Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/506

 forgotten calculated to give the spectator an idea of the state of the region, even to the stones and the scattered trees along the roads." This description is sufficient to show that the Egyptians knew the value of maps, and that they made and used them. These gold-mines were worked in the reign of Rameses II., and if this map was made at that period, as from the description given of it would seem to be the fact, then it is the oldest map known.

It was very different, however, with their neighbors, the Phœnicians. They were the great maritime nation of antiquity, making constant voyages along the coasts of the Mediterranean on either side, and along the western coast of Europe, as far as Great Britain, and possibly farther. The outlines of a coast once seen would, it is true, be sufficiently preserved in the memory for the practical purposes of navigation; but a people who had extended their voyages so far, who had established so many colonies, and to whom is attributed the invention of the alphabet, would naturally be led to the construction of charts,



from their utility, as well as maps to give some general idea of the world, of which they knew more than any other people. A jealous commercial policy kept them from imparting their knowledge to others, so that we do not know whether they had maps or charts; which is not remarkable, as we know, in fact, so little respecting them.

It is from the Greeks that we get our earliest knowledge of geographical maps. The first information we have upon the subject is from passages in Herodotus and Strabo. Strabo says that Anaximander, who was born 612, was the first who represented the world upon a map. Diogenes Laertes ascribed to him the invention of geographical maps, and also of the gnomon. But this he probably introduced into Greece, as it was in earlier use among the Chaldeans. Herodotus says that Aristagoras, when he went (504 ) to Cleomenes, the King of Sparta, to induce him to invade Persia, produced before the Spartan king "a bronze tablet, upon which the whole circuit of the earth was engraved, with all its seas and rivers."

Hecatæus, who lived in the same century with Anaximander, is