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 M?ander, 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 sought9 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 ?gean-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 sunset10 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 ?gean-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 ?schylus (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 Pers?, which deals with the failure of Xerxes’s invasion of Europe from Asia, and his retreat across the Hellespont. The11 distinction would hardly have been introduced into a stage-play if it had not been commonly recognized. In Prometheus Unbound, again, ?schylus 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 Hecat?us.

Hecat?us of Miletus (c. 500 B.C.) has been hailed as12 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 Hecat?us. 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 Susa13 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 Massaget?, 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 the14 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 M?otis 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 Rhodope16 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 to17 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.

An important episode in the progress of a more accurate knowledge of the world of the Greeks was the Retreat of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon in 401–400 B.C. The younger Cyrus had made a great expedition from Sardis, in western Asia Minor, eastwards through the Cilician Gates to the Euphrates, and along the course of that river to the neighbourhood of Babylon. He was accompanied by a band of Greek mercenaries, who, after his defeat at Cunaxa, began the retreat of which Xenophon left a graphic account, containing what must have been to the Greeks much new information concerning the region from the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates northwards past Lake Van and through the mountains of Armenia, north and west to the shores of the Black Sea at Trapezus (Trebizond), and along the south coast of the Black Sea, partly by sea and partly by water, to Byzantium. Xenophon’s story is an illustration of the well-known fact that war is one of the chief means of promoting geographical knowledge. This will appear more clearly in the next important episode in the story of exploration—the campaign of Alexander the Great.

In the interval there were one or two writers from18 whose work something is to be gathered of Greek geographical knowledge and theory about the middle of the fourth century. The philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) may be referred to here in connection with his story, based on an Egyptian tradition, of the great island of Atlantis, that land which plays so important a part in later mythical geography. In the Egyptian story it lay just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and adjacent to it was an archipelago. This would aid its later identification with the Canaries, though it came also to be connected with America and other known lands besides, as well as giving name to an island in the Atlantic Ocean, the disproof of whose existence may almost be called modern. From Plato’s account of Atlantis as the home of a powerful people who in early times invaded the Mediterranean lands, it has also been sought to associate the tradition with Crete at the period of the ?gean civilization mentioned in the first chapter.

Some fragments exist of the writings of the historian Ephorus of Cyme in ?olis (c. 400–330 B.C.). He seems to have endeavoured to cover the whole field of the world as known to the Greeks, and conceived the four most distant regions of the earth to be occupied on the east by Indians, on the south by Ethiopians, on the north by Scythians, and on the west by Celts. The last he considered as occupying all Spain, as well as Gaul. Strabo (p. 24) commended his geographical work and his skill in separating myth from history. A document of this period is the Periplus, already referred to as known under the name of Scylax. This class of work became more and more common as navigation developed, and corresponded in some measure to the modern Admiralty guide or pilot. The Periplus19 is confined mostly to the regions known to the Greeks bordering the Mediterranean. From the Pillars of Hercules the writer follows the north coast eastwards, including the Adriatic and the Euxine as far as the mouth of the Tanais, which he regards as the continental boundary. He then follows the Levantine coast, the north African coast westward, and the west African coast as far as the island of Cerne. He incidentally makes what is regarded as the earliest extant mention of Rome; but his notions of rivers and other features away from the coast are generally erroneous.

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), in two of his extant works, the Meteorologica and the treatise on the Heavens, revealed something of his ideas on physical geography and the figure of the earth and its relations to the heavenly bodies. He believed the earth to be a sphere in the centre of the universe, because that was a form which matter gravitating towards a centre would necessarily assume, also because the shadow cast by the earth on the moon during an eclipse is circular. He accepted the conclusion that the circumference of the earth was 400,000 stadia (nearly 46,000 miles). His views with reference to the cosmical relations of the earth were the same as those adopted by Eudoxus of Cnidus (fl. middle fourth century), but he did his best to prove them. He adopted, however, the prevalent view that the habitable world was confined to the temperate zone between the tropics and the arctic regions. He believed there must be a temperate zone in the southern hemisphere, though he did not suggest that it must be inhabited. In the Meteorologica he treats of such subjects as weather, rain, hail, earthquakes, etc., and their causes. He recognized that20 changes took place in the relations of land and sea. His knowledge of the origin and course of rivers and their relation to mountain systems was confused, and mainly erroneous; and it would seem that little progress had been made in geographical knowledge since the time of Herodotus. In the work of Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos (c. 372–287), an important department of geographical study—that of distribution—finds a place in its particular application to plants.

Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), King of Macedon, however, during the last few years of his life, made possible by his campaigns a greater extension of Greek geographical knowledge than had taken place almost since Homeric times. When he passed eastward through Mesopotamia, by Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis, and through Media to the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, he was in a region which, though an ancient cradle of civilization, had been till then only vaguely known to the Greeks. Beyond that he entered new country, peopled by Herodotus and others with dubious tribal names. He came almost into the heart of Central Asia, founding a city on the upper course of the Jaxartes. Passing southwards through Bactria and across formidable ranges of mountains such as the Hindu Kush, he struck the upper course of the Indus, made his way down to its delta, and would have proceeded right into the heart of India and followed the Ganges to its mouth but for his mutinous troops. He returned through the north of Baluchistan and Persia to Ecbatana, and so homeward. He also sent a member of his staff, Nearchus, by sea along the coast of Baluchistan and Persia, in order to define it and to ascertain the extent of the Persian Gulf. Dic?archus21 of Messana, a pupil of Aristotle, who died early in the third century B.C., used the geographical results of Alexander’s expeditions, including the distances obtained by his bematists, or measurers by pacing. Dic?archus wrote a topography of Greece, and also drew on a map a parallel or equator, for the first time, so far as is known, along the length of the Mediterranean and, with a distorted idea of their relative directions, along the Taurus and Himalayan ranges. Before his time, and probably contemporaneously with Alexander’s campaigns, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) visited (practically discovered) Britain, and made mention of Thule, six days’ voyage north of it, having perhaps heard of the Orkneys and Shetlands. As these islands, however, are at no such great distance as is here suggested from the nearest point of Britain, the name of Thule has been variously taken to represent some part of Norway, the Faer?e, or Iceland: it certainly seems by some later writers to be applied to Scandinavia, and in literary usage came to signify the uttermost north. Pytheas also obtained an idea of the Baltic Sea, and is considered by some to have entered it; he is stated to have reached the River Tanais; but if that is to be considered as one of the north European rivers, and not the known Tanais of the Black Sea basin, its identity is doubtful. Pytheas was a trained astronomer; he was one of the first to calculate latitudes, and had that of Massilia nearly correct; he heard of the unbroken summer daylight and winter darkness of the far north, and he noted various features of geographical interest, such as the decrease in the number of different grain crops observed as he travelled northward. He appears, in fact, from the references in other authors, which alone furnish22 us with knowledge of his work, in the light of a scientific traveller of a type rare in his time.

Mathematical geography was carried a long step forward by Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 B.C.), a native of Cyrene, who became chief librarian at Alexandria under Ptolemy III Euergetes. He calculated the circumference of the earth. He considered Syene to be situated on the tropic (which it was not, precisely), because at noon on the day of the summer solstice the sun appeared to shine directly down a deep well there. He therefore observed the zenith distance of the sun at Alexandria at the same time, and obtained his result from this and the measured distance between Alexandria and Syene. His result was to make the earth’s circumference only about one-seventh greater than it actually is. He also estimated the size of the habitable earth (?cumene), and considered it, as a result, to be about double as long from west to east as it was broad from north to south. But his estimate of the distance from what is now the extremity of Brittany to the known eastern limit of India was about one-third too great. On a map of the world he drew seven parallels, using the few points of which the latitudes had been worked out, and also seven meridians at irregular distances apart. Hipparchus (middle and second half of the second century), an astronomer, native of Nic?a in Bithynia, who worked in Rhodes, drew an elaborate series of parallels, and made the division into 360 degrees; the spaces between the lines he called climata, or zones. The problem presented by meridians was more difficult, for there was no instrument for the calculation of longitude like the gnomon for that of latitude. A well-recognised line was that taken to lie from the mouth of the Danube to that of the Nile—Herodotus23 had used this—and southward up the latter river; but not only the line itself, but also the ideas of intermediate points lying on it, were rather far from the truth.

Eratosthenes in his writings also dealt with the history of geography and with physical geography. This last branch attracted a number of students about this period and later, as, for example, Agartharchides or Agatharchus of Cnidus (middle of the second century B.C.). Crates of Mallus, in the first half of the same century, expressed the view of the Stoic philosophers that the spherical earth was divided into four inhabited quarters—the ?cumene (the known world), the Antipodes, the Peri?ci, and the Ant?ci. Posidonius the Stoic (c. 130–50 B.C.), among his studies in various departments of knowledge, included such subjects as the ocean, volcanoes, and earthquakes; he observed the interaction of the sun and moon in their influence on tides. He recalculated the circumference of the earth, but obtained an underestimate considerably further from the truth than Eratosthenes’s overestimate; and, owing to his high scientific reputation, his error persisted in much later work. Posidonius, before settling at Rhodes, had travelled widely in Africa, Spain, and western Europe generally; and both he and Agartharchides, like other writers of this period, and Aristotle before them, recognized the importance of the human side of geography, and the influence of physical environment on the political and social régime. Polybius (c. 204–122 B.C.) of Megalopolis in Arcadia, historian, statesman, and military commander, was inspired by extensive travel to introduce the results of topographical and geographical studies throughout his history. Among travellers who rank more nearly among24 explorers there may be mentioned at this period Eudoxus of Cyzicus (fl. c. 130 B.C.), who went on a trading expedition to India, in command of a fleet which was despatched by Ptolemy Euergetes of Egypt with the specific object of exploring the Arabian Sea. Eudoxus subsequently tried without success to circumnavigate Africa, making at least two voyages along the east coast. Finally, it must be remembered that at this period the extension of the knowledge of the world was mainly due no longer to Greek, but to Roman, activities, and Roman conquests were pushed beyond the confines of accurate Greek knowledge in various directions. Much geographical material was made available by writers on Roman military expeditions. Thus Pompey was accompanied in the Caucasian region by Theophanes of Mytilene, as historian of his campaigns; Julius C?sar wrote his own account of lands into which he carried his arms (Gaul, etc.).

