History of geography

History of geography studies how people have described, mapped, measured, and explained the Earth, and how geographical knowledge and institutions have changed over time.

Eratosthenes: A Hellenistic Greek scholar who estimated Earth’s circumference and helped establish geography as a systematic field. His measurement of Earth and use of the name geography mark an early foundation for the discipline.
Cartography: The practice and study of making maps. Maps have been a central medium for recording and communicating geographic knowledge.
Al-Idrisi: A twelfth-century Arab geographer and cartographer who produced a major world map and geographic text for Roger II of Sicily. His work brought together knowledge from across the Mediterranean, Europe, and Asia.
Age of Discovery: The period of European overseas exploration and expansion from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Its voyages dramatically enlarged European geographic knowledge while serving imperial ambitions.
Regional geography: An approach that studies places by synthesizing their distinctive physical and human characteristics. Its focus on unique regions contrasts with geography’s search for general spatial laws.
Strabo: A Greek geographer and historian whose seventeen-book work, Geography, described regions and peoples of the known world. His regional synthesis shows how ancient geography joined physical description with history and ethnography.
Latitude: The angular distance of a place north or south of the equator. Latitude made locations comparable across maps and observations.
Ibn Battuta: A fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler whose journeys across Africa and Asia are recorded in the Rihla. His travel account documents firsthand geographic knowledge across a vast connected world.
Colonial cartography: Mapmaking practices used to represent, administer, and claim territories under colonial rule. It reveals how maps could support conquest, governance, and the reordering of land.
Systematic geography: An approach that studies a particular geographic subject across multiple places. It organizes knowledge by phenomena rather than by the character of individual regions.

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Bernhardus VareniusNarrower topic: Varenius’s book marks a significant effort to define geography as an organized discipline.