A History of the World in 12 Maps
Page 5
Like most of the Greek writers who discussed geography before Ptolemy, very little of Anaximander’s writings or maps survives; when trying to piece together a coherent story of Greek geography we have to rely on their memorial reconstruction and reportage by later Greek writers, the so-called doxographers. These include figures like Plutarch, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius, who all recount the lives and key doctrines of earlier writers. It is often difficult to assess the significance of much later writers dealing with geography, including Strabo and his Geography, which is disproportionately influential simply because it has survived. Nevertheless, virtually all Greek writers point to Anaximander as the first thinker to provide a compelling account of what he himself is believed to have called ‘the order of things’. Anaximander offered a variation on Hesiod’s originating Chaos by proposing that in the beginning was eternal boundlessness, or apeiron. The boundlessness somehow secreted a ‘seed’ which then produced flame, ‘which grew around the air about the earth like bark around a tree’.16 As the earth began to form, the enveloping ‘flame’ broke away to create ‘rings’ of planets, stars, the moon and the sun (in ascending order). These rings encircled the earth, but were only visible because of ‘vents’ through which the heavenly bodies can be seen from earth as circular objects. Anaximander argued that human life came from primeval moisture (in some versions, mankind is born of thorny bark, in others it evolves from fish). As a naturalistic explanation of the creation of the universe and humanity, this was a significant development on earlier accounts based on gods and myth, but it is Anaximander’s explanation of the earth’s place in this cosmogony which is particularly original. The doxographers tell us that Anaximander argued ‘the earth is aloft, not dominated by anything; it remains in place because of the similar distance from all points [of the celestial circumference]’, and that its shape ‘is cylindrical, with a depth one third of its width’.17 From this cosmogony came a new cosmology – the study of the physical universe. Abandoning Babylonian and earlier Greek beliefs that the earth floated on water or air, Anaximander introduced a purely geometrical and mathematical cosmology, in which the earth sits at the centre of a symmetrical cosmos in perfect equilibrium. It is the earliest known scientifically argued concept of a geocentric universe.
Anaximander’s rational claims for the physical origins of creation defined all subsequent Greek metaphysical speculation. His impact on Greek geography was also profound. Although no description of his world map remains, doxography provides some idea of how it might have looked. Imagine the earth as a circular drum, around which the heavenly rings circle: on one side of the drum lies an uninhabited world and on its other side the , encircled by the ocean. At its centre stood either Anaximander’s homeland of Miletus, or the stone omphalos, the ‘navel’ of the world, recently established at Apollo’s temple in Delphi, and from where most subsequent Greek maps would take their bearings. Written descriptions probably supplemented Anaximander’s description: the mythical travels of the Argonauts and Odysseus; periploi, or nautical descriptions of seaborne travel across the Mediterranean; and accounts of the early colonization of regions in the Black Sea, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.18 The resulting map probably contained a rudimentary outline of Europe, Asia and Libya (or Africa) as vast islands, separated by the Mediterranean, Black Sea and the Nile.
Subsequent writers on geography would refine and develop Anaximander’s map, but few could match his compelling cosmology. The Milesian statesman and historian Hecataeus (fl. 500 BC) wrote the first explicitly geographical treatise with the title Periodos , or ‘Circuit of the Earth’, complete with a world map. The map is lost and only fragments of the Periodos remain, but they provide some indication of how far Hecataeus built on Anaximander’s earlier geography. Hecataeus’ Periodos describes Europe, Asia and Libya, beginning at the westernmost point of the known world, the Columns of Hercules (or Straits of Gibraltar), and moving eastwards round the Mediterranean, through the Black Sea, Scythia, Persia, India and Sudan, and ending on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. As well as writing about physical geography, Hecataeus was involved in the Ionian Revolt (c. 500–493 BC), in which several Ionian cities unsuccessfully rebelled against their Persian rulers.
Hecataeus’ map remained tied to a perception of the world shaped as either a disc (as in Homer) or a cylinder (as in Anaximander). Such mythical and mathematical assumptions came under sustained attack from the first and arguably greatest of all Greek historians, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 BC). In book 4 of his vast History, Herodotus breaks off from discussing the might of Persia and the northernmost limits of the known world in Scythia, to chastise geographers like Hecataeus. ‘I cannot help but laugh’, he writes, ‘at the absurdity of all the map-makers – there are plenty of them – who show Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth, with Asia and Europe of the same size.’19 As a traveller and a historian, Herodotus had little time for the neat geographical symmetry of either Homer’s myth or Anaximander’s science. Although he reiterated Hecataeus’ tripartite division of the world between Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa), Herodotus also carefully listed the people, empires and territories known to his contemporaries, before concluding that ‘I cannot but be surprised at the method of mapping Libya, Asia, and Europe. The three continents do, in fact, differ very greatly in size. Europe is as long as the other two put together, and for breadth is not, in my opinion, to be compared with them.’20 He dismissed the assumption that the inhabited world was completely surrounded by water, and questioned why it was that ‘three distinct women’s names should have been given to what is really a single land-mass’ – Europe (a Lebanese princess abducted by Zeus), Asia (the wife of Prometheus – although in other traditions the son of the Thracian king Cotys) and Libya (the daughter of Epaphus, son of Jupiter).21 Herodotus had little interest in the geometry or nomenclature of the flat, disc-shaped world maps he describes (none of which survive). As far as he was concerned, such abstract idealizations should be replaced by the verifiable reality of empirical travel and personal encounters.
