Greek and Roman Cartography

Later ancient writers, including Agathemerus (3rd century CE), credit Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610–546 BCE) with drawing the first Greek map of the inhabited world, the oikoumene, reportedly on a bronze tablet, conceiving the earth as a cylindrical body suspended freely in space. His fellow Milesian Hecataeus (c. 550–476 BCE) revised this scheme into a circular map divided between the continents of Europe and Asia in his lost prose work Periodos Ges ("Journey Round the Earth"), known today only through later citation; Herodotus himself criticized the excessive, unrealistic circularity and symmetry of these early Ionian world maps in the Histories (Book 4.36), an early instance of one geographer explicitly critiquing another's cartographic assumptions.