Geography Essay

Before I dive into the past history and how it transformed the topic of Geography, I would like to first define what geography is. Geography, in simple terms, is the “study of the world, both near and far” (Bonnett, 2008, p. 1). For the greater part of the human history, the term ‘geographical knowledge’ was coined to define the survival of the human population on the local level. Knowledge regarding the local landscape meant the difference between life and death. As societies grew, so did the push for advanced technology, not only were people growing food and raising livestock, but now they could now focus on more specialized skills. They started to explore their surroundings and came into contact with other groups of people, allowing humans

For this reason alone, geography is “one of the world’s oldest disciplines, but for many people today, one of the least understood” (Sharma and Elbow, 2000, p. 4). The first people to accurately record their thoughts and surroundings of the world around them on paper were the Greeks, led by Herodotus and his theory of how our environment can influence humans, our culture, and our way of life. His theory might have been outdated, but it definitely paved towards one of geography’s most significant research question. As time progressed so did man’s interest in studying the world around them; from the days of the Roman Empire, Strabo and Ptolemy, were considered ahead of their time, they wrote two famous pieces called Geography and Guide to Geography. They attempted to explain both the “physical and human phenomena of their world” (Sharma and Elbow, 2000, p. 4). After their work was ransacked from the library of Alexandria in 391 A.D., both pieces of work had vanished. It had resurfaced in Europe during the Age of Discovery, where one of the most famous explorers at that time, Christopher Columbus, had read both pieces and became interested in exploration, in which he founded the new world on his quest to find another trade route, other than by land, from Spain to India and Asia. Thus, by extension “in that era, geography was precisely defined and there was an overwhelming consensus about its nature and relationship with other enquiries” (Mayhew, 2001, pg.