Essay on Greek Geography | Greece | Geography

In this essay we will discuss about the evolution of Greek geography.

The Greek scholars provided a framework of concepts and a model, or paradigm of scholarly method that guided Western thinking for many centuries. Some of the Greek concepts appear to have retarded the Western thinking to such an extent that European paradigms in geography could not emerge until the influence of Plato and Aristotle had been overcome. Some of the basic concepts and paradigms of the contemporary geographical philosophy seem to reflect a strong inclination towards the tradition of the ancient Greek scholarship.

It was the Greek scholars who attempted to distinguish between kenos (meaning void) and cosmos (which, according to them, refers to the universe conceived as a system of harmoniously related parts). The foundation of the modern scientific geography appears to have been laid down by the ancient Greek scholars.

Although the roots of the ancient Greek scholarship in the development of geographical ideas reach back to the ‘observations’, ‘measurements’, and ‘generalisation’ of the ancient Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the Mesopotamians, yet its organisation in the form of concepts or paradigm was essentially the achievement of Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes and Strabo.

Among the ancient Greek philosophers, almost all of whom made contributions to the study of geography, the two basic traditions of geographic study can be found: the mathematical tradition and the literary tradition. The Greeks developed the science of astronomy. Scholarly writers also produced topographical descriptions of places in the known world, discussing both natural conditions and the culture and the way of life of the people living there.

People believed that the Greek geographers credited Homer with being the father of geography, because his great epic poem, the Odyssey, initiated the literary tradition in the contemporary Greek geographical thinking. But he did not define any concepts or paradigms which could be universally acclaimed. In fact, he tried to combine the literary tradition with the topographic description of places of the known world.

However, with the increase in knowledge and information available in the contemporary Greece, the Greek sailors of the eighth century BC were able to distinguish four kinds of winds and their directions. Boreas was the north wind—strong, cool, with clear skies; Eurus was the east wind— warm and gentle; Notus was the south wind on the front of an advancing storm—wet and sometimes violent; and Zephyrus was the west wind—balmy, but with gab force. However, in the second century BC, the Athenians built a tower distinguishing eight wind directions with sculpture depicting the weather types associated with each of them.

Much of the ancient Greek geographical scholarship owed its origin in the town of Miletus in Ionia on the eastern side of the Aegean Sea, near the mouth of the Meander River. Although it emerged as a major commercial centre and attracted sailors and merchants with different cultural backgrounds, it was soon flooded with a fund of information.

Between 770 and 570 BC, there was not only a flow of geographical information, but there was also a group of people with intellectual and academic integrity who speculated about how all this miscellaneous information could be assembled in some kind of meaningful arguments and concepts. To Miletus also came reports on Egyptian geometry, Sumerian algebra and Assyrian astronomy, which laid the foundation of the mathematical tradition in the contemporary Greek scholarship.

The first of the Greek scholars to be concerned about the measurement and the location of things on the face of the Earth was Thales, who lived during the seventh and sixth century BC. He tried to combine his mathematical and geometrical precepts with a most accurate scientific precision. Thus, he offered a true paradigm, the relevance of which still persists in modern mathematical geography and astronomy.

There are six geometric propositions credited to him:

(1) The circle is divided into ten equal parts by its diameter;

(2) The angles at either end of the base of an isosceles triangle are equal;

(3) When two parallel lines are crossed diagonally by a straight line, the opposite angles are equal;

(4) The angle in a semi-circle is a right angle;

(5) The sides of the two similar triangles are proportionate;

(6) Two triangles are congruent if they have two angles and a side respectively equal.

The most important contribution of Thales was his recognition that the solution of practical problems of measurement was less of an intellectual accomplishment than the rational generalisation of the specific solutions. He held the view that water in various forms constituted the prime substance/ material from which all observable features of the Earth were made.

He conceived the Earth as a disc floating in water. With available information and data, Thales set forth an explanation that could be checked by new observation and measurement and which sharply contrasted with the unscientific contemporary traditional explanations.

Another great scholar who lived in Miletus and who seemed to be a younger contemporary of Thales was Anaximander. Though he was a contemporary of Thales, yet the tradition which Thales set forth in the form of a paradigm hardly had any effect on the scholarship of Anaximander.

