The Story of Geographical Discovery | Page 5

inscription, and representing
the plain of Mesopotamia with the Euphrates flowing through it, and
the whole surrounded by two concentric circles, which are named briny
waters. Outside these, however, are seven detached islets, possibly
representing the seven zones or climates into which the world was
divided according to the ideas of the Babylonians, though afterwards
they resorted to the ordinary four cardinal points. What was roughly
true of Babylonia did not in any way answer to the geographical
position of Greece, and it is therefore probable that in the first place
they obtained their ideas of the surrounding ocean from the
Babylonians.

[Illustration: THE EARLIEST MAP OF THE WORLD]
It was after the period of Homer and Hesiod that the first great
expansion of Greek knowledge about the world began, through the
extensive colonisation which was carried on by the Greeks around the
Eastern Mediterranean. Even to this day the natives of the southern part
of Italy speak a Greek dialect, owing to the wide extent of Greek
colonies in that country, which used to be called "Magna Grecia," or
"Great Greece." Marseilles also one of the Greek colonies (600 B.C.),
which, in its turn, sent out other colonies along the Gulf of Lyons. In
the East, too, Greek cities were dotted along the coast of the Black Sea,
one of which, Byzantium, was destined to be of world-historic
importance. So, too, in North Africa, and among the islands of the
Ægean Sea, the Greeks colonised throughout the sixth and fifth
centuries B.C., and in almost every case communication was kept up
between the colonies and the mother-country.
Now, the one quality which has made the Greeks so distinguished in
the world's history was their curiosity; and it was natural that they
should desire to know, and to put on record, the large amount of
information brought to the mainland of Greece from the innumerable
Greek colonies. But to record geographical knowledge, the first thing
that is necessary is a map, and accordingly it is a Greek philosopher
named ANAXIMANDER of Miletus, of the sixth century B.C., to
whom we owe the invention of map-drawing. Now, in order to make a
map of one's own country, little astronomical knowledge is required.
As we have seen, savages are able to draw such maps; but when it
comes to describing the relative positions of countries divided from one
another by seas, the problem is not so easy. An Athenian would know
roughly that Byzantium (now called Constantinople) was somewhat to
the east and to the north of him, because in sailing thither he would
have to sail towards the rising sun, and would find the climate getting
colder as he approached Byzantium. So, too, he might roughly guess
that Marseilles was somewhere to the west and north of him; but how
was he to fix the relative position of Marseilles and Byzantium to one
another? Was Marseilles more northerly than Byzantium? Was it very
far away from that city? For though it took longer to get to Marseilles,

the voyage was winding, and might possibly bring the vessel
comparatively near to Byzantium, though there might be no direct road
between the two cities. There was one rough way of determining how
far north a place stood: the very slightest observation of the starry
heavens would show a traveller that as he moved towards the north, the
pole-star rose higher up in the heavens. How much higher, could be
determined by the angle formed by a stick pointing to the pole-star, in
relation to one held horizontally. If, instead of two sticks, we cut out a
piece of metal or wood to fill up the enclosed angle, we get the earliest
form of the sun-dial, known as the gnomon, and according to the shape
of the gnomon the latitude of a place is determined. Accordingly, it is
not surprising to find that the invention of the gnomon is also attributed
to Anaximander, for without some such instrument it would have been
impossible for him to have made any map worthy of the name. But it is
probable that Anaximander did not so much invent as introduce the
gnomon, and, indeed, Herodotus, expressly states that this instrument
was derived from the Babylonians, who were the earliest astronomers,
so far as we know. A curious point confirms this, for the measurement
of angles is by degrees, and degrees are divided into sixty seconds, just
as minutes are. Now this division into sixty is certainly derived from
Babylonia in the case of time measurement, and is therefore of the
same origin as regards the measurement of angles.
We have no longer any copy of this first map of the world drawn up by
Anaximander, but there is little doubt that it formed the foundation of a
similar map