St. Patrick's Church, Fifth Avenue, New York, USA. If you happen to be here, you may notice that in front of the Rockefeller Center International Building opposite the church, there is a statue that often appears in Hollywood movies, and above the pedestal there is a man carrying the earth, he is Atlas, the ancient Greek myth and legend of Hercules, a man who stands tall in the sky. Today, Atlas is not just responsible for the earth, and the word Atlas has become a term for "atlas" in many European Chinese.
We're going to tell the story of Atlas today.
St. Patrick's Church and Atlas Statue
In ancient Greek mythology, Atlas was the brother of Prometheus, the prophetic god who created humanity, and they were all descendants of the Titan god I'apoutos. In the Titan War with Zeus, Prometheus sided with Zeus, while Atlas's side was defeated in the ten-year-long Battle of the Gods, because he was Hercules, so he was sent to the West to take charge of the Celestial Realm.
Atlas in Civilization 6
For the sake of world peace and stability, Atlas began his journey to the top of the sky. This job is naturally a 24X365 work system all year round, although Atlas is infinitely powerful, but it is boring to do after all. In another Greek myth, Hercules, the god hercules, was ordered to go to the Sacred Garden to steal the golden apple, and he followed Prometheus's advice to find Atlas to complete the task, in return for carrying the celestial realm on his behalf during Atlas's departure.
Atlases often appear on stone columns of classical architecture
However, after killing a hundred-headed dragon and tricking the fairy into picking the golden apple, Atlas told Hercules that he had had enough of the job and no longer wanted to fight the sky. A confused Hercules silently agreed, but he begged Atlas to resist for a while, so that he could find a comfortable straw mat on his shoulder and then come back to take over. The straight man Atlas agreed to this request, and Hercules naturally hurried to slip away.
Atlas in the coin, the designer found him a helper
From ancient Greek times to modern times, Atlas has been an object of worship, so many familiar place names are now related to Atlas. In ancient Europe, the scope and name of the Atlantic Ocean were not uniform, one of the names is that people considered this vast ocean to be the residence of Atlas according to the legend that Atlas lived in the far West, so the Atlantic Ocean was named (Atlantic Ocean), meaning "Sea of Atlas". By the seventeenth century the name had been extended to the present Atlantic, and in the 18th century it officially became the standard place name used today.
Atlas Mountains in northern Africa
Legend has it that atlantis Rising, the lost empire of the Atlantic, means "Island of Atlas". The Atlas Mountains, which stretch for thousands of miles in northern Africa, are also named after what is considered to be the home of Atlas. In addition, the etymology of Atlanta and Atlantic City in the United States also comes from Atlas.
Mercator's map of the world in 1587
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In Europe, some people already proposed that the earth was round in ancient Greece, and by the Renaissance, with the great discovery of geography to verify this theory, the geographical science of Europe advanced by leaps and bounds, and the map became more and more accurate. At this time, Atlas, who was originally responsible for standing on the earth and the heavens in mythology, suddenly changed his work site from the West Pole to various maps, atlases and globes, and became a hero on the shoulders of the earth.
Portrait of Mercator
At the end of the 16th century, the famous Western European geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) published his magnum opus Atlas (Atlas sive Cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura), a scientist who rarely traveled and whose main knowledge came from the library, For the first time, the term atlas was used on atlas covers. And chose the image of Atlas as the cover.
Cover of Mercator's Atlas
The atlas caused a stir when it was published, and his use of Atlas became a fashionable culture that competed for, and many atlas authors have since painted Atlas on their covers with atlases bearing the image of the earth on their backs, and like Mercator, used the word Atlas as the title of the atlas, and over time, "Atlas" became a term representing the atlas.
Mercator died more than a decade after atlas in 1607
For example, you can see the word Atlas in the names of atlases such as The times altas if the world and The national atlas of the united states of america. In addition to atlases, various individual maps and globes also appeared in the image of Atlas carrying the earth. Atlas was inadvertently replaced by Mercator for a new job, except that he was now standing on Earth carrying the Earth.
Atlas in a single map, the author also very kindly sent a stick
Today, atlases with both strength and tenacity can be seen everywhere in Europe and the United States, such as Boston Dynamics' net red robot called Atlas, and Volkswagen's new medium-sized SUV released in 2016 is also called Atlas. As long as you pay a little attention, we can see the image of Atlas carrying the earth in various buildings and works of art in Europe and the United States.
Atlas in the Globe
In the well-known strategy game Civilization 6, the opening animation and various promotional posters are inseparable from Atlas, which is powered by the earth. Atlas appears not only in games, but also in film and television dramas, such as Atlas Shrugged, a science fiction suspense film based on the novel of the same name that has been popular in American schools since the 1950s, Chinese translated as "Atlas Shrugging" or "Earth Trembling". In the cover of the novel and the movie poster, the image of Atlas carrying the earth is inseparable.
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Atlas in a movie poster
The science fiction film "Cloud Atlas" released in 2012 was translated as "Cloud Atlas" in China, and it is clear that this translated name was influenced by the meaning of the word "atlas". Some companies have designed Atlas's image of the earth as their own symbol, such as Atlas Films, which allowed Atlas to carry the film with a small use, but this also gave Hercules a good rest.
Atlas in the company logo
Atlas Airlines in the United States is a cargo airline, And hercules became the ambassador for the company to solicit customer deliveries, following the plane every day to fly around the world, Atlas began to stand on the plane to carry the earth.
Atlas on the plane
From the new definition of Atlas Mercator, his research results have been serving us to this day, even if you are not familiar with European and American culture Chinese. The earth is round, a round ball to convert into a flat map needs to be projected, when we open Baidu Map, AutoNavi Map or Google Maps, the map that comes into our eyes near the poles of the area is particularly large, and the paper world map commonly on both sides of the oval projection looks very different, because they all use the Web Mercator projection named after Mercator.
Modern online maps using Mercator projections
This is the story of Atlas, the hercules who rebelled against Zeus and followed the guidance of scientists, from standing on top of the sky to shouldering the earth.
Author: Cao Jiang
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