Instead, he brought into the contemporary Greek world a Babylonian instrument called the gnomon, which made it possible to make a variety of observations regarding the relative positions of the celestial bodies vis-a-vis varying season-to- season position of the noon-shadow.

This made it possible to establish the time of the solstice and the equinox. Anaximander prepared a map of the world to scale, which was probably based on the pictorial maps, drawn by the Sumerians of some of their cities as early as 2700 BC. Anaximander’s world map showed Greece at the centre and the known Eurasian parts lying around. There was an ocean that encircled the world.

Anaximander seemed to have offered an explanation with regard to the Thalesian tradition visualising the Earth as a disc floating in water as the contemporary scholars of Miletus were puzzled by the question: how could the Sun go under the water? He opined that somewhere to the north there existed a very high and huge mountain behind which the Sun made the trip back again to the east. The shadow, cast by these mountains, would account for the night.

He offered an ontological explanation with regard to the prime substance of the universe. This made the observable objects of the Earth, and this explanation is in sharp contrast to the Thalesian tradition which maintained that water is the prime substance/material. The ontological explanation of Anaximander appeared to have laid the foundation of idealism and abstraction in the geographical paradigms of the twentieth century.

He coined the word ‘apeiron’ to symbolise the prime substance which could not be experienced through senses, but became a concept—a specific mental image that by the process of deduction could become a real substance.

However, contrasting explanations put forward by Thales and Anaximander as to whether water or apeiron should be regarded as the prime substance or vice-versa, ultimately led to an apparent dichotomy in the contemporary Greek thinking.

Hecataeus, who was born at about the time of the deaths of Thales and Anaximander, and who died about 475 BC, inherited the conflicting explanatory legacies of his predecessors. He seemed to have initiated the literary tradition in the ancient Greek scholarship. He offered a topographical explanation of the information brought to Miletus not only from the known world of the Greeks, but also from the shadowy world beyond the Greek horizon.

His major creative genius was the Gesperiodos, or Description of the Earth which blends his literary genius with the topographical- ecological tradition, and thus set in ‘a new geography’ which has persisted for some 2500 years. Hecataeus divided his work into two parts, each dealing with one of the regional divisions of the Earth.

One book deals with Europe while the other deals with the rest of the world—Asia and Libya. He set forth a different approach in the contemporary geographical scholarship as he preferred to organise all the available information and knowledge about the known world in usable form.

The contrast in the approaches of these scholars of Miletus more than 24 centuries ago represents the apparent dualism between those who seek to formulate generalisations and those who seek to describe unique things.

In the modern geographical philosophy, these two points of view are described as nomothetic, meaning ‘law seeking’, and idiographic, meaning descriptive of particular things. Down through the ages since Hecataeus there have been scholars who insist that geographical study must adopt one or the other approach.

Different approaches put forward by Thales, Anaximander and Hecataeus, in fact, dominated the ancient Greek scholarship for a century until a new approach in the geographical methodology was developed by Herodotus who ridiculed the mathematical tradition in the geographical studies.

Instead, he preferred a historical approach/tradition. He studied history from a true geographical standpoint. He was credited with the very old idea that all history must be treated geographically and all geography must be treated historically.

Geography, to him, provided the physical background, the stage setting, in relation to which historical events took on meaning. In fact, the paradigm which Herodotus set forth in historical geography—’the recreation of past geographies and the teaching of geographical change through time’—seemed to have a deep effect on the scholarship of Sir Halford J. Mackinder, a noted British geographer of the twentieth century, whose thesis on the Eurasian land power vis-a- vis the struggle between the Asiatic tribes and the European natives, clearly manifested the historical tradition of Herodotus.

The contributions of Herodotus to geography were based on his own personal observations during many years of travel. Herodotus was of the view that the observational statements were the only ones which made direct reference to phenomena in the real world.

During the course of his many years of travel across the Black Sea, the Russian steppes, and the Persian Empire, Herodotus probably came into contact with the people of varied cultural traits whom the Greeks had not met earlier. He observed the way of living of those people and portrayed their cultural traits and life style.

