History of Geography

by Sir John Scott Keltie; O. J. R. Howarth

The birthplace of Greek geographical theory is to be found, not in Greece proper, but in Asia Minor. Miletus, a seaport of Ionia, near the mouth of the Mæander, became the leading Greek city during the seventh to the sixth centuries B.C., trading as far as Egypt and throwing off colonies especially towards the north, on the shores of the Hellespont and the Euxine. It was thus an obvious repository for geographical knowledge, besides being a famous centre of learning in a wider sense. Thales of Miletus (640–546 B.C.), father of Greek philosophers, geometers, and astronomers, may have learnt astronomy from a Babylonian master in Cos, and became acquainted with Egyptian geometry by visiting that country; he applied geometrical theory to the practical measurement of height and distance. He has been wrongly credited with the conception of the earth as a sphere. That conception is actually credited to Pythagoras, who, born in Samos probably in 582 B.C., settled in the Dorian colony of Crotona in Southern Italy about 529 and founded the Pythagorean school of philosophy. He (or his school), however, evolved the correct conception of the form of the earth rather by accident (so far as concerns any scientific consideration) than by design, for the Pythagorean reasoning was abstract in nature, in distinction from that of the Ionian school, which sought material explanations for the phenomena of the universe. The Pythagoreans (whose view does not greatly affect the later history of geographical theory) conceived the earth as a globe revolving in space, with other planets, round an unseen central fire whose light was reflected by the sun, just as the moon reflects the sun’s light. Later the philosopher Parmenides, of Elea in Italy (c. 500 B.C.), considered the universe to be composed of concentric spheres or zones consisting of the primary elements of fire and darkness or night. Anaximander (611-c. 547 B.C.), a disciple of the more practical Ionian school, and a pupil or companion of Thales, conceived an earth of the form of a cylinder. He is said to have introduced into Greece the gnomon, a primitive instrument for determining time and latitude, and to have made a map. The first actual record of a Greek or Miletan map, however, occurs half a century after his time, when in 499 B.C. Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, asked aid of Cleomenes of Sparta against Persia, and showed him a map, engraved on bronze, of the route of his proposed expedition. Anaximenes, of Anaximander’s school, gave the earth an oblong rectangular form.

The physical division of land into continents, though obvious, presupposes the existence of a certain measure of geographical theory. Still more obvious as a primitive division would be a division simply between “my land” and “yours.” But there was a clear necessity at a very early period for names to distinguish, generally, the lands which lay on one side and the other of the Ægean-Mediterranean waters. It may well be that the names of Europe and Asia did not possess precisely this application in their original forms. Their derivation has been assigned to an Asiatic source; they signify on this view the lands respectively of darkness or sunset and of sunrise or light—that is to say, the lands towards west and towards east. The earliest known Greek reference to Europe, moreover, does not indicate on the face of it a distinction from Asia, though it does indicate a distinction from lands separated from it partly or wholly by water. The Homeric hymn to Apollo, which may be dated in the eighth or seventh century B.C., refers to dwellers in the rich Peloponnese and in Europe and in the sea-girt islands—albeit in place of “Europe” some scholars would read a word signifying simply “mainland.” The name of Europe, if admitted here, is taken to mean no more than northern Greece, and would thus lend some colour to an early tradition that it was derived from a Macedonian city called Europus. However this may be, it is easy to conceive that the name of Europe, being at no time given to a territory with defined frontiers, was capable of an elastic application, which would be gradually extended, or (as is more probable under primitive conditions of geographical knowledge) would remain so vague as to permit of no clear definition.

But when the names of continents emerge in Greek usage they afford the necessary distinction between the lands on either side of the Ægean-Mediterranean. They so emerge in the 6th–5th centuries B.C., and the distinction appears by that time to have been perfectly familiar, though the precise application, as will be seen, was a matter of controversy. The poet Æschylus (525–456 B.C.), who, by the way, was also a traveller, possibly to Thrace, certainly to Sicily, was acquainted with the distinction, as appears, for example, from passages in the historical drama of the Persæ, which deals with the failure of Xerxes’s invasion of Europe from Asia, and his retreat across the Hellespont. The distinction would hardly have been introduced into a stage-play if it had not been commonly recognized. In Prometheus Unbound, again, Æschylus refers to the river Phasis (Aras) as the boundary between Europe and Asia. Finally, Herodotus states in an early chapter of his work that the Persians appropriate to themselves Asia and the barbarian races inhabiting it, while they consider as separate Europe and the Greek race, and he does not find it necessary to offer any explanation of the names here. At a later stage the continental distinction appears to have been based on or associated with a distinction between temperate and hot lands.

Fig. 2.—The World as supposed to have been conceived by Hecatæus.

