Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in the death of his mother. Izanagi was livid and beheaded the child,
whose blood became eight more gods.
GREEK BELIEFS
Greek culture and thinking has a long history that stretches back to
the sixth century
BC
. The earliest writings about the Earth and its
chronology were by Hesiodus, the father of Greek didactic poetry, who
was born at Ascra near to Mount Helicon in about 850
BC
. After an
early career as a farmhand he began to write poetry, having been
commissioned to do so by the muses. Following the death of his father
he fell out with his brother and emigrated. His most famous works are
The Works and the Days, a poem with an agricultural theme running
through it, which contains a section entitled 'Five ages of the world',
and Theogony, in the first portion of which he describes the emergence
of Earth (Gaea) from Chaos. Hesiodus' life ended violently with his
murder and his body was thrown into the sea, only to be returned to
the shore by dolphins. His dogs found the murderers of their master
and threw the two guilty men into the sea where they drowned.
Later thoughts on the chronology of the Earth can be attributed
to the Ionian natural philosopher Anaximander (610-547
BC
). He was
born in the town of Miletus which is situated south of Ephesus inwhat
is now Turkey. Apart from writing about the nature of time and the
Universe, and introducing the sundial into Greece, he devised a sys-
tem of cartography and so is styled by some commentators as the
'inventor of maps'. Anaximander considered that time was endless,
but that the Earth's history was cyclical - it and the Universe were
being continually destroyed and subsequently reborn. The Universe
and Earth were derived from an endless mass of matter, from which
evolved a ring of fire comprising the stars, Sun andMoon that enclosed
the Earth in its centre. Anaximander was perhaps the first commen-
tator on evolution, nearly two and a half millennia before Charles
Darwin. He said that all terrestrial animals had arisen from amphi-
bians, but that humans had evolved from fish. It was natural, in an
area prone to earthquakes, that the early Greek philosophers should