He drew up the conclusions on the basis of direct observation, and in a sense he attempted to combine his concept with a most accurate percept regarding the cultural realm of the non- Greek people. Because of his vivid portrayal of the cultural traits of people strange to the Greeks, he is known as the father of ethnography.

Herodotus incorporated older sources of geographical information, including the existing maps, and he identified and criticised his sources. In this way, he handed on knowledge of earlier theories and description which would otherwise have been forgotten. He used the methods of historical geography to support the hypothesis that the Nile mud, deposited in the Mediterranean, had built the delta.

He reconstructed the ancient shoreline and showed that many former seaports were now far inland. He also pointed out the physical process of delta-building that occurred in many places. He not only described the regularity of the summer floods of the Nile, but also attempted to explain them.

Like all the Greek scholars, Herodotus accepted as a fundamental principle that the world must be arranged symmetrically. He accepted the Homeric view of the Earth as a flat disc over which the Sun travelled in an arc from east to west. Herodotus was the first scholar to have drawn a meridian on the world map.

The meridian was drawn from Egypt to Cilicia (south coast of Turkey), peninsula of Sinope and the mouth of Ister (Danube). He had no interest in those mathematical and astronomical problems which later became associated with geography—measurement of the circumference of the Earth and the establishment of exact location for places.

With the concept of an orderly universe firmly established, the perception of evidence to give it support was a natural consequence, and it was during the time of Herodotus itself that an account of an ordered universe required the recognition of cause and effect sequences that occurred in accordance with some law. Plato (428-348 BC), who made important contributions to the development of geographies ideas, offered a different interpretation of the cause and effect sequences.

He conceived of the world as having been created in perfection, but which now in the process of decline from perfection He developed the deductive procedures, and insisted that the observable things on the Earth were only poor copies of ideas, or perfect predicates from which observable things had degenerated or were in the process of degenerating.

Plato’s deductive procedures seemed to have been a major driving force in the growth of the natural sciences vis-a- vis geographical paradigms that developed in the mid-nineteenth century and continued upto the present century.

He pointed out with examples the decline of Attica in Greece, which once possessed a very productive soil, capable of supporting a huge population, and was equipped with immense forest and water resources to feed its occupants, but the relentless exploitation of these resources by its occupants caused destruction and degeneration of what existed earlier.

Arguing from the general theory to the particular situation in Attica, Plato used this as an example of the degeneration of things from their original perfect state. If Plato had argued from the particular to the general, he might have realised that men made changes in the land they occupied and that soil erosion and land destruction were parts of cultural history and were repeated in many places.

He accepted the idea that symmetry of form was one of the attributes of perfection, and the most completely symmetrical form was a sphere. Plato seemed to be the first philosopher to have given the concept of a round Earth located in the centre of the universe with the celestial bodies in circular motions around it.

Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BC, calculated some of the mathematical laws for the circular motions of the celestial bodies. Parmenides, who was a disciple of Pythagoras, applied these to observations made from the surface of a round Earth.

Eudoxus of Chidus, a contemporary of Plato, developed the theory of zones of climate based on the increasing slope away from the Sun on a spherical surface. All these formulations were deductions from pure theory—the theory that all observable things were created in perfect form and that the most perfect form was a sphere.

The contribution of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) had far-reaching impact on the development of geographical ideas. Like Plato, he also believed in an ordered universe and offered a different interpretation of the cause and effect sequences. He conceived of the world as striving towards perfection.

He was the father of the teleological concept, which sees the universe planned by its creator. His teleological explanation seemed to have motivated the perception of the great German geographer, Karl Ritter of the classical period.

At the age of seventeen, Aristotle joined Plato’s Academy near Athens and remained there until Plato’s death, at which time he was thirty-eight years old. During the next 12 years, he spent his time travelling widely throughout Greece and around the shores of the Aegean Sea. In 335 BC he set up his own school, which he named the Lyceum.

Aristotle, who developed the inductive procedures, preferred to formulate his concepts as generalisations of empirically observed ‘facts’. He insisted on the importance of direct observation, and built the theory by reasoning from the particular to the general. Instead of making logical deductions from theory, he taught his pupils to observe things.

