition the vigorous physical characters of the Teutonic Vandals, Suevi, and Visigoths. A certain amount of Nordic blood still persists to-day in northwestern Spain, especially in Galicia and along the Pyrenees, as well as generally among the upper classes. The Romans left no evidence of their domination except in their language and religion; while the earlier Phoenicians on the coasts, and the later swarms of Moors and Arabs all over the peninsula, but chiefly in the south, were closely related by race to the native Iberians. That portion of the Mediterranean race which inhabits southern France oocupies the territory of ancient Languedoc and Provence, and it was these Proven~cals who developed and preserved during the Middle Ages the romantic civilization of the Albigensians, a survival of classic culture, which was drowned in blood by a crusade from the north in the thirteenth century. In North Italy only the coast of Liguria is occupied by the Mediterranean race. In the valley of the Po the Mediterraneans were the predominant race during the early Neolithic, but with the introduction of bronze the Alpines appear, and round skulls to this day prevail north of the Apennines. About 11OO B.C. the Nordic Umbrians and Oscans swept over the Alps from the northeast, conquered northern Italy and introduced their Aryan speech, which gradually spread southward. The Umbrian state was afterward overwhelmed by the Etruscans, who were of Mediterranean race, and who, by 800 B.C. had extended their empire northward to the Alps. In the sixth century B.C. new swarms of Nordics, coming this time from Gaul and speaking Celtic dialects, seized the valley of the Po, and in 390 B.C. these Gauls, reinforced from the north and under the leadership of Brennus, stormed Rome and completely destroyed the Etruscan power. From that time onward the valley of the Po became known as Cisalpine Gaul. Mixed with Nordic elements, chiefly Gothic and Lombard, this population persists to this day, and is the backbone of modern Italy. A similar movement of these same Gauls or Galatians, as the Greek world called them, starting from northern Italy, occurred a century later when these Nordics suddenly appeared before Delphi in Greece in 279 B.C., and then swept over into Asia Minor and founded the state called Galatia, which endured until Christian times. South Italy, until its conquest by Rome, was Magna Graecia, and the population to-day retains many Pelasgian Greek elements. It is among these Hellenic remnants that artists search for the handsomest types of the Mediterranean race. In Sicily also the race is purely Mediterranean in spite of the admixture of types coming from the neighboring coasts of Tunis. These intrusive elements, however, were all of kindred race. Traces of Alpine elements in these regions and on the adjoining African coast are very scarce, and are to be referred to the great and final wave of round skull invasion which introduced bronze into Europe. In Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians, who spoke a non-Aryan tongue, were swamped by the Nordic Achaeans, who entered from the northeast according to tradition prior to 1250 B.C., probably between 1400 and 1300 B.C. There were also probably still earlier waves of these same Nordic invaders as far back as 1700 B.C., which was a period of migration throughout the ancient world. These Achaeans were armed with iron weapons of the Hallstatt culture, with which they conquered the bronze using natives. The two races, as yet unmixed, stand out in clear contrast in the Homeric account of the siege of Troy, which is generally assigned to the date of 1194 to 1184 B.C. The same invasion that brought the Achaeans into Greece brought a related Nordic people to the coast of Asia Minor, known as Phrygians. Of this race were the Trojan leaders. Both the Trojans and the Greeks were commanded by huge blond princes, the heroes of Homer, while the bulk of the armies on both sides was composed of little brunet Pelasgians, imperfectly armed and remorselessly butchered by the leaders on either side. The only common soldiers mentioned by Homer as of the same race as the heroes, were the Myrmidons of Achilles. About the time that the Acheeans and the Pelasgians began to amalgamate, new hordes of Nordic barbarians, collectively called Hellenes, entered from the northern mountains and destroyed this old Homeric-Mycenaean civilization. This Dorian invasion took place a little before 1100 B.C. and brought in the three main Nordic strains of Greece, the Dorian, the Aeolian and the Ionian groups, which remain more or less distinct and separate throughout Greek history. It is more than probable that this invasion or swarming of Nordics into Greece was part of the same general racial upheaval that brought the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy. Long years of intense and bitter conflict follow between the old population and the newcomers, and when the turmoil of this revolution settled down, classic Greece appears. What was left of the Achceans retired to the northern Peloponnesus, and the survivors of the early Pelasgian population remained in Messenia serving as helots their Spartan masters. