![]() ![]() ![]() Thenceforth at around 300 BC, Dicaearchus, a student of the great Aristotle, in an effort at representing the orientation of the world surface, placed a line on the map of the then known world which ran east to west passing through Gibraltar and the Greek island of Rhodes. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.Several theories existed ranging from the ill-informed view of the world being of the shape of a disc surrounded by water to the later-day acceptance of a spherical Earth. The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Is Now Free Onlineīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. The Largest Early Map of the World Gets Assembled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fantastical World Map from 1587Īncient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Islamic World Even so, the maps derived from his work provide an informative glimpse of how, exactly, Romans saw their place in the world - or rather how, exactly, they saw their place in the center of it.Īncient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps ![]() Though Mela showed greater insight into the integration of the various parts of the world known to the ancient Romans than did his predecessors, he also, of course, had his blind spots and rough areas, including the assumption that human beings could only live in the two most temperate of the climatic zones he defined. You can see more versions at, and the David Rumsey Map Collection shows the world according to Mela placed alongside the world according to Ptolemy and the world according to Dionysius Periegetes. Various maps, including the 1898 reproduction pictured at the top of the post ( see it in a larger format here), have attempted to visualize Mela’s worldview and make it legible at a glance. Scholars since have also praised Mela’s clear, accessible prose style - clear and accessible, in any case, for a first-century text composed in Latin. Pulling together what in his day constituted a wealth of geographical knowledge from a variety of previous sources, he painted a word-picture of the world more accurate, on the whole, than any written down before. In that series of three books, which seems not to have contained any maps itself, Mela divides the Earth into two rough “hemispheres” and five zones, two of them cold, one of them hot, and two in between. Romer in Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World. “Pomponius Mela is a puzzle, and so is his one known work, The Chorography,” writes Frank E. Writing from his perspective under the reign of the Emperor Gaius, Claudius, or both, Mela created nothing less than a worldview, which tells us now how the ancient Romans conceived of the world around them, its characteristics and its relationship to the territory of the mightiest empire going. What Saul Steinberg did with a drawing in 1976, pioneering Roman geographer Pomponius Mela had done, in a much less comedic but much more accurate way, with text nineteen centuries before. We’ve all seen that famous New Yorker cover satirizing a New Yorker’s distorted, self-centered view of the world: Manhattan occupies a good half of the image, relegating the rest of America (and indeed the world) to the status of outer-outer boroughs. ![]()
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