Aristotle formulated four fundamental principles of scientific explanation—that is, of:

(a) Answering the question;

(b) Finding what makes the thing the way it is, and that includes a description of its nature and essential characteristics, specifying the kind of matter, and the substance out of which it is made;

(c) Telling what caused the process through which the thing becomes what it is; and finally

(d) The purpose the thing fulfils.

Aristotle felt that things were in the process of physical change leading to a final perfect state. This model for scientific explanation constituted the world’s first paradigm for the guidance of scholars for the succeeding generations.

He developed the theory of natural places and distinguished between the celestial space and the Earth space. In the former, ether was the prime substance, while the latter had four basic substances – Earth, water, fire and air. Aristotle insisted that mathematics could be used to explain the process of change that made things as they were, but it failed to answer the fourth question concerning the purpose.

There is a tendency towards perfection that all things are not declining from an ideal state, but rather are developing towards an ideal stat. He accepted Plato’s concept of a spherical Earth and began to seek explanation of it and to test the concept with observations. His explanation was derived from the theory of natural places.

Aristotle is credited with the concept of the varying habitability of the Earth with differences of latitude. The habitability, according to him, was the function of distance from the equator. He assumed that the parts of the Earth close to the equator (i.e. the torrid zone) were uninhabitable; that the parts of the Earth far away from the equator (i.e. the frigid zone) were constantly frozen and thus not habitable; and the temperate zone in between constituted the habitable part of the Earth. He visualised the existence of a South Temperate Zone which could not be approached from Greece because of the intense heat of the Torrid Zone.

In Politics, Aristotle presented a model of the ideal or perfect state. He fully recognised the theoretical limitations involved in this, and thus spoke in terms of ‘approximation’ of the ideal state. He introduced many of the ideas that later became important concepts in the field of political geography.

These include notions of ideal sizes of population and area for political viability and their relationship to changing technology, the distributional characteristics of the resident population, the locational and morphological problems of the capital city, including strategic and economic considerations, boundaries versus frontiers as limits of national space, and also notions of co­existence and interdependence within a larger system, both in the Hellenic sphere and, under the assumptions about the impact of temperature on political behaviour, in a global pattern.

Aristotle’s paradigm for scientific explanation did not include anything about controlled experiments or the verification of premises, but only the use of logic to formulate and give support to theory. Some of his logical explanations appeared to be so unassailable in the fourth century BC, and have been so universally accepted for many succeeding generations since that time that his influence on the history of European ideas has been far-reaching and enormous. It has been rightly pointed out that modern science could not appear until Aristotle had been abandoned.

Aristotle’s inductive procedures which favoured the formulation of concepts as generalisations of empirically observed facts had a deep impact on Alexander the Great. In course of his world conquest, in the east beyond the Greek zone of influence, Alexander the Great observed the areal expression of different spatial phenomena of different lands he crossed.

He was only a short distance from the eastern limit of the habitable partlekumene. His conquests pushed back Greek knowledge of the Earth as far as the Indus. As a result, he sent back to the Greek world a wealth of new observations concerning what it was like beyond the Greek horizon and how far and in what direction it was necessary to travel to reach these strange places.

Hippocrates (460-376 B.C.) contended in his book On Airs, Water, Places that climate provided explanations for the physical and intellectual differences among people. Stressing the correspondence between the physical environment and national character, he paid particular attention to the intermediary role of human occupation. Hippocrates probably produced the world’s first medical geography.

The voyages of Pytheas far to the north-west of the Greek world in western and northern Europe sometimes between 330 and 300 BC were significant in the sense that he went very close to the northern limit of the ekumene / habitable world.

He brought with him a wealth of new observations concerning the customs and food habits of the people of Great Britain, the use of barns to thresh grain in wet weather and the change in the character of agriculture from south to north in Britain.

He also pointed out the existence of an ice sea lying to the north of the land he visited. He was also the first Greek to inform about ocean tides and explained that tides were related to the phases of the Moon.

