docbobdocs

  AD 878 This year about mid-winter, after twelfth night, the Danish army stole out to Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West Saxons; where they settled, and drove many of the people over the sea; and of the rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will;  ALL BUT ALFRED THE KING, He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods and the fastness of the moors ... In the Easter of this year King Alfred with his little force raised a work at Athelney ; from which he assailed the army, assisted by that part of Somersetshire which was nighest to it. Then, in the seventh week after Easter, he rode to Brixton by the eastern side of Selwood; and there came out to meet him all the people of Somersetshire, and Wiltshire, and that part of Hampshire which is on this side of the sea, and they rejoiced to see him. Then within one night he went from this retreat to Hey, and within one night after he proceeded to Heddington; and there fought with all the army, and p...

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ERATOSTHENES circa 220 BCE 'This is a facsimile of the world map he produced based on his calculations [the original is lost]. The map shows the routes of exploration by Nearchus [to] the mouth of the Indus River (375 BC, after the expedition to India by Alexander the Great), and Pytheas (300 BC) to Britannia. Place names include Hellas (Greece), Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea), Mare Caspium (Caspian Sea), Gades (Cadiz), Columnae Herculis (Gibraltar), Taprobane (Sri Lanka), Iberes (Iberian Peninsular), Ierne (Ireland), and Brettania (Britain), the rivers Ister (Danube), Oxus (Amu Darya), Ganges, and Nilus (Nile), and mountain systems. The map shows his birthplace in Libya (Cyrene), the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Syene (Aswan), where Eratosthenes made his calculations of the earth's circumference, and the latitudes and longitudes of several locations based on his measurements in stadia.' (<etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/10408/10489/10489.htm> Reconstru...

  MAPPI  MUNDI "The first surviving map of the world was etched around 600 BCE into a clay tablet rediscovered at Sippar in Iraq in the late nineteenth century. It is a tiny little thing, just eight centimetres across and twelve up. The map itself is oriented to the north and it depicts the world as a disc of land centred on Babylon and surrounded by a circular sea labelled marratu : the salty or bitter river. The city of Babylon itself is a rectangle stamped across the upper part of the central island and bisected like the land itself by the Euphrates river. Around the city circles denote other regions and cities in western Asia including Assyria and Elam; most are placed in approximately correct positions in relation to Babylon." (Josephine Quinn, 2024, How the World Made the West , Bloomsbury Publishing, London, p. 173) "This Babylonian map is still a work of the imagination. Across the 'bitter river' extend triangular islands, originally as many as eight; the...