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Most writers of practical geographies produced not maps, but written versions of oral travel instructions and topographical descriptions. Cartography was the province of the philosophical geographers, particularly those whose specialisms were astronomy and terrestrial phenomena. Such geographical studies had a long history, beginning with Anaximander of Miletos (first half of the sixth century BCE), credited by Diogenes Laertius (2.2) with inventing the sundial and being the first to draw the circumference (perimetron) of the earth and sea (Dilke 1985: 23).¹ Successive theoreticians combined personal observations, second-hand reports, celestial and mathematical models, and logical deduction to expand and improve the description of the world, but only a few used actual cartography (Irby 2012). Like the practical geographers, written descriptions dominated their field. Knowledge of the oikoumenē grew after Alexander’s conquests pushed back its horizons. In the third century BCE Eratosthenes – who invented the word geographia (Roller 2010: 1, 12ff) – created a world map representing these new lands, and his summation of the theories about cartographic projection constituted a scientific breakthrough (Dilke 1985: 32–35). Geographers, however, continued to debate with many criticisms, corrections, and controversies over the shape, proportions, and substance of the oikoumenē, and this discourse forms the bulk of Classical geographical writing. Such scholarship continued through late antiquity and led to the creation of several invaluable codices preserving the so-called “Minor Greek Geographers” – one such collection was assembled by Marcianus of Heraclea (sixth century CE) and preserved in the Codex Parisinus supplement grec 443 (Schoff 1927: 9; Diller 1952: 3ff; Shipley 2011: 1).