History of geography

He is the first to have noted the process by which large rivers, such as the Nile, build up deltas, and is also the first recorded as observing that winds tend to blow from colder regions to warmer ones.

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 increase in height as one moves north.

Conquerors also carried out exploration, for example, 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 set 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.

Posidonius set out to get a measurement, but his number actually was considerably smaller than the real one, yet it became accepted that the eastern part of Asia was not a huge distance from Europe.

Instruments and principles used included sun dials for determining direction, theodolites for measuring horizontal angles,[15] 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:[16] Around AD 400 a scroll map called the Peutinger Table was made of the known world, featuring the Roman road network.

[26] From the 1st century AD onwards, official Chinese historical texts contained a geographical section, which was often an enormous compilation of changes in place-names and local administrative divisions controlled by the ruling dynasty, descriptions of mountain ranges, river systems, taxable products, etc.

The chapter gave general descriptions of topography in a systematic fashion, given visual aids by the use of maps (di tu) due to the efforts of Liu An and his associate Zuo Wu.

[30] The Shui Jing (Waterways Classic) was written anonymously in the 3rd century during the Three Kingdoms era (attributed often to Guo Pu), and gave a description of some 137 rivers found throughout China.

[31] In the 6th century, the book was expanded to forty times its original size by the geographers Li Daoyuan, given the new title of Shui Jing Zhu (The Waterways Classic Commented).

The Song dynasty poet, scholar, and government official Fan Chengda (1126–1193) wrote the geographical treatise known as the Gui Hai Yu Heng Chi.

The 14th-century Yuan dynasty geographer Na-xin wrote a treatise of archeological topography of all the regions north of the Yellow River, in his book He Shuo Fang Gu Ji.

The geographer Hierocles (6th century) authored the Synecdemus (prior to AD 535) in which he provides a table of administrative divisions of the Byzantine Empire and lists the cities in each.

[36] Beginning with Italy and progressing counterclockwise including Africa, Egypt and the western Middle East, George lists cities, towns, fortresses and administrative divisions of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire.

[41] Syrian bishop Jacob of Edessa (633–708) adapted scientific material sourced from Aristotle, Theophrastus, Ptolemy and Basil to develop a carefully structured picture of the cosmos.

Further details about some of the authors are given below: In the early 10th century, Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, a Persian originally from Balkh, founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad.

Palermo had become a crossroads for travelers and traders from many nations and the Norman King Roger II, having great interest in geography, commissioned the creation of a book and map that would compile all this wealth of geographical information.

The Mongols also had wide-ranging knowledge of the geography of Europe and Asia, based in their governance and ruling of much of this area and used this information for the undertaking of large military expeditions.

See also: Maps of the Yuan Dynasty During the 15th century, Henry the Navigator of Portugal supported explorations of the African coast and became a leader in the promotion of geographic studies.

Among the most notable accounts of voyages and discoveries published during the 16th century were those by Giambattista Ramusio in Venice, by Richard Hakluyt in England, and by Theodore de Bry in what is now Belgium.

European overseas expansion led to the rise of colonial empires, with the contact between the "Old" and "New World"s producing the Columbian Exchange: a wide transfer of plants, animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases and culture between the continents.

The implied hierarchy of knowledge that perpetuated throughout these institutions has only been recently challenged, with the Royal Geographical Society enabling women to join as members in the 20th century.

In the Fifth Paper in Reply to Clarke, Leibniz stated: "Men fancy places, traces, and space, though these things consist only in the truth of relations and not at all in any absolute reality".

During the Age of Enlightenment, advancements in science mean widening human knowledge and enable further exploiting nature, along with industrialization and empire expansion in Europe.

David Hume, "the real father of positivist philosophy" according to Leszek Kolakowski, implied the "doctrine of facts", emphasizing the importance of scientific observations.

Kant tried to reconcile the division of sense and reason by stressing moral rationalism grounded on aesthetic experience of nature as "order, harmony, and unity".

[55][56] Humboldt is admired as a great geographer, according to D. Livingstone that "modern geography was first and last a synthesizing science and as such, if Goetzmann is to be believed, 'it became the key scientific activity of the age'."

In his letter, he made observations while his "attention will never lose sight of the harmony of concurrent forces, the influence of the inanimate world on the animal and vegetable kingdom."

The philosophical basis of this field in United States was laid out by Richard Hartshorne, who defined geography as a study of areal differentiation, which later led to criticism of this approach as overly descriptive and unscientific.

During its heyday in the 1970s through the early 1990s, regional geography made substantive contributions to students' and readers' understanding of foreign cultures and the real world effects of the delineation of borders.