Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  It is difficult to say with any certainty who first had the idea that the Earth is round. Some have argued for philosopher and astronomer Thales of Miletus (624–546 BC), stating that since he knew about the stars he would probably have deduced that the Earth is a sphere; others believe that Anaximander actually described a spherical world, rather than a cylindrical one. But we can point to mathematician Pythagoras (570–495 BC) and his students with more certainty.

  Pythagoras came from the island of Samos, which was an arch-enemy of Miletus, but settled in Croton in southern Italy and founded a school there. In the eyes of the Pythagoreans, the circle and the sphere were the most perfect of geometric shapes. Everything in the universe, the Pythagoreans believed, was made up of spheres–including the stars, the heavens and our globe–and everything moved in circles. This theory was reinforced by the observation that the stars circulated around a fixed point during the night. Diogenes wrote that Pythagoras believed that the Earth, round like a ball, was inhabited ‘all the way round’, and that antipodes existed, for whom ‘our “down” is their “up”’.

  One of Pythagoras’s students, Parmenides (515–460 BC), is thought to have been the first person to divide the earth into different climate zones: two ice-cold, uninhabitable zones in the far north and south, a scorching hot and equally uninhabitable zone around the middle, and two temperate zones between the hot and the cold.

  HERODOTUS LAUGHS | Historian and author Herodotus (489–425 BC) was critical of Anaximander, Hecataeus and others who drew round maps, and the Pythagoreans’ belief in perfect circles. In his Histories, he pointed out that it was not in the least proven that the land mass was circular and surrounded by sea:

  And I laugh to see how many have before now drawn maps of the world, not one of them reasonably; for they draw the world as round as if fashioned by compasses, encircled by the Ocean river, and Asia and Europe of a like extent.

  According to Herodotus, Asia was only inhabited up to India–further east was nothing but a great desert: ‘thereafter, all to the east is desolation, nor can anyone say what kind of land is there.’ Nor had anyone ‘obtained knowledge of Europe’s eastern or northern regions, so as to be able to say if it is bounded by seas,’ and ‘concerning those [countries] in Europe that are the farthest away towards evening,’ wrote Herodotus, ‘I cannot speak with assurance.’ Herodotus claimed that the Caspian Sea was not a bay in northern Oceanus, as Hecataeus believed, but a lake, thereby giving the land mass a new area that extended to the north-east, into the unknown. But Herodotus refused to create a map of the inhabited world while so little was known about its outer edges. He criticised the theoretical cartographers who based their ideas on geometry, arguing instead for an experience-based cartography grounded in travel and discovery.

  Democritus (460–370 BC), a contemporary of Herodotus, was the first to assert that the inhabited land mass was oval-shaped, not round, and that it was therefore best reproduced on an oval map. This is the format we still use when creating world maps today, and it was during this period that the theoretical and religious view of the land mass as a perfect circle with a defined centre, whether Babylon or Delphi, was gradually forced to make way for an oval with an uncertain outer boundary.

  Although much of the Greek cartography during this period was somewhat theoretical, and mostly debated by mathematicians and philosophers, Herodotus understood that maps were about to become widespread. In his Histories, he described their dawning practical significance–how Aristagoras, ruler of Miletus, once came to Sparta around the year 500 BC to use maps in the war against the Persians: ‘as the Lacedaemonians report, he brought with him a bronze tablet on which the map of all the earth was engraved, and all the sea and all the rivers.’

  Herodotus’s reference is important because it shows that at this time, maps could be engraved on portable bronze tablets–that several world maps were probably created in ancient Greece, and that these were more informative than the simple Babylonian map created at the same time. The account is one of the earliest examples of maps being used for political and military purposes–using the map, Aristagoras was able to show the Spartans the route they should take to reach Persia:

  (This he said pointing to the map of the earth which he had brought engraved on the tablet.) ‘Next to the Lydians,’ said Aristagoras, ‘you see the Phrygians […]. Close by them are the Cappadocians, whom we call Syrians, and their neighbours are the Cilicians, whose land reaches to the sea over there, in which you see the island of Cyprus lying […]. Next to the Cilicians, are the Armenians, another people rich in flocks, and after the Armenians, the Matieni, whose country I show you. Adjoining these you see the Cissian land, in which, on the Choaspes, lies that Susa where the great king lives and where the storehouses of his wealth are located.’

  A scene in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds from 423 BC also indicates that maps were widespread. The protagonist, a farmer named Strepsiades, has been forced to settle in Athens due to war, and the following scene occurs when he attends the philosophical school:

  STUDENT: This is a map of the world. Look, here is Athens.

  STREPSIADES: Don’t be stupid, that can’t be Athens. Where are all the jurors and the law courts?

  STUDENT: I’m telling you, this area is clearly the region of Attica.

  STREPSIADES: So where’s my deme then? Where’s Cicynna?

  STUDENT: I don’t know. Over there somewhere. You see here, that is Euboea, the long island lying off the coast.

  STREPSIADES: Yeah, me and Pericles really laid those revolting bastards out. Where’s Sparta then?

