Professor Emeritus of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki Cartography Department Evangelos Livieratos revealed that ancient Greeks living off the coast of Ionia – known nowadays as Asia Minor – from the city of Melitus were the first to use stars and their relationship with the earth’s surface like a GPS system to aid them in navigating around the Earth.
According to the professor’s presentation at the Gerovasili Museum, these ancient Ionian Greeks were essentially the first to adopt a form of GPS system in global history during the 7th Century BC since they utilized the position of the stars as satellites through their relationship to the earth’s surface.
Mr. Livieratos explained that the first known depiction of a map dates back to 30,000 BC and was discovered in northern Italy as a rock inscription.
“The rock inscriptions possibly portray some shacks, a curve which might be a natural barrier (mountain, forest or river) and on the other side of the curve animals”, the professor noted adding that. “Before the satellites, for thousands of years people were doing roughly the same thing as satellites do today, using the stars. They not only used the stars, but their relationship with the earth’s surface, much like satellites do today.”
He also underlined that a couple of centuries after the Ionian Greeks used this method to navigate, ancient people described and understood the sphere.
“A physical 3-dimensional sphere with meridians and parallels was invented around the era of Hipparhcus in the 2nd Century BC” according to the professor who also related that “Ptolemy, the Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer was the first to compile a detailed map/book of the 7,000 known places of his time and that is why he is considered the father of Geography.”
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Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Fyodor Bronnikov License: CC-BY-SA
