Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 1.: The Exploration of the World — John Shaqi
Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 1.: The Exploration of the WorldVerne, Jules
History
Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 1.: The Exploration of the World
Verne, Jules
Discoveries in geography; Explorers; Voyages and travels
Pliny, Hippalus, Arian, and Ptolemy--Pausanias visits Attica,
Corinth, Laconia, Messenia, Elis, Achaia, Arcadia, Boeotia, and
Phocis--Fa-Hian explores Kan-tcheou, Tartary, Northern India, the
Punjaub, Ceylon, and Java--Cosmos Indicopleustes, and the Christian
Topography of the Universe--Arculphe describes Jerusalem, the valley
of Jehoshaphat, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Jericho, the river
Jordan, Libanus, the Dead Sea, Capernaum, Nazareth, Mount Tabor,
Damascus, Tyre, Alexandria, and Constantinople--Willibald and the
Holy Land--Soleyman travels through Ceylon, and Sumatra, and crosses
the Gulf of Siam and the China Sea.
In the first two centuries of the Christian era, the study of
geography received a great stimulus from the advance of other
branches of science, but travellers, or rather explorers of new
countries were very few in number. Pliny in the year A.D. 23,
devoted the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth books of his Natural
History to geography, and in A.D. 50, Hippalus, a clever navigator,
discovered the laws governing the monsoon in the Indian Ocean, and
taught sailors how they might deviate from their usual course, so as
to make these winds subservient to their being able to go to and
return from India in one year. Arian, a Greek historian, born A.D.
105, wrote an account of the navigation of the Euxine or Black Sea,
and pointed out as nearly as possible, the countries that had been
discovered by explorers who had lived before his time; and Ptolemy
the Egyptian, about A.D. 175, making use of the writings of his
predecessors, published a celebrated geography, in which, for the
first time, places and cities were marked in their relative latitude
and longitude on a mathematical plan.
The first traveller of the Christian era, whose name has been handed
down to us, was Pausanias, a Greek writer, living in Rome in the
second century, and whose account of his travels bears the date of
A.D. 175. Pausanias did for ancient Greece what Joanne, the
industrious and clever Frenchman did for the other countries of
Europe, in compiling the "Traveller's Guide." His account, a most
reliable one on all points, and most exact even in details, was one
upon which travellers of the second century might safely depend in
their journeys through the different parts of Greece.
Pausanias gives a minute description of Attica, and especially of
Athens and its monuments, tombs, temples, citadel, academy, columns,
and of the Areopagus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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