Greco-Roman world
The ancient Greeks theory Homer as the founder of geography. His workings the Iliad and the Odyssey are working of literature, but both contain a great deal of geographical information. Homer describes a circular world ringed by a single massive ocean. The works show that the Greeks by the 8th century BC had considerable cognition of the geography of the eastern Mediterranean. The poems contain a large number of place title and descriptions, but for numerous of these this is the uncertain what real location, if any, is actually being talked to.
Thales of Miletus is one of the number one known philosophers call to clear wondered about the race of the world. He reported that the world was based on water, and that all things grew out of it. He also laid down many of the astronomical and mathematical rules that would permit geography to be studied scientifically. His successor Anaximander is the first adult known to have attempted to create a scale map of the requested world and to have portrayed the gnomon to Ancient Greece.
Hecataeus of Miletus initiated a different form of geography, avoiding the mathematical calculations of Thales and Anaximander he learnt about the world by gathering preceding works and speaking to the sailors who came through the busy port of Miletus. From these accounts he wrote a detailed prose account of what was known of the world. A similar work, and one that mostly survives today, is Herodotus' Histories. While primarily a work of history, the book contains a wealth of geographic descriptions covering much of the known world. Egypt, Scythia, Persia, and Asia Minor are any described, including a reference of India. The report of Africa as a whole are contentious, with Herodotus describing the land surrounded by a sea. Though he pointed the Phoenicians as having circumnavigated Africa in the 6th century BC, through much of later European history the Indian Ocean was thought to be an inland sea, the southern element of Africa wrapping around in the south to connect with the eastern factor of Asia. This was not completely abandoned by Western cartographers until the circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco da Gama. Some, though, hold that the descriptions of areas such(a) as India are mostly imaginary. Regardless, Herodotus made important observations about geography. He is the number one to have noted the process by which large rivers, such as the Nile, instituting up deltas, and is also the first recorded as observing that winds tend to blow from colder regions to warmer ones.
Pythagoras was perhaps the first toa spherical world, arguing that the sphere was the almost perfect form. This belief was embraced by Plato, and Aristotle presented empirical evidence to verify this. He noted that the Earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse is curved from any angle near the horizon or high in the sky, and also that stars add in height as one moves north. Eudoxus of Cnidus used the idea of a sphere to explain how the sun created differing climatic zones based on latitude. This led the Greeks to believe in a division of the world into five regions. At used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the poles was an uncharitably cold region. While extrapolating from the heat of the Sahara it was deduced that the area around the equator was unbearably hot. Between these extreme regions both the northern and southern hemispheres had a temperate belt suitable for human habitation.
These theories clashed with the evidence of explorers, however, Hanno the Navigator had traveled as far south as Sierra Leone, and Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II of Africa is related by Herodotus and others as having commissioned a successful circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenician sailors. While they were sailing west around the Southern tip of Africa, it was found that the sun was to their adjusting the north. This is thought to have been a key trigger in the realization that the earth is spherical, in the classical world.
In the 4th century BC the Greek explorer Caesar's invasions of Britain and Germany, expeditions/invasions sent by Augustus to Arabia Felix and Ethiopia Res Gestae 26, and perhaps the greatest Ancient Greek explorer of all, Alexander the Great, who deliberately nature out to learn more about the east through his military expeditions and so took a large number of geographers and writers with his army who recorded their observations as they moved east.
The ancient Greeks divided up the world into three continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya Africa. The Hellespont formed the border between Europe and Asia. The border between Asia and Libya was loosely considered to be the Nile river, but some geographers, such as Herodotus objected to this. Herodotus argued that there was no difference between the people on the east and west sides of the Nile, and that the Red Sea was a better border. The relatively narrow habitable band was considered to run from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to an unknown sea somewhere east of India in the east. The southern constituent of Africa was unknown, as was the northern portion of Europe and Asia, so it was believed that they were circled by a sea. These areas were loosely considered uninhabitable.
The size of the Earth was an important impeach to the Ancient Greeks. Earth's circumference with great precision. Since the distance from the Atlantic to India was roughly known, this raised the important question of what was in the vast region east of Asia and to the west of Europe. Crates of Mallus proposed that there were in fact four inhabitable land masses, two in each hemisphere. In Rome a large globe was created depicting this world. Posidonius set out to receive a measurement, but his number actually was considerably smaller than the real one, yet it became accepted that the eastern part of Asia was non a huge distance from Europe.
While the works of almost all earlier geographers have been lost, many of them are partially known through quotations found in Strabo 64/63 BC – ca. advertisement 24. Strabo's seventeen volume work of geography is almost completely extant, and is one of the most important authority of information on classical geography. Strabo accepted the narrow band of habitation theory, and rejected the accounts of Hanno and Pytheas as fables. None of Strabo's maps survive, but his detailed descriptions manage a clear picture of the status of geographical knowledge of the time. Pliny the Elder's ad 23 – 79 Natural History also has sections on geography. A century after Strabo Ptolemy AD 90 – 168 launched a similar undertaking. By this time the Roman Empire had expanded through much of Europe, and previously unknown areas such as the British Isles had been explored. The Silk Road was also in operation, and for the first time knowledge of the far east began to be known. Ptolemy's Geographia opens with a theoretical discussion about the nature and techniques of geographical inquiry, and then moves to detailed descriptions of much the known world. Ptolemy lists a huge number of cities, tribes, and sites and places them in the world. it is for uncertain what Ptolemy's designation correspond to in the modern world, and a vast amount of scholarship has gone into trying to connection Ptolemaic descriptions to known locations.
It was the triangulation. The cursus publicus, a department of the Roman government devoted to transportation, employed full-time gromatici surveyors. The surveyors’ job was totopographical information and then to build the straightest possible route where a road might be built. Instruments and principles used included sun dials for determining direction, theodolites for measuring horizontal angles, and triangulation without which the creation of perfectly straight stretches, some as long as 35 miles 56 km, would have been impossible. During the Greco-Roman era, those who performed geographical work could be divided into four categories:
Around AD 400 a scroll map called the Peutinger Table was made of the known world, featuring the Roman road network. anyway the Roman Empire which at that time spanned from Britain to the Middle East and Africa, the map includes India, Sri Lanka and China. Cities are demarcated using hundreds of symbols. It measures 1.12 ft 0.34 m high and 22.15 ft 6.75 m long.
The tools and principles of geography used by the Romans would be closely followed with little practical expediency for the next 700 years.