Contributors: ancient geographers
People have over the centuries contributed to the development of geography and growth of information. Further contribution to the growth of information was made by many travelers, surveyors, explorers, and scientific observers. It was only since the late 1700s that the collection and recording of truly accurate geographic information was possible.
The geographers of the ancient era were concerned with exploring unknown areas and with describing the observable features of different places. With years of observation they came to different conclusions on the structure and geography of earth.
A geographer is a scientist whose area of research and study is geography. They study not only the physical details of the environment but also its impact on human and wildlife ecologies, weather and climate patterns, economics, and culture. They are especially focused on the spatial relationships between these elements.
The specializations of geography can be in the field of:
Physical geography
Human geography
Ancient geographers of India
The accounts of Indian geographers begin with the fragments surviving from accounts left behind by those who accompanied Alexander. These are considered to be one of the richest sources of Indian economic, commercial and political geography. They helped people to find their routes to new lands and important places of political significance. Some of the names of the geographers during the British period include Chakrabarti, N.Lahiri etc.
Ancient Arab geographers
Some of the names of Arab geographers are:
Ahmad Bin Majid
He was born in 1421 in Julphar. He was an Arab navigator and cartographer. His important works include Kitab al- Fawa’id fi Usul ‘Ilm al- Bahr wa ‘ l- Qawa’id. This book was written in 1490. it is an encyclopedia on navigation, giving a description on the history and basic principles of navigation, lunar mansions, rhumb lines, the difference between coastal and open sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, star positions, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators. He also wrote several books on marine science and the movements of ships, which helped people of the Persian Gulf to reach the coasts of India, East Africa and other destinations.
Al Muqaddasi
He was born in 946 AD in Jerusalem and was a notable medieval Arab geographer and author of Ahsan at-Taqasim fi Ma ‘rifat il-Aqalim. This book gives us a systematic account of all the places and regions he had visited. He wrote the book on the basis of his observation. He has also described the manners and customs of various countries. This helps travelers to a great extent.
Ancient Greek geographers
Scylax of Caryanda
He was a Greek explorer from Caria in the 6th century BC. He explored and recorded information regarding a number of ancient cities among the Mediterranean islands, including the island of Crete. He was one of the first ancient recorders who wrote of the presence of the city of Kydonia on western Crete.
Dicaearchus of Messana
He was born at Messana in Sicily in c 350. He was a disciple of Aristotle. He excelled as a geographer, Greek philosopher, cartographer, mathematician and author. He wrote on the history and geography of Greece, of which his most important work was his “life of Greece”. He had made important contributions to the field of cartography. He also wrote books on philosophy and politics.
Ancient Roman geographers
Alypius of Antioch
He was a geographer and a vicarious of Roman Britain. He was appointed to ensure that nobody with western associations was serving in Britain during a time of mistrust, rebellion and suppression symbolized by the brutal acts of the imperial notary Paulus Catene. He was later commissioned to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem as part of Julian’s systematic attempt to reverse the Christianization of the Roman Empire by restoring Pagan and Jewish practices
Claudius Ptolemaeus
He was a roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and astrologer. He lived in Egypt under the Roman Empire. He was the author of several scientific treatises. Three of them have been of continuing importance to later Islamic and European science.
Bernhardus Varenius
He is also known as Bernhard Varen. He was a German geographer whose Geographia Generalis was the most highly regarded treatise on geography for more than a century. He divided geography into two parts
- General which is now called systematic
- special
This identified regions according to interactions between human and environmental processes. He also published Descriptio Regni Japoniae in 649. This book was a study of Japan that also contained a treatise on Siam i.e. Thailand.
Immanuel Kant
He was a German philosopher and is considered by many as the most influential thinker of modern times. His philosophy is sometimes called critical philosophy and is contained in his critique of pure reason in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology. He differentiated modes of thinking into analytical and synthetic propositions. According to him an analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject. Such propositions are called analytic because truth is discovered by the analysis of the concept itself. Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, are those that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, and all the common propositions that result from experience of the world are synthetic.
Friedrich Ratzel
He was a German geographer and a founder of modern political geography
He was involved in the study of the influence of environment on politics. He was initially a journalist who traveled in Europe and then in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. In 1886 he became professor of geography at the University of Leipzig. His Anthropogeographie and Politische Geographie stress the determining power of the physical environment in conditioning human activity.
Carl Ritter
He was a German geographer and a founder of modern geographic study. He was responsible for holding the first academic chair in geography as a professor at the University of Berlin from 1820 until the time of his death. Ritter stressed on the importance of using all the sciences in the study of geography. His most important work is Die Erdkunde which is based on earth science is emphasized on the influence of the physical environment on human activity.
Paul Vidal de la Blache
He was a French geographer, who stressed on the effects of geography on history. His best known work is Tableau de la geographie de la France which was first published in 1903 as an introduction to a history of France by Ernest Lavisse and later published separately. Vidal de la Blache taught at Nancy and Paris, where he founded the periodical Annales de Geographie and in 1894 published the Atlas general: Histoire et Geographie.
Ellen Churchill Semple
She was born in Louisville, Kentucky and was an American geographer. She is mostly closely associated with work in anthropogeography and environmentalism. She had in various books and papers communicated certain aspects of the work of Friedrich Ratzel to the Anglophone community. She also had interests in environmental determinism which refers to the theory that the physical environment rather than the social conditions determines culture. She was also associated with environmental influences as opposed to determinism.
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt
He was a German naturalist and explorer. His work on quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography. He had traveled extensively in Latin America exploring and described it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was published in enormous volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined. His work, Kosmos attempted to unify the branches of scientific knowledge. He had also worked with other eminent scientists.
Ellsworth Huntington
He was a geographer and an instructor at Euphrates College. He explored the canyons of the Euphrates River in Turkey. He described his travels through central Asia in his book The pulse of Asia. He was also a research associate in geography. He had published Palestine and its transformation in 1911. He had made climatic investigations of the United States, Mexico, and Central America. His works chiefly concerned the relation of climate to land forms, geological and historical changes, human activities, and the distribution of civilizations.
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