From all this it appears that, according to the lights of knowledge at the time, a fair conception existed of geographical study along the main lines which it follows to-day. There was therefore occasion for a general review of the whole subject; and this occasion was seized by Strabo, a native of Amasia in Pontus, who was born c. 63 B.C., and died in the second or third decade of the following century. He was educated partly at Rome, but his language and outlook were Greek. He travelled much, as far as Etruria, the Black Sea, and the borders of Ethiopia, as well as in Asia Minor, though he knew comparatively little of Greece. His geography, which was not finally completed till towards the close of his life, was the first attempt at covering the whole geographical field—mathematical, physical, and human—and his range was thus wider25 than that of Eratosthenes. Strabo used the recent Roman authorities to some extent, such as C?sar’s Commentaries (in part) and a map of the Roman Empire by M. Vipsanius Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, which was set up in Rome; and he also preferred the authority of Polybius to that of Pytheas, but his sources were mostly Greek. His appreciation of them was not always wise. He ranked the Homeric poems highly, but discredited Herodotus, who on some points had better information than he. He added nothing to the mathematical branch, in which Eratosthenes was his master. He thus accepted the spherical form of the earth, its dimensions as laid down by his predecessors, and its division into five zones. He recognized Hipparchus’s view that further astronomical observations were essential to precision in earth-measurement and the position of points on the surface; but it was outside his province to add to those existing. His work in the physical field, however, improved upon that of his predecessors, and his surveys of the features and products of the various lands must have been singularly valuable for reference. The apportionment of the seventeen books of his geography is not without interest as a rough guide to the distribution of available material and to the author’s outlook. He devoted two books to introductory matter, to Spain and France two, to Italy two, to northern and eastern Europe one, to Greece and adjacent lands three, to the main divisions and remoter parts of Asia one, to Asia Minor three, to India and Persia one, to Syria and Arabia one, to Egypt and the rest of Africa one.

Rome did not carry on the Greek tradition of the study of geographical theory. H. F. Tozer, quoting J. Partsch, writes: “It has been aptly remarked that26 the task which Eratosthenes set himself of measuring the earth by means of the heavenly bodies, and that of Agrippa, who measured the Roman provinces by milestones, may be taken as typical of the genius of the two nationalities respectively.” Thus Pomponius Mela, purporting to survey the world in his De Chorographia (written c. 50 A.D.), followed the coast and described various countries in passing, but by no means all, and added very little to geographical knowledge at large. Pliny the Elder (c. 23–79) devoted three books and part of another of his Historia Naturalis to geography; but his geography may (at least in considerable part) be compared with the arid text-book of a generation ago, though in some instances his descriptions (as of features in Palestine, Syria, and Armenia) are valuable. As bearing on the quotation made above, it may be said here that the famous Roman system of road building gave rise to two classes of road-books (as they may be termed), one consisting of lists of stations and distances, such as the Antonine Itinerary (probably, in its original form, of the late third or fourth century), the other diagrammatic, such as the Peutinger Table (probably of the first half of the third century, though named after a scholar of the sixteenth), on which roads, stations, and other details were presented in a map-like form, but independently of true scale or direction. The Roman agrimensores were skilled surveyors.

It is not, then, surprising that the two great theoretical geographers next to be considered are not associated with the capital of the Roman Empire. Of the work of Marinus of Tyre nothing is known beyond what is recorded by his immediate successor, Ptolemy, who used and acknowledged his results—as far as concerned the Mediterranean fully, and in respect of other27 countries to a modified extent. Ptolemy, mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, was a native of Egypt, who worked at or in the neighbourhood of Alexandria in the second century. His geographical book was called Geographike Syntaxis. He carried mathematical geography far beyond the standard of his predecessors. He used the theoretical division of the globe into five zones by the equator and the tropics, adopted Hipparchus’s division of the equator into 360 degrees, and worked out a network of parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude, first thus applying these terms in their technical sense. In mapping the habitable world he used the Fortunate Isles, beyond the western confines of Europe and Africa, as the location of his prime meridian. The errors which resulted from the vague idea as to the position of these islands (the Canaries and Madeira), and from the fact that Ptolemy followed Posidonius’s underestimate of the circumference of the globe and made his degree at the equator equal to 500 instead of 600 stadia,2 have been very fully analysed, but cannot be even summarized here.

