Land Beyond. The concept of exploration does not transfer easily from one culture to another. European history counts exploration as one of its great themes, but only from the fifteenth century onward. While, for example, ancient Greeks and Romans traveled from Morocco to India, they are rarely referred to as explorers. Exploration has implications of first discovery and often of territorial acquisition. European explorers of the fifteenth century and later were much given to claiming the territories they reached for their monarchs and for Christianity, blithely ignoring the interests of the indigenous inhabitants and the fact that traders or travelers from non-European regions might have already been well acquainted with the place. In short, the word exploration, when applied to journeys to places previously unknown to the journeys' sponsors, is difficult to use outside the context of European imperialism. It has no...