By entering your details, you are agreeing to HistoryExtra terms and conditions. The known world’s breadth was estimated at just over half its length, from Thule (Iceland), 63° north of the equator, to the region of ‘Agisymba’ (modern-day Chad), 16° south of the equator, a latitudinal range of just over 79°. Intro Ptolemy (c.100-178) was a hugely important geographer and astronomer working in Ancient Rome. Perhaps we should therefore regard Ptolemy as the first digital geographer. When Columbus and Magellan planned their epic voyages to the east by sailing west, they both turned to Ptolemy to support their expeditions, and for good reason.
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Thanks! When Ptolemy came to write his Geography, he synthesised this mass of Greek learning, and drew a geometrical net of latitude and longitude over the world, preferring the consistency of mathematics over the unreliable gossip of travellers’ tales (what the Greeks called akoe, or ‘hearsay’). Taking the name ‘Ptolemaeus’ suggests he had Greek ancestors, and ‘Claudius’ indicates he possessed Roman citizenship. He therefore offered a second projection (above) that was “similarly proportioned” to the globe by drawing curved parallels and meridians. The oldest surviving Ptolemaic world map, redrawn according to his 1st projection by monks at … His work informed mapmakers on the size of the Earth, and the co-ordinates for the positions of all the places and features indicated on the map. Claudius Ptolemaeus (c100 AD–c170) lived in second-century Alexandria, where he wrote the Geographike hyphegesis (c150), known today simply as the Geography. The Ptolemy world map is a map of the world known to the Roman Empire in the 2nd c. AD. His compromise was to propose meridians forming acute angles at the equator. Ptolemy knew that no map projection could ever represent the globe without distortions, so he used Euclidean geometry to offer two different methods of making a world map. Ptolemy’s maps of the known world documented the Canary Islands to the Gulf of Thailand.
By Ptolemy’s time the library, like the Hellenic culture it represented, was in decline, ravaged by warfare, neglect and looting. You can unsubscribe at any time. He was, in effect, offering subsequent generations a mapping tool-kit, and a gazetteer of places to which they could expand almost indefinitely, building up an ever-changing map of the world as new data became available. Ptolemy was also able to draw on some remarkably accurate calculations of the size of the Earth, including those of Eratosthenes.
In Phaedo (c380 BC), Plato described the Earth as “round and in the centre of the heavens”, “marvellous for its beauty” and circular perfection. Ask any geographer to name one individual responsible for founding their discipline, and they are likely to answer: “Ptolemy”. Instead, he transmitted geographical data in digital form, using a series of numbers and diagrams that allowed later map-makers to adapt it.
Without Ptolemy’s mistaken calculations they would probably have never set off on such daunting voyages, and the shape of the age of discovery might have looked very different. See each listing for international shipping options and costs. For more recent exchange rates, please use the. Everything you ever wanted to know about... 7 famous Victorians: from Brontë to Brunel, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s greatest queen, 12 alternative giant leaps for mankind – from carnivorism to Magna Carta, D-Day dress rehearsal: the battle for Madagascar. The official website for BBC History Magazine, BBC History Revealed and BBC World Histories Magazine, Jerry Brotton, author of a new book on the history of mapmaking, introduces a second-century geographer whose legacy can be traced to Christopher Columbus and even Google Earth, This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine. On the first cone-like projection (shown top) the meridians were drawn as straight lines converging at an imaginary point beyond the north pole, with the parallels shown as curved arcs of different lengths, centred on the same point. You have successfully linked your account!
He began by defining geography as “an imitation through drawing of the entire known part of the world”. Ignoring Eratosthenes’s calculations, Ptolemy had estimated the length of a degree as 500 stades, underestimating the global circumference by as much as 10,000km, or more than 18 per cent of the Earth’s actual circumference. Ptolemy explained that anyone could draw such a map by using a swinging ruler and referring to his tables of latitude and longitude in the later books of the Geography. world map derived from Ptolemy's Geographia World map derived from Ptolemy's Geographia, woodcut, 1482. Some of the greatest classical scholars worked there, including the mathematicians Euclid (c325–265 BC) and Archimedes (c287–212 BC), the poet Callimachus (c310–240 BC) and the astronomer – and one of the earliest librarians at Alexandria – Eratosthenes (c275–194 BC). It was included in a volume of Ptolemy's maps that was the first to be printed outside Italy and the first to use woodcuts. You will shortly receive a receipt for your purchase via email. But there was also another astonishing reason for the success of Ptolemy’s projections. He conceded that this projection had its drawbacks: on a globe, parallel lines diminish south of the equator, but on Ptolemy’s projection they actually increase in length. View cart for details. This page was last updated: 20-Oct 01:05. Using astronomy and geometry, they pieced together a map of the known world which they called the ecumene – an inhabited ‘dwelling space’. Using a sundial, Eratosthenes measured the angle cast at midday on the summer solstice at both Aswan and Alexandria, which he believed were on the same meridian, 5,000 stades apart (a Greek stadion measured between 148 and 185 metres). Yet expanding the world in this way made it difficult to project the globe onto a flat surface. It defined geography, explained how to draw a world map, and offered a gazetteer of over 8,000 locations in the known world. It defined geography, explained how to draw a world map, and offered a gazetteer of over 8,000 locations in the known world. If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person.
For the next 1,500 years virtually every map-maker accepted Ptolemy’s Geography as the authority on the shape and size of the world. This led him to conclude that the globe had a circumference of 250,000 stades (between 37,000 and 46,000km). Please enter your number below. Copyright © 1995-2020 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved. He is the author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Allen Lane, September 2012). The trigonometry was more complex, and Ptolemy confessed that it was harder to construct a map on this projection, as the curved meridians could not be drawn with the aid of a swinging ruler. He calculated the angle between the two places as one-fiftieth of a circle. Ptolemy’s maps: the father of modern Geography. What is known is that Ptolemy worked at the Alexandria Library, founded in c300 BC, the repository of all written knowledge, which held thousands of manuscripts from across the Greco-Roman world. This map takes valuable information from his famous book Geographia. However Ptolemy cheerfully advised readers to “hold on to descriptions of both methods, for the sake of those who will be attracted to the handier one of them because it is easy”.
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