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The Atlas Portal

An atlas is a collection of maps, traditionally bound into book form, but now found in multimedia formats. As well as geographic features and political boundaries, many often feature geopolitical, social, religious and economic statistics.

The first book that could be called an atlas was constructed from the calculations of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek geographer working in Alexandria circa A.D. 150. The first edition was published in Bologna in 1477 and was illustrated with a set of 27 maps, though scholars say that it is not known whether the printed maps were engraved versions of original maps made by Ptolemy, or whether they were constructed by medieval Greek scholars from Ptolemy's text.

The origin of the term atlas is a common source of misconception, perhaps because two different mythical figures named 'Atlas' are associated with mapmaking. King Atlas, a mythical King of Mauretania, was, according to legend, a wise philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who supposedly made the first celestial globe. However, the more widely known Atlas is a figure from Greek mythology.

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The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator, in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments. While the linear scale is constant in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite. Mercator's 1569 edition was a large planisphere measuring 202 by 124 cm, printed in eighteen separate sheets.

The development of the Mercator projection represented a major breakthrough in the nautical cartography of the 16th century. However, it was much ahead of its time, since the old navigational and surveying techniques were not compatible with its use in navigation. Only in the middle of the 18th century, after the marine chronometer was invented and the spatial distribution of magnetic declination was known, could the Mercator projection be fully adopted by navigators.

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Anaximander (c. 610 BC–c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia. He joined the Milesian school and studied the teachings of its master Thales. He succeeded him and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and Pythagoras amongst his pupils.

Anaximander was one of the earliest Greek thinkers at the start of the Axial Age. He was an early proponent of science and tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins, claiming that nature is ruled by laws. In astronomy, he tried to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. In physics, he postulated that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. He was also involved in the politics of Miletus as he was sent as a leader to one of its colonies.

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