In his Persian Wars (5.49-50), Greek-speaking historian Herodotus, who was born in Halicarnassus, in modern-day Turkey (Türkiye), describes a visit in 499 BCE by Aristagoras, known as a despot of Miletus, an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the modern village of Balat in Aydın Province, Turkey, to see Cleomenes, the king of Sparta, a prominent city-state in Laconia, in the south-eastern Peloponnesian region of Greece. Aristagoras took with him a bronze tablet that was said to contain an engraving of a map of the entire world. Aristagoras hoped to use the map to convince Cleomenes of the riches on offer in Persia, if he would only attack the Persian king in his capital at Susa, located in modern-day Iran's Khuzestan province. Having never seen such a map before, Cleomenes struggled to grasp its scale. Nor did its features seduce him into believing that Persia was a land ripe for conquest. Cleomenes had no desire to go traipsing off into the deep unknown, and so declined Aristagoras' offer when he learned of Susa's distance from the sea.
To us, this story is perhaps difficult to comprehend because we have easy access to maps. Think about how you picture a map of the world. You probably see a global map, aligned to the north, with Europe at its centre. The American continents are positioned to the west, Asia is east, while Africa is south. Now imagine the centre of the map is the Americas. Europe would now be east, while Asia is west. But what if you imagine the centre of the map is Africa. Europe is north, not west, and there is no discernible way to divide the European and Asian continents. But what if you have no visual map? Your only guides are place names and stories. You do not have a compass to tell you what is north, east, south or west. You do not know the shape of islands, how far away they are, or where they are. You have no intimate knowledge of coastlines you have never visited. How would you perceive the world? Where is its centre? Does it even have a centre?
Many of our perceptions of the modern world and indeed the ancient world are shaped by a projection drawn by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. Through Mercator's projection we can plot the areas of different empires, and see groups of countries coloured red for Rome or blue for Greece depending on the time period. But to simply think of groups of people as blocks of colour on a map prevents us from seeing the ancient world as its people did. Perhaps we should put our maps aside for a time, and think of the world through their eyes. Cleomenes did not know where Susa was, or anything about the geography or administration of ancient Persia. It was effectively a mystery to him. Therefore, should we ourselves assume that we know anything about the people or order of the ancient world through association with our present day maps? Let's start again, without our map.