The Birth of the Image of World, as We Know It Today:
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In this article:
~ The World According to The Phoenicians, told by Homer
~ 'ONE World Map'
~ Eratosthenes & Strabo (map)
~ 'The Bad News'
~ 'The Classical Greek contribution to Cartography':
1) Oikoumene
2) The Shape of the World
3) Spherical Geometry & Astronomy
4) Empiricism
~ 'Strabo Summarises'
~ The Legacy left to Ptolemy (Map)
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The World according to THE PHOENICIANS, as told by Homer.
'ONE World Map'
It is entirely possible to speak of ONE image of the world, ONE world map. As we can see above, this ONE map is derived from Phoenician geography. For it is they who planted the seed, they who travelled the furthest and they who
needed an image of the world the most. The Greeks merely watered this seed, but they did so dilligently and lovingly. Unfortunately there are no records I know of from Phoenician cartographers, not even textual references. Their work and intellect must be gleened from the work of the Greek thinkers.
The map which people in the 21st century typically use to depict the world can verily be traced back nearly 2500 years. As we shall see, particularly around 500BC and then about 1000 years after, the image of the world we accept today was being fashioned in earnest and enhanced. Our world map today can be compared quite closely with those that were found (recreated) in many books with titles such as
"The World as Known to Herodotus" or
"The World According to Strabo".
Greek Map of the world, Eratosthenes and reworked by Strabo, 200 B.C. to 20 A.D. NOTE: As with many maps for the next 1000 years, it is oriented with East at the top. [Source]
'The Bad News'
I guess we should start with the bad news. The
really bad news:
Not a single world map, in any form, has survived from the entire classical period.
All we have are second and third hand accounts of what they looked like, and recreations based on text left behind by thinkers such as Pythagoras, Herodotus, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Eratosthenes, Crates and Archimedes. For that is how Greek cartographers passed on the legacy of their knowledge, handwritten textual directions of what the world looked like.
'The Classical Greek contribution to Cartography'
So what contributions were made in Greece c600BC? What foundations were laid? The answer is there were many. Many significant contributions at that. The finest observer and collator of Greek advances in cartography is
Strabo and it his through his works that I am presenting. There were two major influences on the path the Greek mapmakers progressed upon, those were
Geometry and
War, both of which produced the following:
1) Oikoumene: Early Greek thought made an important distinction between
the Earth, as a whole entity, which they called
'Gea', and the known,
inhabited world of man, which they called
'Oikoumene'.
This is significant in that no time was wasted on speculation as to what lay beyond the unknown. Their task was chiefly concerned with the
categorisation (which gave birth to the encyclopedic school of cartography) and
rational explanation (hard geography not imagination) of the
known world.
They brought an intellectual intensity to the art and science of mapmaking, and once this distinction had been made it was possible to focus in earnest on a rational and analytical approach to viewing the world.
2) The Shape of the World:
There are two views put forward by Greek thought regarding the shape of the world, and a later one developed subsequently.
a) The flat circular disc.
b) The spherical globe.
Given the loss of actual maps and cartographic works from this period, there are problems in reading Greek text on the subject. Questions are thrown up which vex the student of cartography, such as those expressed by Peter Whitfield.
"Did these early thinkers consider the earth to be circular, or the inhabited world? Circular as a disk is circular, or as a sphere?
Well we know that Homer considered the world to be a flat disc. Henry-Davis.com gives a good explanation of the Homeric World View.
The Homeric conception of the world represented as a flat, circular disc of land surrounded by a continuous ocean-stream remained a popular notion in the Greek world even after many philosophers and scientists had accepted the theory of the sphericity of the earth enunciated by the Pythagoreans and subjected to theoretical proof by Aristotle. In this interpretation the world is like a plateau on the top of a mountain; inside this, close to the surface of the earth, lies the House of Hades, the realm of Death, and beneath it Tartarus, the realm of Eternal Darkness. The plateau of the earth is surrounded by Oceanus, the world river, and from its periphery rises the fixed dome of the sky. The sun, the moon, and the stars rise from the waters at the edge of the dome, move in an arc above the earth, and then sink once again into the sea to complete their course beneath the Oceanus. The atmosphere above the mountain of the earth is thick with clouds and mist, but higher up is the clear Æther with its starry ceiling.
