Ancient Science · Part 16 · Maps · B1
Mapping the World: Early Maps, and Pytheas’s Voyage to the Far North
Part 16 of Ancient Science: the first Greek maps showed the world as a disc surrounded by Ocean. Then a Greek from Massalia called Pytheas sailed round Britain and on to Thule, where the summer sun hardly sets. Later geographers called him a liar, but much of what he said was true. North of, beyond, along, across, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we draw the world as the Greeks knew it, and then we sail off the edge of it, with a man from Massalia called Pytheas.
Off the edge? There is no edge. The world is round.
Round, yes. But the part the Greeks knew was small: the lands around the Middle Sea, and a little beyond. Pytheas went much further, to a place where the summer night lasts only two or three hours.
Some did. Others called him a liar. Let me show you.
The first Greek map of the world was drawn by Anaximander of Miletus, in the sixth century BCE. It is lost, like almost every ancient map. Later writers say that early maps showed the world as a round disc, with the river Ocean flowing all the way round it. Herodotus laughed at them.
Over the centuries, Greek travellers, traders and soldiers brought back more and more information. After Alexander’s conquests, the Greeks knew about India; Greek sailors went out into the Atlantic past the Pillars of Heracles, the rocks at the mouth of the Middle Sea.
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