The ancient Greeks and Romans created maps, beginning at latest with Anaximander in the 6th century BC.

In the 6th century BC, Anaximander proposed a cosmology with the Earth shaped like a section of a pillar ( a cylinder ), held aloft at the center of everything.

In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC.

The crater is named for the 6th century BCE Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaximander.

According to Hippolytus of Rome in the third century CE, Anaximander claimed that living creatures were first formed in the " wet " when acted on by the Sun, and that they were different then than they are now.

: Anaximander ( 610-546 BC )

Anaximander ( c. 550 BC ) believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it is the same distance from all things.

* 610 BC — Birth of Anaximander, Greek philosopher

Anaximander ( 610-546 BC ) held that the apeiron was the principle or main element composing all things.

* 546 BC — Death of Anaximander, Greek philosopher ( approximate date )

* 610 BC — Birth of Anaximander, Greek philosopher ( approximate date )

Prior to 546 BC, the Milesian philosopher Anaximander proposed that mankind had sprung from an aquatic species of animal.

* Anaximander ( 610 – 546 BC ) is credited with introducing this Babylonian instrument to the Greeks.

Anaximander ( 610-546 BC ) then suggested that things could not come from a specific substance like water, but rather from something he called the " boundless.

While his predecessors Thales and Anaximander proposed that the arche, the underlying material of the world, were water and the ambiguous substance apeiron, respectively, Anaximenes asserted that air was this primary substance of which all other things are made.

Anaximander, famous for his proto-evolutionary theory, disputed the ideas of Thales and proposed that rather than water, a substance called apeiron was the building block of all matter.

Several centuries later Ionia was the place where western philosophy began and was the homeland of Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. They were natural-philosophers of the Ionian school of philosophy and tried to explain the phenomena according to no-supernatural laws. They also searched a simple material-form behind the appearances of things ( origin ) and this conception had a great influence on the early archaic art in Greece.

Anaximenes, a pupil of Anaximander, thought that air was the element that imparted life, motion and thought, and speculated that there was a primordial terrestrial slime, a mixture of earth and water, which when combined with the sun's heat formed plants, animals and human beings directly.

Thales inspired the Milesian school of philosophy and was followed by Anaximander, who argued that the substratum or arche could not be water or any of the classical elements but was instead something " unlimited " or " indefinite ," the apeiron ; his reasoning was that because the world seems to consist of opposites ( e. g., hot and cold ) yet a thing can become its opposite ( e. g., a hot thing cold ), they cannot truly be opposites but rather must both be manifestations of some underlying substratrum that is neither, while all of the classical elements are one extreme or another ( e. g., water is wet and so the opposite of dry ).

Hecataeus described the countries and inhabitants of the known world, the account of Egypt being particularly comprehensive ; the descriptive matter was accompanied by a map, based upon Anaximander ’ s map of the earth, which he corrected and enlarged.

Among the material monists were the three Milesian philosophers: Thales, who believed that everything was composed of water ; Anaximander, who believed it was apeiron ; and Anaximenes, who believed it was air.

The principle is usually attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, although the first person to use it was Anaximander of Miletus.

Anaximander was the first philosopher that used arche for that which writers from Aristotle ownwards called ' the substratum " ( Simplicius Phys.

Thales ' theory was refuted by his successor and esteemed pupil, Anaximander.

Instead, he proposed the existence of the apeiron, an indefinite substance from which all things are born and to which all things will return .< ref > Simplicius, Comments on Aristotle's Physics ( 24, 13 ).< DK 12 A9, B1 ></ ref > Apeiron ( endless or boundless ) is something completely indefinite and Anaximander was probably influenced by the original chaos of Hesiod ( yawning abyss ).

Although Ionia was a centre of Western philosophy, the scholars it produced, including Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, had such diverse viewpoints that it cannot be said to be a specific school of philosophy.

After Thales and his student Anaximander opened the door to an infinite universe, a strong pluralist stance was adopted by the atomists, notably Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus.

Next came Anaximander ( 610-546 BCE ), the first writer on philosophy.

Anaximander claimed that the beginning or first principle is an endless mass ( Apeiron ) subject to neither age nor decay, from which all things are being born and then they are destructed there.

Two mud volcano fields were first explored, one along the Mediterranean Ridge, where most of them were partially ( Napoli, Milano mud volcanoes ) or totally ( Urania, Maidstone mud volcanoes ) affected by brines, and the other on the Anaximander mounds south of Turkey.

During these first exploratory dives, symbiont-bearing taxa that are similar to those observed on the Olimpi and Anaximander mud fields were sampled and identified.

His successor Anaximander is the first person known to have attempted to create a scale map of the known world and to have introduced the gnomon to Ancient Greece.

This is the same description used by the early Greek philosopher Anaximander for the sun before any spherical ideas emerged.

He has written a book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander, published in France in June 2009 and scheduled for publication in the US, Italy, Brazil and Greece in 2011.

The Greek philosopher Anaximander described the world as " endless " ( apeiron ), Xenophanes — as " the greatest " ( megistos ).

Astraios now reports Androcles had taken the education of Pythagoras in his hand, and this after he had him in the lyre, wrestling, and in painting to be trained, to the philosopher Anaximander to Miletus, and then to learn the deepest wisdom of the Egyptians Arabs, Chaldeans and the Hebrews sent.

Astronomical models of the universe were proposed soon after astronomy began with the Babylonian astronomers, who viewed the universe as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus.

Hecataeus of Miletus initiated a different form of geography, avoiding the mathematical calculations of Thales and Anaximander he learnt about the world by gathering previous works and speaking to the sailors who came through the busy port of Miletus.

Pythagoras is said to have been a disciple of Anaximander and to have imbibed the cosmological concerns of the Ionians, including the idea that the cosmos is constructed of spheres, the importance of the infinite, and that air or aether is the arche of everything.

Anaximander noted that water could not be the arche because it could not give rise to its opposite, fire.

Anaximander claimed that none of the elements ( earth, fire, air, water ) could be arche for the same reason.