Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
When would you plant some crops to keep yourself fed? After all, coconut milk and wild berries only
go so far.
Do you know the distance to the other side of the island? How would you measure it? And what about
your approximate location in the world? You've forgotten latitude and longitude exist. Do you know where
in the world you are?
If you managed to figure out all that, could you then determine what shape the world is? And how large
that world might be?
Well, the ancient Greeks—or more accurately, a varied group of people we have lumped together and
called the Greeks—managed to do just about all of these things. Of course, it took several geniuses work-
ing over the course of a few centuries to pull all of this together—and not without a few substantial mis-
takes that were kept alive for most of the next twenty centuries, influencing everyone from the hierarchy
of the Roman Catholic Church to Christopher Columbus.
But the Greeks did it. And they managed it without watches, telescopes, sextants, Black & Decker tape
measures, or any of the other useful little devices that have made accurate measurement of time and space
possible. The Greeks were not the first people to look at the world and attempt to explain its workings. The
Egyptians and Mesopotamians produced much of the groundwork from which the Greeks proceeded. And
the Indian and Chinese cultures were working things out in their own way for much of the same time.
But what set the early Greek thinkers apart from their contemporaries as well as from earlier cultures
was their systematic attempt to apply rational thought to the world. They were the first to explore the
notion of testing their ideas about the world in the beginning of what we now call the scientific method.
And while they fell back on myth and superstition when they were unable to explain the universe—just as
past and future generations of humanity would—they were the first to attempt to
know
the universe.
Geography
is a word derived from the Greek—
ge
, meaning “the earth,” and
graphe
, “to describe.”
Many Greeks thought and talked and wrote about geography without exactly calling it that. In fact,
Homer's epic
Odyssey
is viewed as one of the first geographic works in Western culture because it de-
scribes the many recognizable places that Odysseus (Ulysses) visited during his long voyage home from
Troy. (See Chapter 4, “Imaginary Places: Was There a Troy?”)
More scientific approaches to geography came about in Miletus, a Greek trading center that flourished
some seven hundred years before Christ in what is now modern Turkey. There, Greek philosopher-math-
ematicians began to apply mathematical principles to measuring the earth. Thales, a sort of ancient Thomas
Edison, combined his success in the olive oil business with an extraordinary ability to both ponder and
invent. He made several major contributions to geometry and was said to have accurately predicted a solar
eclipse in 585
BC.
But one of his influential conclusions was that the earth was a disk floating in water.
Anaximander, a younger colleague who introduced a sundial, made a rather astonishing guess when he
surmised from fossil remains that life originated in a sea that once covered much of the earth's surface. He
drew the first scaled world map. With Greece in the center, it showed a world bounded by an endless river
or sea. He believed that the earth was a cylinder with a disk, the habitable part, resting on top. But instead
of floating on an endless sea, as his mentor Thales had thought, Anaximander's earth was suspended freely
in space; the heavens were attached to a sphere that revolved around the earth, which explained the daily
circuit of sun, stars, and planets.
Other Greek writers, philosophers, historians, and mathematicians followed—Herodotus, Plato, and
Aristotle among them—all expanding the Greek inquiry into the size and shape of the world, its place in
the universe, and the bounds of human habitation. Plato believed the earth was spherical, but for philo-
sophical reasons, not through scientific evidence; the sphere, he believed, was the perfect geometric form.
Aristotle later agreed, but sought observable evidence, which he found in the shadow cast by the earth on
the face of the moon.
