History of Geography

The fundamentals of geography can be traced to the prehistoric cultures, such as the ancient, medieval, and early modern Chinese. The Greeks, who were the first to discover geography as both art and science, achieved this through Cartography, Philosophy, and Literature, or through Mathematics. There is some dispute about who was the first person to assert that the Earth is spherical in shape, with the praise going either to Parmenides or Pythagoras. Anaxagoras was able to show that the profile of the Earth was circular by explaining eclipses. However, he still believed that the Earth was a flat disk, as did many of his contemporaries. One of the first estimates of the radius of the Earth was made by Eratosthenes.

The first rigorous system of latitude and longitude lines is credited to Hipparchus. He employed a sexagesimal system that was derived from Babylonian mathematics. The parallels and meridians were sub-divided into 360°, with each degree further subdivided 60′ (minutes). To measure the longitude at different location on Earth, he suggested using eclipses to determine the relative difference in time.

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