At a time when knowledge of the world was fragmented and based on travelers’ and merchants’ accounts, one man set out to organize the information and give it a scientific approach. His name was Marinus of Tyre, a Greek geographer, cartographer, and mathematician of the 2nd century AD, whose work laid the foundations of modern […]
Geographers
Posted inAncient Greece, Geography
Megasthenes, the 3rd Century BC Greek Geographer who Described Himalayas and Calculated the Longitude and Latitude of India
Like many lost works of antiquity, their content can be partially reconstructed through the citations of later authors. This is what happened, for example, with the Phoenician history of Sanchuniaton. And also with the work of Megasthenes titled Indica, where he recounts his journey to India in the 3rd century BC. Megasthenes was born in […]
Posted inGeography, Middle Ages
Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Greek traveler and geographer, is the sole known medieval author who believed that the Earth was flat
Syrian Greek merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes, born in the 6th century, penned a controversial work ‘Christian Topography’. He rejected the Greek concept of a spherical earth and provided firsthand descriptions from his travels, including maritime trade and Arabian flora and fauna, influencing Western depictions of the region.
