Books: Herodotus to Byrd

A HISTORY OF EXPLORATION—Sir Percy Sykes—Macmillan ($7). Who first went exploring purely in search of knowledge is unknown. Merchant-explorers more than three millennia before Christ were the Sumerians, whose high civilization glimmered before history's dawn. Exploration was a by-product of trade and conquest for the Assyrians, the Minoans of Crete, the Phoenicians, the Greeks. Anaximander of Miletus (Sixth Century B. C.) drew up the earliest known map of the world, which he regarded as a cross-section of a great cylinder hanging from the heavens. A generation later Hecataeus wrote Periodos, the first...