Read much more:
http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/AncientWebPages/105mono.html
World view according to Homer
Hecataeus of Miletus (early 500BC) also described the world as a circular landmass quite surrounded by water (Oceanus). A contemporary on the otherhand,
Anaximander, is reported by Strabo five centuries later, to have built a globe. So we see how the two philosophies co-existed.
A great deal of confusion can arise therefore when considering which was the prevailing view, or even if there was some kind of consensus, at least up until the arrival of one man -
Pythagoras (500BC). As many now know, he presented a purely theoretical principle: That the world must possess the most perfect form known to nature - the sphere. Aristotle built upon such theoretical assumptions and compounded the success of a
spherical view of the world.
As the
Gulf of Maine Aquarium website so aptly puts it:
"People knew the Earth was round 2500 years ago. They just forgot...
Scholars like Pythagoras in 500 BC based their belief on observations about the way the altitudes of stars varied at different places on Earth and how ships appeared on the horizon. As a ship returned to port, first its mast tops, then the sails, and finally its hull gradually came into view. Aristotle, who lived 300 years before Christ, observed that the Earth cast a round shadow on the moon. When a light is shined on a sphere, it casts the same shadow. "
[Their Navigation & Mapping page is good.]
c)
Trapezoid / Climata
A later shape appeared after Alexander's 'expeditions'. This was a world that was governed and arranged according to latitudinal zones and was fervently put forward by
Herodotus, who encouraged an empirical approach to map making. Again, it is difficult to discern if he really believed the world was a
trapezoid or whether this was just a problem thrown up by working with 2 and 3 dimensions. It is largely accepted that the trapezoid was put forward as a technique for representing the work on paper.
3) Spherical Geometry & Astronomy
In theorising about the world in such a way, the Greeks were bringing two new schools of thought to mapmaking - Geometry and Astronomy. Advances in these fields made possible:
~ Precise mensuration
~ Position Finding
~ And then Co-Ordinate Systems
In fact, during this period, geometric science very much rode the coat tails of astronomical theory. It was the astronomical concept of the sky being a sphere which allowed men to think of the earth being one too. Indeed they applied an entirely deductive thought process to arrive at such a conclusion. "If the sky is a sphere, or a series of spheres, the centre of such a system (earth) must in turn be a sphere also" was the thinking. So the mapping techniques which had been applied to the skies were then applied to the earth.
Eratosthenes (240-200BC) is 'the daddy' in this field. He:
~
Calculated the circumference of the earth using spherical geometry (it was fairly innacurate but the best the world would see until Aryabhatia)
~
Devised a system of Parallels and Meridiens which meant locations could be plotted on a map (allowing Ptolemy to cast his invisible net over the known world 400 years later)
Archimedes (250-220BC) is also reported to have constructed globes according to Eratosthenes' work and his own contributions. These were of the heavens and planetary systems
with the earth placed at the centre. This is the classical 'Geocentric Theory' which had been advanced by
Aristarchus (c250BC) but was trashed by commentators at the time.
Hipparchus (160-130BC) is also significant here because he was responsible for the most detailed star catalogue for the Greeks and he also introduced Babylonian and Indian mathematics, which included the 360 degree division of the globe.
Notably
Ptolemy decided to advance the Geocentric view of the world, leading future cartographers (for 1000 years) away from the Heliocentric Theory, which did indeed place the sun at the centre of the universe and was accepted in many areas of the classical world.
4) Empiricism
The Greeks may not have brought the first empirically made maps to us but they certainly worked hardest at it in the ancient world. Although the Phoenicians handed down a well developed image of the world to ancient Greece we simply do not have many records of their work like we have records that various approaches were debated more fervently in Greece than elsewhere at the time.
We have the immortal
Herodotus (450-430BC) to thank for the detailing much of the lands to the East of the Greek world, particularly those of Persia, and he did so (largely) with a detachment and scrutiny that had not been used before. For example, he may have used oral accounts but he most often double checks these before submitting them into his
Histories. Prior to him, was Hecaetus of Miletus who, in his
Circuit of The Earth, documented the peoples, lands, climates and customs of the Mediterranean. These two works, despite being textual and not diagrammatic, are significant in any history of cartography for they demonstrated an indefatigable spirit towards documenting as much as possible in the known world and (in Hecaetus' case)
assigning and order to it too (he described and ordered them clockwise around the Mediterranean).