He probably sailed along the eastern shore of the North Sea, as far as modern Denmark and reported on the existence of a place called Thule. He is quoted as saying that at Thule the Sun remained above the horizon during the whole of the longest day, which would put this place well to the north in Norway or possibly Iceland.

It is certain that Pytheas observed the angle of the Sun’s shadow on a gnomon before he left for the voyage, and the latitude derived from this measurement was almost exactly correct. Although the Greek scholars of his time dismissed his observation as pure fantasy, yet modern scholars now believe that much of his observations and reports were correct. Now-a-days he is given a due place among the great explorers of all times.

Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.) is rightly identified as the ‘father of geography’ because he was the first to coin the word ‘Geography’ and set forth a stamp on the study of the Earth as the home of humankind and that still persists.

He succeeded in calculating the circumference of the Earth with remarkable precision. He may be regarded as the first scientific geographer who upheld the mathematical tradition in geography which was introduced by Thales much earlier in the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

With the help of an indigenous apparatus known as gnomon (introduced to the Greek world by Anaximander), Eratosthenes made two separate observations of the position of the Sun at the time of the summer solstice. One observation was done near Syene (Aswan). At this place there was a deep well, and at the bottom of the well, at the time of the summer solstice the image of the Sun was reflected in the water.

This strange occurrence used to attract many tourists in ancient times. This meant that on that date the Sun was directly overhead. The second observation was done outside the museum in Alexandria, where there was a tall obelisk. Using the obelisk as a gnomon, he measured the length of the shadow at the time of the solstice. He was thus able to measure the angle between the vertical obelisk and the rays of the Sun.

With these two separate observations of the positions of the Sun at the time of the summer solstice in mind, Eratosthenes proceeded with the famous theorem of Thales that: ‘When a diagonal line crosses two parallel lines, the opposite angles are equal.’ The parallel lines were formed by the parallel rays of the Sun.

The rays of the Sun at Syene, which were vertical, might be extended to the centre of the Earth. Also, the obelisk which was vertical at Alexandria could be extended to the centre of the Earth. Then the angle between the Sun’s rays and the vertical obelisk at Alexandria must be the same as the opposite angle at the centre of the Earth.

The next question was – How much of the whole circumference of a circle is subtended by the angle at the centre of the earth? He measured this as one-fiftieth of the whole circumference. It was then only necessary to fill in the distance between Syene and Alexandria which was equivalent to about 500 miles (5000 stadia), and then multiply this distance by 50. Eratosthenes, therefore, found out that the whole Earth was about 25,000 miles in circumference (actually the circumference measured through the poles is 24,860 miles).

Eratosthenes pointed out that Alexandria was due north of Syene whereas, in fact, it is about 3°W of Syene. The length of the road between Syene and Alexandria, which was according to the Egyptian calculation 500 miles, is actually 453 miles, and Syene is actually at 24°5’N, a little north of the tropic of cancer.

But all these errors cancelled out so that the resulting calculation was surprisingly close to the correct figure (Thomson, 1965, 159-61). Eratosthenes also attempted to determine the distance of the Sun and the Moon from the Earth. He concluded the distance of the Moon at 780,000 stadia (78,000 miles) and that of the Sun 4000000 stadia (400000 miles).

He produced a book on the habitable part or the ekumene of the Earth and in the preparation of the book he very much relied on the assumption and accounts of Aristotle and Pytheas respectively.

He accepted the major division of Europe, Asia and Libya. He provided mathematical boundaries to the five major climatic zones—a torrid zone, two temperate zones and two frigid zones. The Torrid Zone was 48 degrees of the whole circumference (24 degrees north and south was calculated as the location of the tropics).

The frigid zones extended 24 degrees from each pole. The temperate zone was between the tropic and the polar circles. His ekumene extended from Thule, near the Arctic Circle in the north to Taprobane (Ceylon) in the Indian Ocean in the south and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Bay of Bengal which he thought to be the eastern limit of the habitable part.

Eratosthenes prepared a world map in which he made use of a frame of north-south and east-west lines, but these were not spaced regularly, In fact, he used the meridian of Alexandria extending it southward through Syene and northward through Rhodes and Byzantium, as the prime meridian. He also used the latitude of the Pillars of Hercules, which he assumed to have passed through Rhodes. He prepared his world map based on this frame of the north-south and east-west lines.