  STUDENT: Right here.

  STREPSIADES: That’s far too close! You need to move it immediately! You had better reponder that one, mate!

  STUDENT: But it’s simply not possible just to…

  STREPSIADES: Then you’ll get a beating, by Zeus…

  The scene illustrates that theatre audiences in Athens during this period knew what a world map was, and Strepsiades’ ignorance emphasises the fact that he comes from outside the city.

  In Phaedo by the philosopher Plato (429–347 BC), we meet Socrates (470–399 BC), who marvelled at both the Earth’s size and its appearance:

  ‘Secondly,’ said he, ‘I believe that the earth is very large and that we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phasis live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and that many other people live in many other such regions […] The earth when seen from above is said to look like those balls that are covered with twelve pieces of leather; it is divided into patches of various colours […] one part is purple of wonderful beauty, and one is golden, and one is white, whiter than chalk or snow.’

  THULE | Some time between 330 and 320 BC, the Greek explorer Pytheas travelled between the Pillars of Hercules and north across the Atlantic towards the white part of the Earth. He was sent from the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille) to see where the goods purchased by the colony–tin from Britain and amber from the Baltic Sea–came from. Upon returning home, Pytheas wrote a work titled On the Ocean, but sadly this has not survived. We therefore only know of the book’s contents and Pytheas’s travel route from the works of others who wrote about Pytheas in retrospect.

  Pytheas put Norway and the northern regions on the map for the very first time–or at least made these areas a part of world geography. In his descriptions, Pytheas mentions the island of Thoúle or Thule, ‘six days’ sail north from Britain and near the Frozen Sea’. Out there, he believed, he’d been to the edge of the world.

  Since antiquity, debate has raged over where Pytheas travelled to, and whether he ever made it there at all. In fact, two of the most important sources of the details of his journey, Strabo and Greek historian Polybius (200–118 BC), were both keen to brand him a liar. Polybius believed that it was simply impossible for human beings to live anywhere as far north as the imaginary island of Thule, and set oikoumene’s northern border at 54 degrees north–at the
Baltic coast.

  Not only was Pytheas an explorer, but he was also an outstanding astronomer–the first in history to use astronomical calculations to determine a location on Earth. Using the shadows cast by a sundial, he managed to locate the market square of his home town of Marseille at a latitude of 43 degrees and 13 minutes north. A more accurate measurement would not become available until modern times, and this calculation became the starting point for the measurements Pytheas took on his travels.

  The locations of the lines of latitude are determined by the height of the Sun at the equinox. At the equator, which is situated at 0 degrees, the Sun is directly overhead at the equinox. At the North Pole, the Sun is around 90 degrees further down, around where our noses point–just over the horizon. The North Pole is therefore located at latitude 90 degrees north. At the lighthouse at Lindesnes in Norway, the Sun is 57 degrees, 58 minutes and 46 seconds below zenith at the equinox, and this is therefore the lighthouse’s latitude.

  Minutes and seconds are used for greater precision because it is a long way from one latitude to the next–just over 111 kilometres on average. A latitude minute is almost equal to a nautical mile, 1,852.216 metres on average, while a latitude second is around 30 metres.

  After passing between the Pillars of Hercules, Pytheas sailed north alongside Spain and France, around Brittany and out to Cornwall on the south-west coast of England. From here he probably sailed up the Irish Sea to the northern tip of Scotland, and from here, Norwegian polar explorer and researcher Fridtjof Nansen asserts in his book In Northern Mists, Pytheas must have travelled north to the Orkney and Shetland Islands, then on to western Norway and up to the Arctic Circle. Nansen deduced this from the astronomical observations Pytheas is said to have made according to the astronomer Geminus of Rhodes. Geminus wrote that Pytheas described places where the night lasts no longer than two hours–so this is as far north as 65 degrees north. Geminus also quoted Pytheas as stating that ‘the Barbarians showed us the place where the sun goes to rest’. Pytheas may therefore not only have heard about Thule, as some have claimed, but have actually been there himself. Other descriptions stemming from Pytheas state that Thule extended all the way up to the Arctic Circle, and the writings of Strabo, Eratosthenes and Pliny the Elder all feature quotations that show that Pytheas described Thule as the land of the midnight sun. In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny wrote:

  The farthest of all, which are known and spoke of, is Thule; in which there be no nights at all, as we have declared, about midsummer, namely when the Sun passes through the sign Cancer; and contrariwise no days in mid-winter: and each of these times they suppose, do last six months, all day, or all night.

  It is thought that Pytheas reached the Norwegian coast somewhere around Møre or Trøndelag, where he encountered a people who, according to Strabo’s account, lived on oats, vegetables, wild fruits and roots, and who made a drink from grain and honey–a kind of mead. He also described how they threshed corn in large buildings due to sudden rains and the lack of sunlight. To Pytheas, the threshing of corn in barns instead of outside in the Mediterranean sunshine must have seemed rather strange and exotic.

