Excerpt from The Barrier Boundary of the Mediterranean Basin and Its Northern Breaches as Factors in History By reason of this marine breach in the mountain barrier the Greeks were able to weave a border of Hellenic blood and culture upon those northern Euxine shores. Owing to the successive streams of nomad hordes from Western Asia which flooded the adjoining plains, however, Mediterranean civilization left there no permanent impress. Nevertheless, Russian traders and marauders from northern Slav principalities like Kiev, Smolensk, and commercial Novgorod, took the Dnieper River route to the Black Sea and Constantinople in the ninth and tenth centuries, and carried away the elements of Byzantine art and religion to the untutored north. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.