Of equal importance was his development of systems of coordinates for the world, i.e. latitude and longitude, which he used in order to locate places and to measure distances. Geographical order now replaced the casual and unsystematic location measurements of earlier times. Eratosthenes’ cartographical work was later developed by his students and successors at the museum in Alexandria.

Hipparchus succeeded Eratosthenes as the chief librarian when the latter died. The dates of Hipparchus’ birth and death are not known, but if chronology is to be believed, then he was working at the library in 140 BC. He invented an instrument which was easier to handle than the gnomon.

It was astrolabe which consisted of a circular dial marked off into 360 parts with a rotating arm fixed at its centre. Hanging on the rigging of a ship, the astrolabe made possible the measurement of latitude at sea by observing the angle of the polestar.

Hipparchus upheld the mathematical tradition of the Greek geographical idea which was introduced in the ancient Greek scholarship by Thales and carried on by Eratosthenes. Hipparchus was more of a mathematician and astronomer than a geographer. However, he is identified as the first Greek scholar to have established the exact position of every point on the Earth’s surface, and divided the circle into 360 degrees, based on Assyrian arithmetic.

He defined a grid of latitude and longitude lines. To him, the equator was a great circle that divided the globe into two equal parts, and the meridians which were drawn converging on the poles were also great circles.

The parallels, on the other hand, became shorter and shorter as they approached the poles. Since the Earth makes one complete revolution in 24 hours and there are 360 meridians drawn from equator to poles, each hour the Earth turns through 15 degrees of longitude.

Hipparchus is credited with showing the curved surface of Earth on a flat surface as he devised the projection. He introduced to the Greek world two kinds of projection: the stereographic projection and the orthographic projection.

He pointed out how to construct a stereographic projection by laying a flat parchment at a tangent to the Earth and extending the latitude and longitude lines from a point opposite the point of tangency; and an orthographic projection could be made by projecting the lines from a point of infinity.

He also made it clear that on the stereographic map, the central portion would be too small in relation to the periphery, and on the orthographic map the central portion would be too large. However, both the projections, according to Hipparchus, would only show a hemisphere, not the whole world.

Upholding the mathematical tradition in geography, Hipparchus pointed out that it could be made more meaningful and precise through plotting of locations in the theoretical grid, and the instrument he invented to be more useful for its accurate results.

In order to determine longitude, he pointed out that the local times of the start of an eclipse at different places could be compared and the time differences would provide a measure of longitude. But no such system of coordinated observations was even attempted for thousands of years after his time. Geography, during his time, became more mathematical and technical, and astronomy became the pivot of the discipline.

The history of ancient Greek scholarship would remain incomplete if the contributions of Posidonius are not mentioned. Posidonius lived shortly before the time of Christ. It was he who recalculated the circumference of the Earth and arrived at a much smaller figure than that of Eratosthenes.

He observed the height above the horizon of Canopus (a star of the first magnitude) at Rhodes and Alexandria, which he assumed to be on the same meridian. He then estimated the distance between them based on average sailing time for ships.

The figure he arrived at, for the circumference of the Earth, was 18,000 miles. He greatly overestimated the west to east distance from the western most part of Europe to the eastern extremity of the ekumene, and then thought to be occupied by India. It is believed that Columbus used the smaller circumference estimated by Posidonius.

Posidonius assumed that the highest temperature and the driest deserts were located in the temperate zone near the tropics and the temperatures near the equator were much less extreme. He thus contradicted the view of Aristotle who had pointed out earlier that the equatorial part of the Torrid Zone was uninhabitable because of heat.

However, the conclusion of Posidonius with regard to the habitability of the equatorial part of the Torrid Zone was purely a creation of his mental image, as he had no access to credible reports from anyone who had crossed the Sahara.

The Sun pauses longest near the tropics and is overhead for a much shorter time at the equator. It is interesting to note that the incorrect estimate of the circumference of the Earth which Posidonius recalculated was widely accepted by those who upheld the mathematical tradition after him, but his correct assumption on the habitability of the equatorial land was not recognised by those who followed him.