Atlas

Atlas, in Greek mythology, a personification of the mountain near Morocco, known to us as Mount Miltsin. According to the story, Atlas, the son of Iapetus and Clymena, was King of Mauretania. He took part with the Titans against Zeus, and was by way of punishment transformed into a mountain and condemned to bear the heavens on his shoulders. He was credited with being father of the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the Atlantides. The figure bearing the world on its shoulders was adopted by Mercator as the frontispiece of his first collection of maps, to which he gave the name Atlas, subsequently applied to all similar publications. Anatomists use the term to describe the first vertebra of the neck.