The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period.The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map (2nd …

Terminology. The term Frankish or Franconian (High German: Fränkisch) as a modern linguistic category was coined by the German linguist Wilhelm Braune (1850–1926) who used it as a term to designate historical West Germanic texts which he could not readily classify as belonging to either Saxon, Alemannic or Bavarian. He divided it into Low, Middle and High Franconian …