Earth-writing began as Nile-centered world maps
Geography—Greek geographia, “Earth-writing”—has many cultural histories before it became a university discipline. Ancient Egypt centered the world on the Nile; Babylon’s Imago Mundi of about 600 BC rings the Euphrates with Assyria and Urartu. Greeks credited Homer as geography’s founder.
Ninth-century BC Babylonian maps already sketched worlds, sometimes placing Babylon north of an uncertain centre. Egyptian horizons ran to Siwa’s Amon oasis, Kush to the fourth cataract, and trading Punt.
Homer’s circular ocean-ringed earth and Thales of Miletus’s water-based cosmos plus astronomical rules pushed Greek thought toward measurable Earth study by the eighth–sixth centuries BC.
Two Greek schools soon diverged. Thales's successor Anaximander is credited with the first attempt at a world map, while Hecataeus of Miletus skipped the mathematics, collecting earlier writings and quizzing sailors in his busy port to compile a prose survey of the known world. Pythagoras may have been first to propose a spherical Earth, the most perfect form in his view; Plato adopted it and Aristotle backed it with evidence, noting the Earth's curved shadow on the Moon during eclipses and stars climbing higher as a traveller heads north. Explorers kept testing theory: Hanno the Navigator reached as far as Sierra Leone, Herodotus reported that Pharaoh Necho II sent Phoenicians around Africa, and in the fourth century BC Pytheas circled the British Isles, only to have his reports of a habitable north dismissed.
Greeks split the world into Europe, Asia and Libya, with the Hellespont as one border and the Nile usually as another, though Herodotus objected that people on either bank were no different. Eratosthenes measured Earth's circumference with striking precision, which raised the question of what filled the unknown span between Europe and Asia; Crates of Mallus proposed four inhabited landmasses. Most of these writers survive only through quotations in Strabo, whose seventeen-volume geography is nearly complete. Romans put the subject to practical use, laying out some 89,000 kilometres of roads with triangulation, and their transport department kept surveyors on staff to plot fields, map latitudes and elevations, and measure rivers for armies to cross.
Source: History of geography