  But why did so many intellectuals try to brand Pytheas a liar? If his narrative is accurate–if it is true that he not only travelled as far into the unknown as the islands north of Scotland, but then onwards over the unknown North Sea to discover yet another country–he pushed the limits of Greek knowledge of the world from the south coast of England all the way up to the Arctic Circle, an entire 16 degrees of latitude northwards. It must have seemed simply unbelievable to many.

  A Renaissance map, based on Ptolemy’s coordinates. Note how the Nordic region, depicted with countries such as Norvegi, Gottia, Dana, Pilapelant and Tile, pushes beyond the frame of the map north of 63 degrees north. Ptolemy either did not believe there to exist, or did not know of, lands further north. Printed by Nicolaus Germanus in Ulm in 1482.

  Nansen, himself a far-travelling explorer of northern regions, did not find it in the least bit strange that Pytheas chose to travel so far: ‘There is nothing intrinsically impossible in the supposition that this remarkable explorer, who besides being an eminent astronomer must have been a capable seaman, had heard in the north of Scotland of an inhabited country still farther to the north, and then wished to visit this also. We must remember how, as an astronomer, he was especially interested in determining the extent of the “œcumene” on the north, and in seeing with his own eyes the remarkable phenomena of northern latitudes, in particular the midnight sun.’

  We don’t know whether Pytheas believed that Thule was an island, but this seems likely. Travelling as he did, northwards from one island to the next, and then setting out across the sea from Shetland to reach a country even further north, he must have found it difficult to imagine that he had arrived at the mainland. In any case, Thule was drawn as an island on all later maps.

  This mystical country to the north eventually became an established part of the geography. ‘Still further above these is Thule,’ writes Ptolemy after describing the Orkney Islands, and locates Thule at 63 degrees north–possibly because Roman historian Tacitus identified Thule with Shetland in his Agricola from the year AD 77.

  THE EARTH’S CIRCUMFERENCE | Aristotle (384–322 BC) summarised the classical period of Greek geography. Through simple facts, such as that the shadow the Earth casts on the Moon is circular, and that the Pole Star climbs higher and higher in the sky as one travels north, he determined that the Earth must be round. Aristotle believed the universe to be symmetrical and in balance. It is the nature of earth and water to pull in towards the universe’s centre, he claimed, since these are the heavy elements, and overall the Earth’s mass will therefore stay the same distance from this centre. Aristotle also believed that it was possible to travel to India by sailing westwards from the Pillars of Hercules–1,800 years before Columbus set out on his voyage.

  Aristotle also ascertained that the Earth consisted of five climate zones. ‘There are two inhabitable sections of the earth: one near our upper, or northern pole, the other near the other or southern pole,’ he wrote in Meteorology. The known and inhabited world, which stretched from Gibraltar in the west to India in the east, and from Ethiopia in the south to the Sea of Azov in the north, was according to Aristotle longer than it was high in the ratio 5:3. It was therefore logical that maps should be oval: ‘They draw maps of the earth in a laughable manner; for they draw the oikoumene in a very round form, which is impossible on the basis of both logic and observed facts.’

  Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, the Macedonian who in 334 BC set out on a military raid all the way to India, taking with him not only soldiers but scholars who collected data about local flora and fauna, culture, history and geography as they travelled, and measured the distances between the places at which they stopped. Alexander had learned from Aristotle’s method, which placed greater emphasis on observations than on theories–on the importance of noticing the world around oneself. This military expedition marked the start of an era in which cartography was based less on theories, and more on experience. Later geographers made extensive use of the descriptions of Alexander’s journey to create maps of Asia, and a more detailed world map.

  Alexander’s conquests resulted in a shift in the Greek culture from small city-states to a number of dynasties spread around the Mediterranean and Asia. The political geography changed, and during the Hellenistic period Greek culture and power reached their peak, while simultaneously starting to absorb elements from north African and west Asian cultures. The library in Alexandria was not only founded on the model provided by Artistotle’s school and library in Athens; it was also part of the tradition established by the pharaohs and Mesopotamian kings, and particularly King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, northern Iraq, which Alexander is thought to have visited.

  Around the year 250 BC, Greek mathematician Eratosthenes (275–194 BC) was asked to come to Alexandria to take over the running of the libra
ry. With his Geographika, he established geography as an independent discipline, bringing together all previous attempts to describe the Earth’s appearance, size and history. He was also the first to use the word ‘geography’, created from the words geo, a variant of Gaia, the name of the Earth, and graphia, which means to write or draw.

  Using a simple experiment, Eratosthenes also managed to calculate the Earth’s circumference with staggering accuracy. First, he assumed that in Syene (Aswan) in southern Egypt, the Sun was at its zenith at the summer solstice. Then he estimated that Alexandria was on the same longitude as Syene. Finally, he estimated that the distance between these two cities was 5,000 stadions. At the summer solstice, he measured the shadow cast by a sundial in Alexandria. Since this covered around a fiftieth of the dial, he multiplied 5,000 by fifty, and deduced that the Earth’s circumference was therefore 250,000 stadions. He later increased this to 252,000 stadions so that the figure would be divisible by sixty–a nod to Sumerian and Babylonian mathematics.