Antique maps / Античные карты

In a general work of this kind it would be tedious and out of place to embark on a long and detailed history of cartography; newcomers to the subject might well be bored, the knowledgeable could not be blamed for regarding it as trivial. In any case, the subject has been splendidly covered by many writers and all we attempt to do is to provide some background which we regard as an essential part of a fascinating study, and which we hope will have some interest for all our readers. When the first maps, in whatever form, were used it is impossible to say but, as soon as writing and the use of symbols evolved, man undoubtedly felt the need to illustrate a route by land or sea, to show a river crossing, to warn of a mountain barrier or simply to draw the locality in which he lived. The oldest recorded representation of this sort is a g-ft (275 cm)- long wall-painting found in 1963 in Catal Hoyiik, a prehistoric site in Anatolia, which is dated between about 6100 and 6300 BC. The painting outlines a town'plan' showing very clearly some eighty 'buildings'  with a volcano, possibly erupting, in the background. Later plans sketched on papyrus by the Egyptians and on moulded clay tablets by the Assyrians and Babylonians have survived and it is recorded that about 600 BC. Greek thought was turning to geographical problems. Strabo, writing in Alexandria in the period 20—10 BC, tells us that the first map of the world was compiled by Anaximander of the School of Philosophy at Miletus in the early part of the sixth century BC, followed soon afterwards by a treatise on geography, including a map showing the earth as a plane or disc by Hecataeus. They and others of that school believed in the Homeric theory of a disc-shaped world surrounded by the great river Okeanus with Delphi and the Aegean at the centre of the habitable world. Others, however, leaned to the Pythagorean theory of a spherical world, a theme taken up by Plato, Herodotus and Aristotle, which gradually came to be accepted throughout the Hellenic world. <...>