2 Fifty instead of sixty geographical miles.

28

PTOLEM?US ROM? 1490.

Fig. 4.—The World according to Ptolemy.
Fig. 4. (left side)
Fig. 4. (right side)

Ptolemy had a strong tendency to exaggerate the size of the great land-masses—his Europe extended too far west (and the Mediterranean was made too long in consequence); his Africa was too wide, especially towards the south; his Asia was vastly exaggerated in its eastern extension, and many details, even in the Mediterranean area, were made too large. Ptolemy followed his predecessors in using the parallel of 36° N. as the axial line of the Mediterranean. It passes through the Straits of Gibraltar, the island of Rhodes, and the Gulf of Alexandria, and was theoretically prolonged30 eastward along the supposed line of the Taurus mountains and the range known to lie north of India. In respect to this line there were remarkable inaccuracies in laying down the coasts of the Mediterranean and in fixing the position of the points upon them. The sea itself was made not only too long, but too broad; Byzantium and the Black Sea were carried too far north, and the size of the sea of Azov was immensely exaggerated. On the other hand, Ptolemy restored the correct view, held by Herodotus, of the Caspian as an inland sea, and knew that the great river Volga entered it. Yet again, he knew nothing of Scandinavia, or of the land-locked Baltic Sea, marking only a small island of Scandia, possibly by confusion between the Scandinavian mainland and some Baltic island. But his idea of the British Isles may be taken as fairly correct, if allowance be made for their remoteness. He laid down some parts of the coast very fairly, but oriented the major axis of Scotland more nearly from east to west than from north to south; he also placed Ireland wholly more northerly than Wales. There is plenty of evidence in Ptolemy’s work of a growth of knowledge of remote lands, though much of it is vague, if not actually unintelligible to us. Thus in Asia he had an idea of the great central mountain ranges (Pamir, Tian-shan, etc.), for silk-traders had by now established trans-continental routes to China. Ptolemy had also some conception of the south-eastern coasts, which had probably been seen by Greek mariners as far as southern China. But he wholly misunderstood the form of the east of the continent, for beyond the Golden Chersonese (Malay Peninsula) there lies a vast gulf, the eastern shore of which represents his view of China, extending southward far beyond the31 equator, and facing west. Again, he had no conception of peninsular India—unless, indeed, his huge island of Ceylon (Taprobane) was drawn so by some confusion with the peninsula, as it was certainly also confused with Sumatra. Yet it would seem that he might have gathered a more accurate idea of India from the Periplus of the Erythr?an Sea, a guide to navigators dated about the year 80. This work furnished sailing directions from the Red Sea to the mouth of the Indus and the coast of Malabar, following the Arabian coast, although the possibility of crossing the open sea with the assistance of the monsoon was realized at a still earlier date. And the Periplus distinctly indicates the southward trend of the Indian coast-line.

Roman penetration of Africa gave Ptolemy some new details; he also conceived the Nile as formed by two headstreams arising in two lakes, possibly on the strength of some hearsay of the facts, and he marked the Mountains of the Moon in remoter Africa, which again suggests hearsay of the heights of Ruwenzori, Kenya, and others. The Romans had penetrated Ethiopia, and possibly the region of Lake Chad, and Ptolemy also used other sources of information about North Africa which are unknown from previous writers, but are completely vague and impossible to follow. Of the shape of the continent he was almost completely ignorant; he just realized that an indentation occurs in the Gulf of Guinea, but gave it nothing like its proper value, and carried the coast thence south-westward till the continent is broader at the southern limit of his knowledge than it is at the north.

Ptolemy’s work on physical features was on the whole poor, and he neglected the human side of geography. Discarding the idea of the circumfluent ocean,32 he supposed the extension of unknown lands northward in Europe, eastward in Asia, and southward in Africa, beyond the limits in which he attempted to portray their outlines; and he even suggested a land connection between south-eastern Asia and southern Africa. Before his time the precision of mathematical method had far surpassed that of the topographical material to which it was applied.

Pausanias, a Greek probably of Lydia and about contemporary with Ptolemy, wrote a description (Periegesis) of Greece, which, apart from the arch?ological value which is its chief interest, contains references to various phenomena of physical geography, while as a detailed topographical work it stands alone in the literature of which an outline has thus far been given.