---
title: "History of geography"
chunk: 6/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geography"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:47.409771+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Al-Jahiz (776-869) who described the impact of the physical environment of man upon his appearance, which led him to compare the peoples of various regions of the world and the peoples inhabiting them.
Ya'qubi (d. 897) whose Kitab al-Buldan describes numerous places across Africa and Asia, while also giving pride of place to the description of the peoples inhabiting the lands mentioned, as well as their beliefs and practices.
Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani (893-947) whose Sifat Jazirat al-Arab remains one of the most valuable sources on the geography, flaura, fauna, and peoples of the Arabian Peninsula.
al-Masudi (896-956) who wrote The Meadows of Gold, combining universal history with scientific geography.
Ibn Hawqal (d. 978) who wrote Surat Al-Ard, adding further detail on the Islamic West as well as more accurate maps to the currents of Western Asian scholarship to which he belonged.
al-Maqdisi (945-991) whose description and cultural division of the world in his work Aḥsan al-taqāsīm make it a landmark in geographical studies. His work also highlighted a tendency to give greater attention and depth of analysis to the lands of the Islamic world.
Al-Bakri (1040-1094) whose Book of Roads and Kingdoms (al-Bakri) contains important descriptions of the Atlantic world, the Sahara and Central Africa.
Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100-1165) whose Tabula Rogeriana is one of the most advanced works of geography of the whole Middle Ages. Here, a reversal of the trend that had started a few centuries earlier can be noted, with a tentative return to universal geography, transcending the boundaries of the religious spheres.
Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) who left behind an account of his pilgrimage across the Mediterranean towards the Hijaz, providing precious descriptions of the interactions between the Norman, Byzantine and Arab cultural spheres in the region.
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) whose Muqaddimah, an introduction to his world history, extensively discusses the influence of different geographic settings, not only on the physical appearance of men, but also on the forms of social organization they develop.
Further details about some of the authors are given below:
In the early 10th century, Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, a Persian originally from Balkh, founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad. The geographers of this school also wrote extensively of the peoples, products, and customs of areas in the Muslim world, with little interest in the non-Muslim realms. Suhrāb, a late 10th-century Persian geographer, accompanied a book of geographical coordinates with instructions for making a rectangular world map, with equirectangular projection or cylindrical equidistant projection. In the early 11th century, Avicenna hypothesized on the geological causes of mountains in The Book of Healing (1027).

In mathematical geography, Persian Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, around 1025, was the first to describe a polar equi-azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere. He was also regarded as the most skilled when it came to mapping cities and measuring the distances between them, which he did for many cities in the Middle East and western Indian subcontinent. He combined astronomical readings and mathematical equations to record degrees of latitude and longitude and to measure the heights of mountains and depths of valleys, recorded in The Chronology of the Ancient Nations. He discussed human geography and the planetary habitability of the Earth, suggesting that roughly a quarter of the Earth's surface is habitable by humans.
By the early 12th century the Normans had overthrown the Arabs in Sicily. Palermo had become a crossroads for travelers and traders from many nations and the Norman King Roger II, having great interest in geography,  commissioned the creation of a book and map that would compile all this wealth of geographical information. Researchers were sent out and the collection of data took 15 years.  Al-Idrisi, one of few Arabs who had ever been to France and England as well as Spain, Central Asia and Constantinople, was employed to create the book from this mass of data. Utilizing the information inherited from the classical geographers, he created one of the most accurate maps of the world to date, the Tabula Rogeriana (1154). The map, written in Arabic, shows the Eurasian continent in its entirety and the northern part of Africa.
An adherent of environmental determinism was the medieval Afro-Arab writer al-Jahiz (776–869), who explained how the environment can determine the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of a certain community. He used his early theory of evolution to explain the origins of different human skin colors, particularly black skin, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt in the northern Najd as evidence for his theory.

=== Medieval Europe ===

During the Early Middle Ages, geographical knowledge in Europe regressed (though it is a popular misconception that they thought the world was flat), and the simple T and O map became the standard depiction of the world.
The trips of Venetian explorer Marco Polo throughout Mongol Empire in the 13th century, the Christian Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, and the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration during the 15th and 16th centuries opened up new horizons and stimulated geographic writings.
The Mongols also had wide-ranging knowledge of the geography of Europe and Asia, based in their governance and ruling of much of this area and used this information for the undertaking of large military expeditions. The evidence for this is found in historical resources such as The Secret History of Mongols and other Persian chronicles written in 13th and 14th centuries. For example, during the rule of the Great Yuan Dynasty a world map was created and is currently kept in South Korea. See also: Maps of the Yuan Dynasty
During the 15th century, Henry the Navigator of Portugal supported explorations of the African coast and became a leader in the promotion of geographic studies. Among the most notable accounts of voyages and discoveries published during the 16th century were those by Giambattista Ramusio in Venice, by Richard Hakluyt in England, and by Theodore de Bry in what is now Belgium.