Herodotus implicitly raised questions about mapmaking that would define it – and at times divide it – for centuries. Are claims to objectivity of science, and in particular geometry, sufficient to make accurate maps of the world? Or should mapmaking rely more on the noisy, often contradictory and unreliable reports of travellers to develop a more comprehensive picture of the known world? One consequence of such distinctions was to ask if mapping was a science or an art: was it primarily spatial or temporal, a visual or a written act? Although Greek mapmaking remained based on mathematical and astronomical calculations, Herodotus raised the issue of how it gathered, assessed and incorporated the raw data gathered by travellers in the creation of a more comprehensive map of the world.
Herodotus’ concerns found little immediate resonance among his contemporaries, who continued to pursue mathematical and philosophical questions relating to the nature of the earth. Anaximander’s belief in a geometrically symmetrical universe was developed by Pythagoras (fl. 530 BC) and his disciples, as well as Parmenides (fl. 480 BC), who is credited with taking the logical step of suggesting that if the universe was spherical, then so was the earth. But the first recorded statement on the earth’s sphericity comes towards the end of Phaedo (c. 380 BC), Plato’s celebrated dialogue on the last days of Socrates. The dialogue is best known for its philosophical explanation of the Platonic ideas of the immortality of the soul and the theory of ideal forms, but towards its end Socrates offers an image of what he calls ‘the wondrous regions in the earth’, as seen by the virtuous soul after death. ‘I have been convinced’, says Socrates, ‘that if it is round and in the centre of the heaven, it needs neither air nor any other such force to prevent its falling, but the uniformity of the heaven in every direction with itself is enough to support it, together with the equilibrium of the earth itself.’22 What follows is a uniquely Platonic vision of the earth. Socrates explain
s that humanity inhabits only a fraction of its surface, dwelling in a series of hollows, ‘varying in their shapes and sizes, into which water and mist and air have flowed together; and the earth itself is set in the heaven, a pure thing in pure surroundings, in which the stars are situated’. Socrates explains that ‘this earth of ours’ is a poor, ‘corrupted’ copy of ‘the true earth’, an ideal world which is only visible to the immortal soul.23 Finally, in a remarkable description of global transcendence, he anticipates his own death, as he describes rising up and looking down on the spherical world:
First of all the true earth, if one views it from above, is said to look like those twelve-piece leather balls, variegated, a patchwork of colours, of which our colours here are, as it were, samples that painters use. There the whole earth is of such colours, indeed of colours far brighter still and purer than these: one portion is purple, marvellous for its beauty, another is golden, and all that is white is whiter than chalk or snow; and the earth is composed of the other colours likewise, indeed of colours more numerous and beautiful than any we have seen.24
This unprecedented spectre of a spherical, glittering, ideal world, viewed by the immortal soul in a moment of spiritual transcendence, would be adopted in a range of subsequent global geographical imaginings, particularly within the Christian tradition of salvation and spiritual ascendancy. It would also define Plato’s belief in the world’s creation by a divine demiurge, or ‘craftsman’, put forward in Timaeus. This vision of the earth is central to Plato’s argument regarding the theory of forms and the soul’s immortality. Only the immortal soul can apprehend the ideal form of the world; but the mortal human intellect and imagination, in the shape of painters, mapmakers or mathematicians, are able to represent its divine, celestial order, albeit through poor reproductions. Even the mathematicians could only offer pale approximations of the ideal earth: Plato’s allusion to the twelve-piece leather ball is a reference to Pythagoras’ theory of the dodecahedron, the solid closest to the sphere. Plato’s vision – more than two millennia before the dream of rising up above the earth and seeing it in its full glory became a reality in the age of extraterrestrial space travel – would prove a compelling, if elusive ideal for generations of geographers.
Having defined the earth within the wider context of creation, late classical Greek thinkers began to speculate on the relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial spheres, and how the former could help to measure the shape and extent of the latter. One of Plato’s pupils, the mathematician and astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 408–355 BC), produced a model of concentric celestial spheres rotating around an axis through the centre of the earth. Eudoxus made the intellectual leap of stepping outside the limits of the terrestrial world to imagine the universe (and the earth at its centre) beyond space and time by drawing a celestial globe seen from the ‘outside’ looking inwards, viewing the stars and the earth from a god-like perspective. This allowed him to plot the movements of the heavens on a terrestrial globe, showing how the main celestial circles (created by imaging the extension of the earth’s axis out into space, around which the stars appear to circle), including the equator and the tropics, criss-crossed the earth’s surface.
