How the earth is measured

Abstract

Geography, as a modern scholarly discipline, has its roots in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment rediscovery, and rethinking, of the ancient Greco-Roman classics. Though the word landscape is of Germanic origin, its use in geography must be understood in this cosmopolitan disciplinary context, and notably in relation to the key ancient Greek geographical concept of choros, meaning ‘land,’ as the ‘land’ in landscape. There are two classical paradigms for landscape study: one exemplified by the narrative, humanities-oriented approaches of Herodotus and Strabo, and the other deriving from the mathematical and scientific approach of the geometer, cartographer, geographer, and astrologer Claudius Ptolemy. This article will trace the entangled history of the two as they manifested themselves in diverging ideas of landscape as a metadisciplinary concept.