In the ancient period of human history the first real efforts to represent the world on a map began at a time when Greek philosophers were speculating about the size and shape of the then known world. Several theories existed ranging from the ill-informed view of the world being of the shape of a disc surrounded by water to the later-day acceptance of a spherical Earth. Thenceforth at around 300 BC, Dicaearchus, a student of the great Aristotle, in an effort at representing the orientation of the world surface, placed a line on the map of the then known world which ran east to west passing through Gibraltar and the Greek island of Rhodes. This early attempt at the ancient world map was followed by similar efforts on the part of Eratosthenes, Marinus of Tyre, and the famous Roman astronomer Ptolemy, with the latter developing this further with his fantastic innovation of recording latitudes and longitudes in degrees for nearly 8,000 points on his world map.
Ptolemy's map of the ancient world gives a fair idea of the representation of the then known world. Although distorted in shape and orientation, Ptolemy's ancient world map represented the then known world as extending from the Scottish Shetland islands in the far North Sea to the Nile Valley in the south, from the Canary islands off the West African coast in the west to China and South East Asia in the east.
