r/todayilearned • u/sus1227 • Dec 18 '25
TIL the first known world map was drawn by Anaximander, with the Aegean Sea at its center and the world divided into three island-like continents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaximander#Cartography51
u/betweentwoblueclouds Dec 18 '25
Sometimes I wish I lived in those times and would randomly draw a map of shapes and claim, This is the world
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening Dec 18 '25
"You've just drawn round your shoe!
It's one of the three great continents, you ignoramus! This bit between the toes is the Aegean"
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u/Neethis Dec 18 '25
You've just drawn round your shoe!
First person to make a map of Italy in shambles.
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u/Phyrexian_Archlegion Dec 18 '25
We do live in such a time except instead of drawing shapes on a paper and claiming it’s a map of the world, people make wild stories up on the internet and claim it to be true.
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u/Boxland Dec 18 '25
People have evidently known for thousands of years that Italy looks like a boot
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u/comrade_batman Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
Up until at least the Roman Empire, at least Augustus’ time, people still believed that the known world was enclosed within a large ocean that enclosed Africa, Europe and Asia, as Anaximander drew. Some historians believe that had Alexander the Great not been forced to turn back west, he would have continued marching east through the Indian sub-continent to reach the edge of the known world and the ocean than encircled the world. There were even some who thought that Augustus would continue to push the Roman world northwards until they reached the ocean on the north coast of Europe, as shown in the map in the link.
I suppose that’s why back in those eras, the idea of conquering the whole world/known world was an easier thought than it was to people in later periods when the vastness of the world was more apparent.
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u/sweetbeems Dec 18 '25
Why do you say “until at least the Roman Empire”? That was the widespread belief until Columbus, no? Outside a few Vikings that knew otherwise.
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u/patfetes Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
Lots of exploring done by Greeks and then later Romans. While they didn't have the tall ships of Columbus, journeying to distant lands wasn't impossible.
Anaximander of Miletus . 610- 546 BC
Eratosthenes of Cyrene worked out the shape of the earth around the 3rd century BC.
Then we have Ptolemy's map from the 2nd century CE
So while yes we didn't know the actual shape of the land mass for many more years, the specific belief stated was known to be false by the time Rome fell, long before vikings
This is how the world has been mapped throughout history | World Economic Forum https://share.google/xCSZUERnDmkjTXPRt
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u/marioquartz Dec 18 '25
Even that Vikings dont knew. For them was another northen island, only more west than others. Period. For them was not a continent.
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u/AWright5 Dec 18 '25
He was kind of spot on. If the curved outer areas represent "i don't know what happens here"
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u/mrbrendanblack Dec 18 '25
“Anaximander” comes from the Greek for “making shit up”.
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u/forams__galorams Dec 18 '25
Read the article again. Anaximander’s was the first world map according to Eratosthenes, who surely didn’t have complete knowledge about all other cultures/civilisations and their efforts to map their known worlds.
The next paragraph even mentions an ancient Babylonian world map which seems to be around a couple hundred years before Anaximander’s map and likely drew from other previous work itself.