[Illustration: A GREEK GALLEY ABOUT 500 B.C. From a vase-painting.] There is an old story which says that one day the Greeks captured a Phoenician ship and copied it. However this may be, the Greeks soon became great colonisers themselves, and we have to thank a Greek philosopher living in Miletus, on the coast of Asia Minor, for making the first map of the ancient world. Of course, the Babylonians and Egyptians had made maps thousands of years before this, but this Greek--Anaximander introduced the idea of map-making to the astonished world about the year 580 B.C. What was the map like? It was "a bronze tablet, whereupon the whole circuit of the Earth was engraved with all its seas and rivers." This is all we know. But this map-making Greek was famous for another idea in advance of his time. He used to study the heavens and the earth, and after much study he made up his mind that the earth was round and not flat. He taught that the world hung free in the midst of the universe, or rather in the midst of the waters. The centre of the earth was at Delphi. In the world of legend there was a reason for this. Two eagles had been let loose, one from the eastern extremity of the world, the other from the west, and they met at Delphi--hence it was assumed that Delphi was at the centre of the world. And Delphi at this time was such a wonderful city. On the slopes of Mount Parnassus it stood high on a rock--on the heights stood the temple of Apollo with its immense riches, its golden statue of the great god, and its ever-smoking fire of wood. [Illustration: JERUSALEM, THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD. From the Hereford Map of the World, thirteenth century.] In the same way, in those days of imperfect geography, as we hear of Delphi being the centre of the Greek world, so we hear of Jerusalem being considered the central point of the world. "This is Jerusalem," says Ezekiel, "in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her." In the Mappa Mundi (thirteenth century) in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is still the centre of the earth. Following close on these ideas came another. It, too, came from Miletus, now famous for its school of thought and its searchers after truth. A _Tour of the World_ is the grand-sounding title of the work of Hecataeus, who wrote it about 500 years B.C. It contains an account of the coast and islands of the Mediterranean Sea and an outline of all the lands the Greeks thought they knew. In the fragments that have come down to us, the famous old geographer divides both his work and the world into two parts. One part he calls Europe, the other Asia, in which he includes Africa bounded by the river Nile. He held that these two parts were equal. They were divided from one another by the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea, while round the whole flat world still flowed the everlasting ocean stream. CHAPTER IV HERODOTUS--THE TRAVELLER