See main articles: Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome On the rough but fertile terrain on the northern Great Sea, a thriving civilization had arisen on the island known today as Crete. It is thought that the island, being west of Egypt on the African continent, had borrowed much of its culture from the earliest days of its sea-faring ways. Others say that it was the Phoenicians that brought civilization there. Whatever the case, it was fate that destroyed it in the way of a massive earthquake. Raiders from the mainland, what we now call Greece, took advantage of the situation and built up their own infant civilization from the ruins. One young Greek would, in the days following the fall of the civilizations of East Asia, conquer lands as far north as the Himalayan foothills and down into Africa