Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
provement. (The irony of this ideal society free of poverty and suffering is that the word utopia literally
means “no place”—More's little joke.)
The other two most notable literary “travel books” influenced by the extraordinary discoveries and ex-
plorations of this period are Sir Francis Bacon's
The New Atlantis
(1627), which, like
Utopia
, posits an
ideal society on a Pacific island, and Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(1726). Like the others, Swift
relied upon enormous public fascination with newly discovered exotic places to craft his satire of English
and European manners and society in his tales of a traveler to the islands of Lilliput, Laputa, Brobdingnag,
and a variety of other remote nations of the world.
Milestones in Geography I
5000
BC
to
AD
1507
Before Christ
c. 5000
Sailing ships are used on rivers in Mesopotamia.
c. 3000
Sailing ships are used on the Nile in Egypt.
c. 2900
The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is built as a tomb for Pharaoh Cheops (Khu-fu). The
sides of the pyramid, an almost perfect square at the base, are aligned on exact north-south and east-
west lines.
c. 2400
The Chinese introduce a method of taking astronomical observations based on the equator
and the poles; although not adopted in the West until the sixteenth century
AD
, this remains today
the standard astronomical recording method.
c. 2300
A map of the city of Lagash in Mesopotamia is carved in stone in the lap of a statue of a
god; it is the oldest known “city map.”
c. 2000
The first use of sail on seagoing vessels in the Aegean Sea.
c. 1800
Under Hammurabi, the famous lawgiver, star catalogs and planetary records are compiled
in Babylonia.
c. 1350-1251
Moses leads the Hebrews in the Exodus from Egypt. (This date is in dispute; other
suggested dates are as late as 1225
BC.
)
c. 1100
The Phoenicians, occupying what is now modern Lebanon, begin their expansion in the
Mediterranean region. Primarily seafaring traders, they will colonize the Mediterranean, most not-
ably in Carthage. Although eclipsed by the Greeks, their contributions were significant, particularly
in navigation and in the development of an alphabetic script from which the modern Western alpha-
bet is derived.
c. 900
A Babylonian world map is drawn on clay.
c. 750
Greek city-states begin to expand throughout the Mediterranean.
