Anaximander also can be called the West’s first astronomer and geographer. He was the first among the Greeks to represent the details of the surface of the earth by maps. The idea of map-making was known in Egypt where plans of particular districts or objects as mines, houses and temples were being drawn up as early as 1400 BC. Anaximander, however, sought to convey a concrete picture of the surface of the earth as a whole.
From Babylon also he introduced the sun-dial. It consisted in essence of a gnomon, a fixed upright rod, the direction and length of the shadow of which can be measured hour by hour.
Anaximander was the first to speculate on the size and distance of the heavenly bodies. Departing from the Homeric view that the earth was a flat plate or disk, Anaximander characterized earth as a drum shaped cylinder suspended in midair. This idea looks remarkably like a guess at the celestial law of gravity.
This placement strongly suggested that the heavenly bodies passed through the sky and then under the Earth to reappear again the next day, thereby superseding earlier cosmological tendencies that limited the movement of heavenly bodies only to the sky above.
Anaximander seems to have guessed at the biological process of evolution. He is recorded as having believed that humankind originally emerged from fishes to step forth onto land.
Anaximander of Miletus
