# A map of the inhabited world with measured intervals is later described as Eratosthenes’s cartographic scheme

Date: 230

## The fact

Strabo, as Perseus and ToposText print him, describes [Eratosthenes](/people/eratosthenes) dividing the inhabited earth with a chart and measured intervals. Later reconstructions printed in atlases are evidence, not his hand. This is stored apart from the three-book prose Geography.

It is one event.

## Context

Hipparchus criticised distances and the shape of the oikoumene. A 21st-century schematic of parallels is not 230 BCE.

Eratosthenes’s documented role is bounded by other offices and collaborators named in the sources below. Sharing a field with them is not a reason to drop a documented act, and it is not a reason to assign later consequences done in the name after death.

Conventional years are c.276–c.194 BCE. Almost no autograph survives. Cleomedes, Strabo, Nicomachus, and later encyclopedias are the public file. Classroom globe reconstructions are not his acts. Contribution is complex.

Named person as heading of the dated public instrument. Later editors, museums, printers, or offices share publication. Complex where later carriers are the surviving public file.

## Evidence and sources

Perseus Strabo and ToposText independently carry the chart-and-intervals description.

Official or archival record: Perseus — Strabo, Geography (Jones) (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0198; Perseus Digital Library / Tufts).

## Significance

A public coordinate-and-chart scheme is a data-and-knowledge path.

## What is established and what is not

Established: later geography describes an Eratosthenic chart of the inhabited world. Not established: a recovered original drawing or that Ptolemy’s gazetteer is this same instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

Established here: a sourced, dated public instrument with a named contribution by Eratosthenes.

They are not a public rating.

Eratosthenes did not file a later UNESCO form, a later Loeb colophon, or a later museum label as a personal act. A portrait or conventional bust is not this mechanism. Allegation, reconstruction, and established occurrence stay distinct. Do not treat a museum wall map of 2020 as this scheme. Keep the carrier date of later English distinct from the received historical year stored in the date field. Do not read a later English edition as a recovered autograph of Eratosthenes.

## People

- Eratosthenes: https://factrail.ai/people/eratosthenes

## Drivers

- Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access

## Sources

- https://topostext.org/work/144
- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0198

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/era-oikoumene-map