Very owes humanity of ancient Greece. The Greeks, people inventive, curious, enterprising, always ready to learn have been useful from the neighbors. Do they adopted the Phoenician Shipbuilding and Maritime art. The Egyptians have borrowed some of the information on geometry and astronomy from the Babylonians – a sundial and the division of the day into 12 hours, the Persians – the philosophical ideas … The Greeks, of course, creatively develop new knowledge. Not surprising that flourished in Greece and science literature, theater, architecture, sculpture and music, conceived the Olympic Games … And among the sciences and geography was, and the maps became more and more necessary.

It is in Hellas laid the foundations of cartography – the science of mapping. Greek scientists, carrying maps of the known world, as in ancient times called the habitable part of the Earth, first introduced the concept of parallel and meridian. They also came to the conclusion that the Earth – the ball, and even managed to accurately determine its size. First they thought about map projections – ways to depict on a flat horizontal plane spherical Earth. Due to all these achievements have been, on the one hand, the fact that the geographic information collected by travelers and navigators, became more and more. And on the other – the improvement in Ancient Greece astronomy and mathematics, by which is an increasingly accurate maps.

In 1897, Russian archaeologists excavating one of the mounds on the banks of the Kuban River, found a silver vase. In it lay the ground for nearly five millennia, blackened, but perfect preserved. When the discovery was purified on a thin silver find a picture. At first glance, nothing remarkable: silverware at all times decorated with pictures or designs. But this case was special – an ancient master engraved outline of the lake, the strings of the rivers flowing down from the mountains, figurines of animals that lived in those days in the Caucasus. In short, the picture was nothing more than a primitive map. This is an ancient vase was exhibited St. Petersburg's Hermitage, she still kept in his Golden Treasury. Preserved and other old maps. For example, the Egyptian, executed on papyrus in the XVI century. BC It shows the gold fields of Upper Egypt gold-bearing veins, gold field workers huts, a swimming pool for washing the ore, and erected a temple there and then. Curious combination of a flat plan with pictures of mountains, depicted "in a profile." Alas, this is the only known modern scholars of ancient Egyptian card and kept it a miracle.