Herodotus' geography
Mapping out the ancient world
I was recently part of a literary festival where I was asked for an example of how the ancient world conceptualised something completely differently to how we do know. When I am put on the spot like that it is always exciting to find out what answer comes out of my mouth, and for some reason I started to talk about Herodotus’ geographic theories. So here is a short article that takes you through it!
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE) is an ancient Greek writer who has been very misrepresented. Known as the ‘Father of History’, he was later dubbed the ‘Father of Lies’ due to his particular approach to research. He believed in collecting stories from different peoples around the world and presenting them with equal standing, often giving his opinion on which account is likely to be right - but he didn’t omit something just because he didn’t believe it.
He was driven by his enquiry (historia in Greek, giving us our word history) and believed in a basic form of empiricism, he tried to observe or verify much of what he was researching. Indeed, his need for proof brought him into conflict with some long standing beliefs assigned to some of the great authorities of Greek knowledge. He was not afraid to ruffle feathers. This was particularly true when it came to geography and theories about the nature of the world.
The world view before Herodotus
Before Herodotus, theorists considered the world to be disk-shaped (but not always flat) and the landmass to be split into three parts: Europe, Asia, and Libya (most of modern Africa). These three continents were broken up by the inner sea - the Mediterranean Sea, and encircled by a large river (Oceanus). The Mediterranean and Oceanus converged to the west, at the pillars of Hercules.
Herodotus was rather damning of earlier attempts to draw a map of the world. Attacking the likes of Anaximander (c. 610 BCE), one of the first Greeks know to attempt such a map, Herodotus took issue with the desire to fill in the unknown parts of the map with geometric principles rather than accepting the unknown:
“They draw Ocean flowing around the whole earth, [and] portray the earth to be more perfectly circular than if it were drawn with a compass” (Herodotus Histories, 4.36.2)
By the time Herodotus came to write his own work in the late 5th century BCE, the most respected map was created by Hecataeus (c. 550 BCE). He was the one to split the map into the three continents and try to place them in their positions relative to each other.
Herodotus’ take on the world
Herodotus was not one for mincing his words. While he relied on the works of his predecessors to guide his own map, he did not put much stock in their processes:
“I laugh when I see the many men who draw maps of the world without using their heads” Histories, 4.36.2
In particular, he calls out the belief in a river encircling the world - something he found infuriating because ‘they don’t show any evidence for it’; to make matters worse he says he knows of no river in the world called Oceanus and believed that ‘Homer, or some other early poet, invented the name and inserted it into his poetry’.
Herodotus could not stand the reliance on myth or mathematical and geometric models devoid of evidence to conceptualise the world. Indeed he placed great importance on his own lived experience of travelling to far flung lands like Egypt and Scythia.
His own theories were not perfect either, of course. He was bound by the same need to speculate or fill in the gaps of his own map. He is usually honest about his speculations, for instance he says that nobody knew the full journey of the Nile River, but it was a big river that ran through Libya so he just assumed it followed a mirror image of another large river which cut through Europe – the Danube. So using this model of potamological symmetry, he viewed the Nile as beginning in western Libya and travelling east to Egypt before turning north into it’s delta. Similarly, he was not sure about the far edges of Scythia due to its great size, so he decided it was probably square in shape – for no real reason.
Herodotus’ map
Herodotus’ was not a man to criticise without trying to replace old models with new. His predecessors emphasised an east-west symmetry in their geography, based in no small part to the movement of the sun in the sky. But Herodotus emphasised a north-south orientation instead.
So while we often like to discuss the Persian Wars with the Greeks as being east vs west, in Herodotus’ map it would be more accurate to describe it as north vs south, with both Asia and Libya situated south of Europe. This geography validated a growing belief in Greek thought: geographic determinism. The further north on the map you went, it became colder and the men stronger but less intelligent; the further south you went, it was warm and so the men became effeminate and weak, but intelligent. Greece, of course, was sat in the middle and its men both strong and intelligent – the Goldilocks effect, if you will.
Herodotus made a lot of errors with his map, but he declared the world a tangible place. A map of which did not need to rely on myth or abstract theories. Instead, his geography followed the methods of his overall enquiry, placing value on experiences and acquired knowledge from a wide variety of sources across the world. His map may still look a little odd, but it was a major shift in the way geography would be conceptualised.