Hecatæus of Miletus (c. 500 B.C.) has been hailed as the father of geography on the ground of his authorship of a Periodos, or circuit of the earth, the first attempt at a systematic description of the known world and its inhabitants. But even if he wrote such a work, evidence has been adduced that the extant fragments of it belong to a later forgery. However, he was a Miletan and a traveller, besides a statesman. The map which is supposed to have accompanied his work maintained the old popular idea of the earth as a circular disc, encircled by the ocean. Greece was the centre of the world, and the great sanctuary of Delphi was the centre of Greece. If this Periodos is taken as a forgery, there is a parallel case in the Periplus of the Mediterranean attributed to Scylax of Caryanda, a contemporary of Hecatæus. If Scylax wrote any such work, in its extant form it is a century and a half later than his time. He is said to have explored the Indus at the command of Darius Hystaspis, and to have returned by the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 B.C.) was a historian, but was widely travelled, and understood the importance of a knowledge of the geography of a country, and its bearings on the history of its people. He only introduces geographical information in so far as it throws light on the history with which he is dealing, or because it seemed to him of special interest, or as a report of curious information obtained from the countries which he visited; but he has certainly some more exact information about the restricted world of which Greece was the centre than any of his predecessors. He visited Egypt and the Greek colony of Cyrene, on the coast of what is now Tripoli. There is reason to believe that in Asia he got as far as Babylon on the Euphrates, and perhaps as far as Susa beyond the Tigris. He crossed the Euxine to the northern shore as far as Olbia on the Borysthenes, and probably went round to the south-east coast to the country of the Colchians, whose characteristics he describes as if from personal knowledge. He does not seem to have got very far west in the Mediterranean, though he spent the latter part of his life in southern Italy. There is little doubt that he visited several of the Grecian islands. But apart from the information about the countries round the Mediterranean which he collected personally, his history contains material from various sources concerning the countries and peoples in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This information, on the whole, is of the vaguest kind, and shows that the Greeks whom Herodotus may be taken to represent were only groping their way with regard to a knowledge of the world outside the limits of their own restricted sphere. This vague knowledge included a considerable section of western Asia as far as the Caspian Sea and the river Araxes. Herodotus had also heard of India and of the Indus river, and had a fair knowledge of the Persians, the Medes, and the Colchians, as also of part at least of Arabia. Eastwards, in what might be called Central Asia, he had heard of the Bactrians and Sogdians to the south of the Jaxartes (Syr-darya, the northern of the two great affluents of the Sea of Aral), and of the Massagetæ, Issedones, Arimaspians, and other races or peoples; those to the north of the Jaxartes being included, according to Herodotus, in Europe, which he took to extend from the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Hellespont and up the Phasis (Rion) river, from its mouth in the Black Sea, to the Caspian. He also divided Asia from Libya (Africa) along the axis of the Red Sea, and was thus in conflict with others who had divided Europe from Asia at the Tanais, and Asia from Libya at the Nile. He would not permit a theoretical boundary-line to “bisect a nationality,” as the Nile does.

Fig. 3.—The World according to Herodotus B.C. 450.

It may be well to examine Herodotus’s geographical knowledge in some detail, as representing the general knowledge possessed by a student (increased by his own travels) as distinct from that possessed by traders and colonists in different particular directions. His knowledge of Europe proper was contained within rather narrow limits. He knew, from personal knowledge, or from information obtained from merchants and colonists familiar with the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea), of the country lying to the north of that sea for some distance, of the rivers which flowed into it from the north and from the west, and of various peoples either settled in or wandering over the land that is now mainly included in Russia. His notions of the comparative dimensions of the Euxine and of the Mæotis Palus (Sea of Azov) are altogether erroneous, as might have been expected; but he knew (though in the main vaguely) of the Tanais (Don), the Borysthenes (Dnieper), and other rivers which flow into those seas. The Ister (Danube) he knew as a river of considerable importance, but he made it rise in Spain and flow north-east and east through the greater part of Europe. He conceived it as corresponding to some extent in the direction of its course with that of the Nile on the other side of the Mediterranean. He had some vague notion of the Iberians and of the Celts, as inhabiting the country to the north of the Pillars of Hercules. He knew something of the country lying to the north of Greece, Illyria, Thessaly, and Thrace, and the Rhodope mountains. He has much to tell of the Scythians inhabiting the country north of the Black Sea, but it is difficult to make out exactly to what race they belonged and whither they had wandered; they may have been the forerunners of the Slav peoples. Of Europe to the north of the Danube, and of the Scythian country, he had no information of any importance. He did not believe in the Hyperboreans, nor did he credit the statement that there was any sea north of Europe. He has a good deal to say about Africa. He had been up the Nile as far as the first cataract to the old city of Elephantine, but above that his information is vague and largely erroneous. He knew of the great bend which the Nile takes to the west above Elephantine, and had heard of Meroe on the other side of that bend; but his notion of the length of Africa was so erroneous that, instead of carrying the Nile south into the interior of the continent, he made it rise far to the west and run eastwards before it turned north at Meroe. But he at least controverted the view that it rose in the ocean itself to the south—a belief based possibly on some rumour, transmitted through many lips, of the existence of great lakes towards its headwaters. As for a river flowing west-and-east, in the west of the continent, he had heard of such a river in a story of five Nasamonian youths who travelled south from the shore of the Syrtis, crossed the desert for many days, and were at last taken captive by black men of small stature, who carried them to a city on the banks of this river, whence they were subsequently allowed to return. It has been eagerly discussed what truth underlies this story, and whether the river was the Niger in its upper course; but at best the account added little to the knowledge of distant Africa. The idea of a pygmy people dwelling towards the southern shore of the ocean is older than the Iliad in which it is found (III, 3). Herodotus’s conception of the shape of Africa did not carry its southward extension much beyond the latitude of Cape Guardafui. He discarded the popular conception of the round earth, regarding it as longer from east to west than from north to south. The philosopher Democritus of Abdera (born c. 470–450) exhibited the same conception in a map which he constructed.