2 How did the world begin?

The first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins with a story about how the world came to be – a creation myth. In the modern world, many people still use stories to make sense of how the world came to be. These stories are called cosmologies. Putting Ovid’s cosmology into the context of other cosmology stories will help you to get a sense of the world he is imagining in the Metamorphoses, and allow you to develop a deeper understanding of the big questions that the poem asks.

Figure 4 World map designed by the Muslim scholar Al-Idrisi for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily in the 12th century. The map is oriented with the South at the top.

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World map drawn inside a circle, with the seas shaded in blue and the land in a pale beige. Mountain ranges are drawn in and the names are cities are marked in red in Arabic. The region that is known in Arabic as the Hijaz – in the modern state of Saudi Arabia – is at the centre of the map.

Figure 4 World map designed by the Muslim scholar Al-Idrisi for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily in the 12th century. The map is ...