Nineteenth century European explorers, attracted by the accounts of Ancient

geographers or Arab geographers of the classical period, followed the routes by the
nomadic people of the vast "empty" space. They documented the names of the stopping
places they discovered or rediscovered, described landscapes, took a few climate
measurements and gathered rock samples. Gradually, a map began to fill in the white
blotch.

The Sahara and the Sahel entered the geographic corpus by way of naturalist
explorers because aridity is the feature that circumscribes the boundaries of the
ecumene. The map details included topographical relief and location of watering
holes crucial to long crossings. The Arabic word "Sahel" (shore) and "Sahara"
(desert) made its entry into the vocabulary of geography.

Latitudinally, the "slopes" of the arid desert, devoid of continuous human

habitation, descend in step-like fashion toward the northern and southern edges of
the Mediterranean that opens to Europe and the Sahel that opens to "Trab al Sudan."
Longitudinally, a uniform grid divides the central desert then shrinks back toward
the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. Gradually, the Sahara-Sahel is further divided
into a total of twenty sub-areas: central, northern, southern, western, eastern,
etc.

Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the

Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western
and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by
the Levant. The Sea has played a central role in the history of Western
civilization. Although the Mediterranean is sometimes considered a part of the
Atlantic Ocean, it is usually referred to as a separate body of water. Geological
evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off
from the Atlantic and was partly or completely desiccated over a period of some
600,000 years during the Messinian salinity crisis before being refilled by the
Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years