the rising sun, and would find the climate getting colder as he approached Byzantium.  So, too, he might roughly guess that Marseilles was somewhere to the west and north of him; but how was he to fix the relative position of Marseilles and Byzantium to one another?  Was Marseilles more northerly than Byzantium?  Was it very far away from that city?  For though it took longer to get to Marseilles, the voyage was winding, and might possibly bring the vessel comparatively near to Byzantium, though there might be no direct road between the two cities.  There was one rough way of determining how far north a place stood:  the very slightest observation of the starry heavens would show a traveller that as he moved towards the north, the pole-star rose higher up in the heavens.  How much higher, could be determined by the angle formed by a stick pointing to the pole-star, in relation to one held horizontally.  If, instead of two sticks, we cut out a piece of metal or wood to fill up the enclosed angle, we get the earliest form of the sun-dial, known as the gnomon, and according to the shape of the gnomon the latitude of a place is determined.  Accordingly, it is not surprising to find that the invention of the gnomon is also attributed to Anaximander, for without some such instrument it would have been impossible for him to have made any map worthy of the name.  But it is probable that Anaximander did not so much invent as introduce the gnomon, and, indeed, Herodotus, expressly states that this instrument was derived from the Babylonians, who were the earliest astronomers, so far as we know.  A curious point confirms this, for the measurement of angles is by degrees, and degrees are divided into sixty seconds, just as minutes are.  Now this division into sixty is certainly derived from Babylonia in the case of time measurement, and is therefore of the same origin as regards the measurement of angles.

We have no longer any copy of this first map of the world drawn up by Anaximander, but there is little doubt that it formed the foundation of a similar map drawn by a fellow-townsman of Anaximander, HECATAEUS of Miletus, who seems to have written the first formal geography.  Only fragments of this are extant, but from them we are able to see that it was of the nature of a periplus, or seaman’s guide, telling how many days’ sail it was from one point to another, and in what direction.  We know also that he arranged his whole subject into two books, dealing respectively with Europe and Asia, under which latter term he included part of what we now know as Africa.  From the fragments scholars have been able to reproduce the rough outlines of the map of the world as it presented itself to Hecataeus.  From this it can be seen that the Homeric conception of the surrounding ocean formed a chief determining feature in Hecataeus’s map.  For the rest, he was acquainted with the Mediterranean, Red, and Black Seas, and with the great rivers Danube, Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, and Indus.