We Are All Ancient Mapmakers
In the first half of the sixth century B.C., a Greek man named Anaximander, born in Turkey, sketched the world in a way no one had previously thought to do. It featured a circle, divided into three equal parts. He labeled those parts Europe, Asia, and Libya, and separated them by the great waterways of the Nile, the Phasis river, and the Mediterranean. To call it a map would perhaps be a bit overgenerous. It was really more of a schematic. But it nonetheless represented a crucial innovation. Anaximander had rendered the world in a way that no person had ever seen it before: from above.
Anaximander’s sketch wasn’t especially useful as a cartographic instrument, and it also came with some peculiar conceptual baggage. He believed the earth sat atop a column, following the architectural sensibilities of the day. It was Plato, several hundred years later, who proposed the idea of a spherical earth. He had no strong, principled reason to do this; the guy just liked spheres. But though they were fascinated by the shape of the earth, neither Plato nor Anaximander, nor even Aristotle, can count among their accolades credit for creating the first scientific map of the world. That distinction falls to a North African man by the name of Eratosthenes.
Eratosthenes is best known today as the founder of the field of geography. He coined the term in his magnum opus, , published during his tenure as the head librarian at Alexandria, sometime between 240 and 220 B.C. It was three books in length and covered topics ranging from climate zones to the geological