Alexander's expeditions to the East were mentioned previously and they are crucial to the empirical chapter in the story of the world map. The 'Oikoumene' (known world) was expanded considerably during his time and not only by him. Indeed the differences in terms of reach between a 500BC map and one made by Ptolemy in 400AD verily shows how much Alexander's expeditions contributed to this 'one world map' we use today. And it was directly experienced and documented, in line with Hecaetus and Herodotus' empirical methods.
Herodotus would have lampooned Pythagoras' approach to mapmaking, for the luxury of his travels meant he firmly sided against the theoretical school of thought. He advocated travel, collation and collection, as Europeans in the age of exploration would also do. In short he championed an empirical approach to cartography and it was followed. As a result of such methodology, the Greek awareness of the world expanded in these areas:
~
Many non-Greek geographical, mathematical and astonomical traditions were consumed into the Greek worldview, including Indian, Persian, old Babylonian, Phoenician and by transmission Chinese mathematics, cartography, astronomy. Resulting in the following, but first here is a Babylonian map.
Babylonian clay tablets dating from around 600 BC. One such map shows Babylon and the surrounding area in a stylised form with Babylon represented by a rectangle and the Euphrates river by vertical lines. The area shown is depicted as circular surrounded by water which fits the religious image of the world in which the Babylonians believed.
~
The awareness that Africa was navigable, for it was recorded that the Phoenicians had in fact accomplished such a journey around 600BC.
NOTE: Later maps show Africa connected to south east Asia, demonstrating how the world really did forget a great deal of this knowledge.
~
North and north western Europe opened up to the Greek world map. A journey was recorded, made by
Pytheus (c300BC) to the coasts of France, Britain and Germany which totally revolutionised the Greek worldview.
NOTE: Indeed it is reported that many believed Pytheus' reports to be fabrications in search of fame and fortune! This is because of a clash of concepts. If the world was organised by latitudes (
Climata) and that the extremities were quite inhabitable according to the notion of Oikoumene, then how the hell could there be people living in northern Europe!?
~
Central and South Asia were now known NOT to be the limits of the human world. This resulted in the trapezoid shape of the world, for the circular representation failed to account for this.
~
A World map that included Four Continents, Eurasia being just one of them. This was again a purely theoretical image of the world, for these continents were arranged equidistant around the equator. This is telling of how theoretical and empirical views merged in the classical greek world and we shall see this zonal approach reraising its head about 1000 years later in European Mappae Mundi.
'Strabo Summarises'
Strabo (30BC - 10AD) summed up many of the leading theories of the classical age. He is an important link in the transmission of these works and is 'the pre-Ptolemaic connection', being one of the few sources for our understanding earlier Greek geographers. His works may be, and have been, taken as a summary of Greek cartography and his assumptions about the world around him are both groundbreaking and revealing.
Strabo had no doubt it was possible to sail around the world eastwards or westwards, for he conceived of the inhabited world as an island, located entirely north of the equator, extending to 54 degrees north (to Ireland), and about 125 degrees east to west, from India to Portugal.
The possibility that other continents existed was quite accepted, as Crates had shown on his globe, but no time was spent in speculating where they were or what kind of beings inhabited them.
In "The Image of The World", Whitfield
'The Legacy Left To Ptolemy'
All of the above resulted in a world map that would be picked up by
Ptolemy and then passed on to Arab scholars in the Middle Ages. Here is a later reproduction of one of Ptolemy's maps.
NOTE:
a) The arrangement of lands according to latitudes and longitudes.
b) The encyclopedic approach to include as much empirical detail as possible.
c) The absence of any imagined elements, it's just the mountains, seas, name places etc
d) The inclusion of information of lands beyond Greek discoveries. Given the difference in the dating of this map with the Greek thinkers mentioned above, this may seem obvious. But when we consider the Roman and Christian approach to map making, it is quite unusual to see these.
e) The locating of an area between Phoenicia and Persia as the centre of the map.
f) The source of the Nile is identified in East Africa, something later European explorers quibbled about a great deal.
Click this significant map image below for a bigger picture, then click that image for the full size huge one.
Ptolemaic World Map, printed in Rome, 1478. This was made from textual notes left by Ptolemy. Earlier Greek interpretations of the world included far less detail to the East and North.
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