Historian, Geographer (c.549 BC – c.476 BC)
Before Herodotus, there was Hecataeus of Miletus, considered as the first and most renowned historiographer of Greece. Hecataeus was also the prodrome of scientific geography and chartography, considered by many as the Father of Geography.
He was a student of Anaximander. He travelled from southern Russia to Egypt where he learned historiography and wrote down his experiences from the places he visited. Hecataeus was an active statesman in Miletus and the only one from his homeland to oppose a revolution against the Persians foreseeing its failure. He succeeded in persuading the Persian satrap Artaphernes to restore the constitution of the Ionian cities when he was sent as an ambassador of his homeland.
He wrote numerous books. His most famous one, Periodos Ges (Tour Round the World) consists of two books, one on Europe and one on Asia, the latter also containing Africa. It provides ethnologic descriptions on the peoples found around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in a clockwise manner, from Gibraltar to Morocco such as about their civilization, their origins and their history. He developed Anaximander’s map of the globe and attempted to define the distances on the geographic map based on the constellations of the sky. He was the one who introduced geometric shapes and zones on geographic maps that are used to this day. His other, non-surviving works include Aeolics, Map of the Persian State, Historiae, Heroologia, Map of the Globe and Genealogia.
Hecataeus’s work exerted massive influence on his forerunners. Strabo and especially Herodotus cite him numerous times in their books, while the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles which contain geographic knowledge support the fact that Hecataeus’ works were very popular among the spiritual world of ancient Greece.
Bibliography
- Georgakopoulos, Konstantinos. Ancient Greek Scientists. Georgiades, Athens: 1995. Print.
- “Haecateus of Miletus”. Helios New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Passas, I. Athens, 1946. Print.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica. ”Hecataeus of Miletus” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. March 6, 2008. Retrieved on April 19, 2017.
