ole surrounded by two concentric circles,
which are named briny waters. Outside these, however, are seven
detached islets, possibly representing the seven zones or climates
into which the world was divided according to the ideas of the
Babylonians, though afterwards they resorted to the ordinary four
cardinal points. What was roughly true of Babylonia did not in
any way answer to the geographical position of Greece, and it is
therefore probable that in the first place they obtained their
ideas of the surrounding ocean from the Babylonians.

[Illustration: THE EARLIEST MAP OF THE WORLD]

It was after the period of Homer and Hesiod that the first great
expansion of Greek knowledge about the world began, through the
extensive colonisation which was carried on by the Greeks around
the Eastern Mediterranean. Even to this day the natives of the
southern part of Italy speak a Greek dialect, owing to the wide
extent of Greek colonies in that country, which used to be called
"Magna Grecia," or "Great Greece." Marseilles also one of the Greek
colonies (600 B.C.), which, in its turn, sent out other colonies
along the Gulf of Lyons. In the East, too, Greek cities were dotted
along the coast of the Black Sea, one of which, Byzantium, was
destined to be of world-historic importance. So, too, in North
Africa, and among the islands of the AEgean Sea, the Greeks colonised
throughout the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and in almost every
case communication was kept up between the colonies and the
mother-country.

Now, the one quality which has made the Greeks so distinguished
in the world's history was their curiosity; and it was natural
that they should desire to know, and to put on record, the large
amount of information brought to the mainland of Greece from the
innumerable Greek colonies. But to record geographical knowledge,
the first thing that is necessary is a map, and accordingly it is
a Greek philosopher named ANAXIMANDER of Miletus, of the sixth
century B.C., to whom we owe the invention of map-drawing. Now,
in order to make a map of one's own country, little astronomical
knowledge is required. As we have seen, savages are able to draw
such maps; but when it comes to describing the relative positions
of countries divided from one another by seas, the problem is not
so easy. An Athenian would know roughly that Byzantium (now called
Constantinople) was somewhat to the east and to the north of him,
because in sailing thithe