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Anaximander
The Greek Philosopher and Astronomer who Invented Cartography
Anaximander (610 BC. 546 BC) was the son of Praxiades and lived at the court of Polycrates of Samos. A well travelled man of solemn manners and pompous garments, pupil of Thales and teacher of Anaximenes, with whom he formed what we call the Milesian School of Pre-Socratic philosophy. He wrote the first surviving lines of Western philosophy and noted the obliquity of the ecliptic.
He discovered the gnomon (a perpendicular sun-dial to indicate solstices and equinoxes), drew the first map of the earth and sea: a circular plan in which the known regions of the world formed equal segments. The moon was a ring eighteen times the size of the earth that shone with light borrowed from the sun, and the stars were fixed on a crystalline sphere rotating around the earth.
Anaximander, the First Cartographer
- Anaximander most likely drew this map so it could be used to improve navigation and trade between the colonies around the Mediterranean Sea and
Black Sea. - "Further, there cannot be a single, simple body which is infinite, either, as some hold, one distinct from the elements, which they then derive from it, nor without this qualification. For there are some who make this (i.e. a body distinct from the elements) the infinite, and not air or water, in order that the other things may not be destroyed by their infinity. They are in opposition one to another air is cold, water moist, and fire hot and therefore, if any one of them were infinite, the rest would have ceased to be by this time. Accordingly they say that is infinite is something other than the elements, and from it the element arise." Aristotle. Phys. G, 5, 204 b 22 (R. P. 16 b).
- "He declares that at first human beings arose in the inside of fish, and after having been reared like sharks, and become capable of protecting themselves, they were finally cast ashore and took to land." Plutarch Symp. Quaest, 730 f (R. P. 22.)
- Anaximander's writing is lost. In this fragment, the sentence in bold is the only sentence that survived:
- "Of those who declared that the first principle is one, moving and indefinite, Anaximander... said that the indefinite was the first principle and element of things that are, and he was the first to call the first principle indefinite [apeiron]. He says that the first principle is neither water nor any other of the things called elements, but some other nature which is indefinite, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay the penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time, as he says in rather poetical language." Simplicius. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics.
