ABSTRACT
The diversity of spatial notions in antiquity, which ranges from mythical conceptions to attempts to define space and sophisticated theoretical approaches, is immediately apparent alone from the relatively large number of terms that ancient Greek offers for place and space. According to Plato, space is the “midwife of becoming.” There is almost no one who contributed more to the advancement of a spatially oriented historiography in France than the historian Fernand Braudel. Braudel’s spatial model of organization is nevertheless interesting from an analytical point of view. The roots of the most of the words that today express spatial content in Indo-European languages lie in Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages. Spatial notions in the Germanic languages tend to derive from common Germanic or Old Saxon roots. Every spatial constellation that is created or thought by human beings takes place at a given time, has a rhythm, a specificity, and hence also a historicity of its own.