Eudoxus’ geocentric universe was a major development in celestial mapmaking. It allowed him to develop a personified version of the zodiac (zodiakos kuklos, or ‘circle of animals’) which would shape all subsequent celestial mapmaking and astrology, and which still influences the language of modern-day geography, including the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. As well as his astronomical calculations, Eudoxus wrote a lost text, the Circuit of the Earth, which is said to have made one of the first estimates of the earth’s circumference, 400,000 stades (the notoriously difficult Greek method of measurement, defined as the distance covered by a plough in a single draft, and estimated anywhere between 148 and 185 metres).25 By joining empirical observation of the heavens and the earth to the philosophical speculations of Anaximander and Plato, Eudoxus’ calculations influenced the works of the most important of all ancient philosophers and his perceptions of the known world: Aristotle (384–322 BC).
Several of Aristotle’s works contain detailed accounts of the shape and size of the earth, including his cosmographical treatise On the Heavens, and Meteorology (which strictly translated means ‘the study of things aloft’), both written approximately 350 BC. In On the Heavens, Aristotle provided what we would regard as proper evidence that the earth is spherical. Drawing on Anaximander’s cosmogony, he believed that the earth’s ‘mass will be everywhere equidistant from its centre’, in other words, spherical. ‘The evidence of the senses’, Aristotle went on, ‘further corroborates this.’ ‘How else’, he asks, ‘would eclipses of the moon show [curved] segments as we see them?’ And why else does ‘quite a small change of position to south or north cause a manifest alteration of the horizon’, unless the earth is round?26
The Meteorologica took these arguments even further. Aristotle defined his subject as ‘everything which happens naturally’, and ‘which takes place in the region which borders most nearly on the movements of the stars’, and was closest to the earth.27 Although the book now reads like an esoteric account of comets, shooting stars, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, it was part of an attempt by Aristotle to give shape and meaning to a geocentric universe. In the second book of the Meteorologica, Aristotle describes the inhabited world. ‘For there are two habitable sectors of the earth’s surface’, ‘one, in which we live, towards the upper pole, the other towards the other, that is the south pole . . . these sectors are drum-shaped’. He concluded that ‘present maps of the world’, showing the as a circular, flat disc were ‘absurd’ for philosophical and empirical reasons:
For theoretical calculation shows that it is limited in breadth and could, as far as climate is concerned, extend round the earth in a continuous belt: for it is not difference of longitude but latitude that brings great variations of temperature . . . And the facts known to us from journeys by sea and land also confirm the conclusion that its length is much greater than its breadth. For if one reckons up these voyages and journeys, so far as they are capable of yielding any accurate information, the distance from the Pillars of Hercules to India exceeds that from Aethiopia to Lake Maeotis [Sea of Azov, adjoining the Black Sea] and the farthest parts of Scythia by a ratio greater than that of 5 to 3. Yet we know the whole breadth of the habitable world up to the uninhabitable regions which bound it, where habitation ceases on the one side because of the cold, on the other because of the heat; while beyond India and the Pillars of Heracles it is the ocean which severs the habitable land and prevents it forming a continuous belt around the globe.28
Aristotle’s globe was divided into five climatic zones, or klimata (meaning ‘slope’ or ‘incline’): two polar zones, two temperate, inhabitable zones either side of the equator, and a central zone, running around the equator, uninhabitable due to its fierce heat. It drew on the idea of klimata proposed by Parmenides, and made the first move towards establishing an ethnography of climate.29 According to Aristotle, the ‘climate’, nor ‘incline’ of the sun’s rays lessened the further north one travelled away from the equator. So, neither the unbearable heat of the equator, nor the freezing, ‘frigid’ northern polar zones could possibly sustain human life, which was only possible in the northern and southern ‘temperate’ zones. Aristotle’s belief in the importance of experience and what he thought of as empirical facts in defining the width and breadth of the known world would have pleased Herodotus, but it also greatly expanded the extent of the known world in the light of the military conquests of Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, from the Balkans to India in 335–323 BC. Together with Ptolemy’s later treatise, Aristotle’s description of the earth would come to dominate geography for more than a thousand years.
Aristotle’s Meteorologica represents the culmination of classical Greek theoretical speculation on the known world. His belief in
trusting the senses and the importance of practical observation was a departure from the cosmologies of Anaximander and Plato, but Greek geography before him was not exclusively theoretical. There are scattered references (many retrospective) to the practical usage of maps as far back as the Ionian Revolt against the Persians. Herodotus tells the story of how Aristagoras of Miletus sought military aid against the Persians from Cleomenes, king of Sparta, and that he ‘brought to the interview a map of the world engraved on bronze, showing all the seas and rivers’, and ‘the relative positions of the various nations’. The map’s detailed geography of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, Cyprus, Armenia and ‘the whole of Asia’ seems to draw on far more than Anaximander’s contemporary map, and included the Babylonian ‘royal roads’, the cleared tracks radiating outwards from Babylon, designed around 1900 BC to carry war chariots, and which also enabled trade and communication.30 Aristagoras fails to enlist Cleomenes’ military support when he admits the map reveals the prohibitive distance the Spartan army would have to travel from the sea: the story is thus one of the earliest examples of the political and military use of maps.