Ἄτλας

The Greek name Ἄτλας (Átlas) is of uncertain but much-debated etymology. The most widely accepted derivation connects it to the Proto-Indo-European root *telh₂- (to bear, to carry, to endure), through the prefixed form *n̥-tlh₂-nt- — the one who carries, the bearer. This root appears in Latin tolerare (to bear, to endure), from which English gets 'tolerate' and 'toleration.' An alternative etymology connects Átlas to the root *a-tl- from ἀ- (privative prefix, not) + τλῆναι (tlēnai, to endure) — 'the one who cannot endure' — though this interpretation is now less favored. In Greek myth, Atlas was a Titan who led his fellow Titans against the Olympian gods in the great war called the Titanomachy and, upon the Titans' defeat, was condemned by Zeus to stand at the western edge of the world and hold the heavens — the dome of the sky — on his shoulders for eternity. He was thus stationed at the boundary between the known world and the outer ocean, carrying the cosmic structure that separated earth from sky.

In Greek geographical tradition, Atlas gave his name to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa — the range near the western coast where the Titan was imagined to stand — and to the Atlantic Ocean, the sea beyond those mountains, at the edge of the known world. The name's geography is revealing: Atlas was placed at the western horizon because the west was where the sun set and where the ocean of encircling water was imagined to lie. He was the marker of the world's edge, the guarantor of the cosmic boundary between the inhabited world and what lay beyond it. Hercules visited him during the eleventh of his labors to retrieve the golden apples of the Hesperides, and temporarily took the sky onto his own shoulders while Atlas fetched the apples — a moment that introduces the Titan's almost comical resignation to his eternal punishment.

The word's transformation from a mythological figure to a geographical instrument was accomplished by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who in 1595 published his collected maps under the title Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi — 'Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World.' Mercator chose the name not for the obvious reason (Atlas holding the world up) but in honor of what he called 'the mythical King Atlas of Mauritania, a learned philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer.' He depicted on his title page not the Titan bearing the earth on his shoulders but a seated scholar surrounded by measuring instruments, examining a globe. The image of Atlas as a figure holding or supporting a globe was already established in art — in ancient and Renaissance sculpture, Atlas is often shown bearing a spherical celestial globe — and Mercator's title attached this iconography permanently to the word for a collection of maps.

The word 'atlas' underwent a fascinating extension in anatomy when the first vertebra of the cervical spine — the vertebra that supports the skull — was named the atlas by the anatomist Andreas Vesalius in the sixteenth century. Just as the mythological Atlas holds the sphere of the heavens on his neck and shoulders, the atlas vertebra holds the sphere of the skull. This anatomical naming is elegant in its precision: the atlas is the topmost vertebra, it has no vertebral body (unlike all other vertebrae), and it articulates with the occipital condyles of the skull in a way that allows the head to nod — the skull rests on the atlas and the atlas rotates against the axis (the second vertebra, also mythologically named: the axis was the turning point of the universe). The mythological Titan became simultaneously the cartographic collection and the anatomical vertebra, through the same underlying metaphor of bearing a sphere.