Geography In Homer's Odyssey

Its originality can be seen in the in scription of the map and accurate orientation. In ancient Greece, even if Homer was n ot a mapmaker, his geographical descriptions in Iliad and Odyssey almost made readers to regard him as a master cartographer. Hesiod’s poems written probably durin g the 8th century BCE gave the statement of the ancient geography. Through the lyr ics of Works and Days and
Theogony he showed to scholars of his generation some defin ite geographical knowledge. He introduced the names of such rivers a s Nile, Ister (Danube), few other coasts, islands, shores and regions. His advanced k nowledge of geography not only had predated Greek colonial expansions, but also wa s used in the initial Greek world maps, made by Greek mapmakers

Anaximander was the f irst ancient Greek to draw a map of the known world who believed that the earth was a cylindrical form. The way in which the geographical knowledge of the Greeks a dvanced from the prior assumptions of the shape of the Earth was through H erodotus and his conceptual view of the world. Herodotus travelled very extensively, collecting information and documenting his outcomes in his books on Europe, As ia, and Libya. He also combined his knowledge with his learning that he ga thered from the people he met.
Herodotus wrote his Histories in the mid-400s BCE. Eventhough his work was devoted to the story of lengthy struggle of the Gre eks with the Persian Empire,
Herodotus also included everything he knew about th e history, geography, and people. His work thus provides a complete picture o f the known world of the 5th century BCE. Herodotus rejected the prevailing opin ion of most 5th century maps that the earth is a circular plate surrounded by Ocean. In his work he described the earth as an irregular shape with oceans surrounding Asia and Africa only. A vital

Harappan civilization was unable to su rvive natural catastrophe and
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nomadic invasions, and it vanished from history. Un til the mid-19th century, it was forgotten or “lost”, even by the people who lived i n the vicinity of its sand-covered ruins. Between about 1500 and 1000 B.C., as the cities of the Indus region crumbled into ruins, one archaeological – historical theory ascribes that Aryan invaders from central Asia moved into the fertile Indus plains an d pushed into the Ganges River
Valleys to the east. It took these warlike people m any centuries to build a civilization that rivalled that of the Harappans. This Invasion theory by the Aryans, strengthened by the British Empire especially after 1857, has si nce been argued against from noted
Indians like Dayananda Saraswati, Aurobindo and Amb edkar and Western scholars like Edmund Leach, Michel Danino and others. These two contrasting theories not withstanding, it is now certainly known that the po st-Indus Valley settlers who depended primarily on great herds of cattle to prov ide their subsistence, had little use for the grand scale irrigation works and modern agr icultural technology of the Indus
Valley