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were founded by refugees fleeing from these Dorian invaders. The Pelasgian strain seems to have persisted best in Attica and the Ionian states. The Dorian Spartans appear to have retained more of the character of the northern barbarians than the Ionian Greeks, but the splendid civilization of Hellas was due to a fusion of the two elements, the Achaean and Hellene of Nordic, and the Pelasgian of Mediterranean race. The contrast between Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens, between the military efficiency, thorough organization, and sacrifice of the citizen for the welfare of the state, which constituted the basis of the Lacedaemonian power, and the Attic brilliancy, instability, and extreme development of individualism, is strikingly like the contrast between Prussia with its Spartan-like culture and France with its Athenian versatility. To this mixture of the two races in classic Greece the Mediterranean Pelasgians contributed their Mycenaean culture and the Nordic Achaeans and Hellenes contributed their Aryan language, fighting efficiency, and the European aspect of Greek life. The first result of a crossing of two such contrasted subspecies as the Nordic and Mediterranean races, has repeatedly been a new outburst of culture. This occurs as soon as the older race has imparted to the conquerors its civilization, and before the victors have allowed their blood to be swamped by mixture. This process seems to have happened several times in Greece. Later, in 339 B.C., when the original Nordic blood had been hopelessly diluted by mixture with the ancient Mediterranean elements, Hellas fell an easy prey to Macedon. The troops of Philip and Alexander were Nordic and represented the uncultured but unmixed ancestral type of the Achaeans and Hellenes. Their unimpaired fighting strength was irresistible as soon as it was organized into the Macedonian phalanx, whether directed against their degenerate brother Greeks, or against the Persians, whose original Nordic elements had also by this time practically disappeared. When in its turn the pure Macedonian blood was impaired by intermixture with Asiatics, they, too, vanished, and even the royal Macedonian dynasties in Asia and Egypt soon ceased to be Nordic or Greek except in language and customs. It is interesting to note that the Greek states in which the Nordic element was most predominant outlived the other states. Athens fell before Sparta, and Thebes outlived them both. Macedon in classic times was considered quite the most barbarous state in Hellas, and was scarcely recognized as forming part of Greece, but it was through the military power of its armies and the genius of Alexander that the Levant and western Asia became Hellenized. Alexander, with his Nordic features, aquiline nose, gently curling yellow hair, and mixed eyes, the left blue and the right very black, typifies this Nordic conquest of the Near East. It is not possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands, and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas. So far as modern Europe is concerned culture came from the south and not from the east, and to this Mediterranean subspecies is due the foundation of our civilization. The ancient Mediterranean world was of this race; the long-sustained civilization of Egypt, which endured during thousands of years of almost uninterrupted sequence; the brilliant Minoan Empire of Crete, which flourished between 4000 and 1200 B.C., and was the ancestor of the Mycensean cultures of Greece, Cyprus, Italy, and Sardinia; the mysterious empire of Etruria, the predecessor and teacher of Rome; the Hellenic states and colonies throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas; the maritime and mercantile power of Phcenicia and its mighty colony, imperial Carthage; all were the creation of this race. The sea empire of Crete, when its royal palace at Cnossos was burned by the 'sea peoples' of the north, passed to Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage, and from them to the Greeks, so that the early development of the art of navigation is to be attributed to this race, and from them the north, centuries later, learned its maritime architecture. Even though the Mediterranean race has no claim to the invention of the synthetic languages, and though it played a relatively small part in the development of the civilization of the Middle Ages or of modern times, nevertheless to it belongs the chief credit of the classic civilization of Europe, in the sciences, art, poetry, literature, and philosophy, as well as the major part of the civilization of Greece, and a very large share in the Empire of Rome. In the Eastern Empire the Mediterraneans were the predominant factor under the guise of Byzantine Greeks. Owing to the fact that our histories have been written under the influence of Roman orthodoxy, and because in the eyes of the Frankish Crusaders the Byzantine Greeks were heretics, they have been regarded by us as degenerate cowards. But throughout the Middle Ages Byzantium represented in unbroken sequence the Empire of Rome in the East, and as the capital of that empire it held Mohammedan Asia in check for nearly a thousand years. When at last in 1453 the imperial city, deserted by western Christendom, was stormed by the Ottoman Turks, and Constantine, last of Roman Emperors, fell sword in hand, there was enacted one of the greatest tragedies of all time. With the fall of Constantinople the Empire of Rome passes finally from the scene of history, and the development of civilization is transferred from Mediterranean lands and Mediterranean race to the North Sea and the Nordic race.