Assignment 1
October 3rd, 2016
Maps of the Mediterranean drawn in the fifteenth century AD, according to a table of coordinates devised by Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, show the Maltese archipelago as a single large island, much as it looked in the thirteenth millennium BC… Ptolemy, as we will see, based himself on an earlier geographer, Marinus of Tyre – a Phoenician – who in turn had drawn on even older maps and geographical knowledge.
How far back in the human story does the quest for geographical knowledge go? And for how long – either in actual maps and charts, or in tables if coordinates, or in verbal accounts and “word-pictures” of coastlines and journeys – has such knowledge been preserved and promulgated by navigators?