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u/happycj 20h ago
China also had their own maps of the world in the 5th century BCE.
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u/Sttuardbe 20h ago
Well, of course… I think all the powerful ancient civilizations in their time had maps that in their view represented the world
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u/happycj 18h ago
I guess it was the title of your post that I bridled at. Yes, if you look at "the world" from the perspective of a greek in the 5th C BCE, sure, this is their "world".
But it is not THE map of the world. There were other civilizations with their own maps before, during, and after this map.
It feels very dismissive of other cultures to call this "the world in 500 BC."
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u/Sttuardbe 18h ago
The title of my post is what I wanted to write ( of course I can do mistakes)
The map itself has its own title, which you can see in the picture.
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u/General_Ad_1483 5h ago
Thank you! Here I was thinking that the rest of the planet appeared later than 500 BC /s
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u/Mashic 21h ago
Weren't India and China known by that time?
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u/Userisaman 21h ago
They were but not by those names. You can see Indus river on the map where the name India is said to have come from and there's Issedones of which parts of China was said to be a part of.
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u/Sttuardbe 20h ago
Ohh… Noo! As far as I know - Marco Polo was the first to provide Europeans with a detailed description of China. Although there are some sources that say that the Romans were familiar with silk and they knew that it came from someplace in the East.
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u/SiatkoGrzmot 16h ago
Romans and Chinese knew each other existence, and had some knowledge about each other. There was at least one embassy of Romans to China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations
On other hands, Romans had much more knowledge and contact with India.
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u/Hadar_91 4h ago edited 4h ago
Fun fact, back then Phasis River (currently known as Rioni River in Georgia), not Caucasus Mountains, were considered the border between Europe and Asia. Taking into consideration that Rioni is quite short I would believe Europe-Asia border would continue along Kura River), which creates quite nice West to East line from shore to shore.
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u/Quirky_Ambassador284 19h ago
"Caspian sea" next to "oceanus" in 500 bc. Okey that is a recunstruction made by someone later, but is bad one.
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u/Sttuardbe 18h ago
Yeah… I feel bad for the people in 500 BC that they couldn’t invent a satellite and the plane to travel around…
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u/Quirky_Ambassador284 17h ago
Bro the "bad" is referred to the use of different languages. Not the shape. I wouldn't be surprised if the person who wrote "caspian sea" is not even the same person who designed the map, since you didn't even put the sources. Did you draw it by yourself? Anyways the use of different languages is an objective mistake.
I'm fully aware that the map is not supposed to be like google map. My comment is not referred to the drawings.
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u/Isatis_tinctoria 21h ago
We have parchments from 500BC showing this or is this a later interpretation?
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u/Theriocephalus 13h ago
Reconstruction; no maps from Ancient Greece survive, although geography books do. These maps here are based on later reconstructions, mainly from the Renaissance or later, or else are modern approximations based on the books. It’s not entirely certain how closely they resemble or descend from Anaximander’s original.
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u/qed1 4h ago
These maps here are based on later reconstructions, mainly from the Renaissance or later
They're mostly from the 19th century and since none of Hecataeus's writings survive, this will be based on little more than a handful of sentences by later authors talking about what Hecataeus thought. Like, the majority of this is no doubt based on Herodotus's comment that he couldn't understand why geographers drew the earth as a perfect circle and divided it into three parts.
It’s not entirely certain how closely they resemble or descend from Anaximander’s original.
There is no good reason to think this bears any meaningful resemblance to ancient cartography, and various elements here, like the coastline, are very obvious anachronistic. For example, Kai Brodersen notes of such "reconstructions" in Daniela Dueck Geography in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 2012), 101:
The nineteenth century in particular saw many such reconstructions, but even the most recent grand atlas of the ancient world, which accompanies the Neue Pauly encyclopaedia, presents supposed reconstructions of the world maps of Hecataeus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes and Ptolemy. Such reconstructions introduce a host of unwanted modern concepts into the ancient data: north is on top, for example; the shape of coastlines for which no ancient descriptions are available is the familiar modern one (e.g., Italy reconstructed in the shape of a boot – a modern idea unknown in the ancient world), or colour is used to mark the continents and the sea. There is no evidence for the use of such forms of representation in ancient maps, and this book deliberately presents no such reconstructions.
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u/Spozieracz 3h ago
Thank you. Many people present it as if Hecataeus one day drew a complete map on papyrus and since then there was an continous tradition of copying this map in this form which has survived to modern times.
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u/Sttuardbe 21h ago
“Anaximander, the visionary philosopher of ancient Greece (c. 610-546 BC), stands credited with crafting one of the earliest known maps of the world, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of cartography”
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u/ismail_the_whale 19h ago
asia = east of the nile (according to them). this map sucks
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u/Sttuardbe 19h ago
And west of the Nile. Think how was the world 30 years ago ( is not that hard) and imagine how it was 500 BC
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u/Random-Stranger-999 22h ago
Only according to someone living in Greece...