5 - Regional geographies and histories

Summary

The regional discourse in geography

The region as a core concept in geography

Just as there is a basic human desire to know about the past, to understand our individual and collective histories, so too there is a comparable need to know about places and to understand how and why they differ. Geography as an academic subject has developed over more than two thousand years to meet in a disciplined way people's curiosity about places. The origins of modern Western geography are traceable to classical Greece. The writings of Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), Eratosthenes (c. 275–193 BC), Strabo (63 BC–c. AD 25) and Ptolemy (c. AD 100–178) provided descriptions of the lands and peoples of the known, inhabited world, the ecumene. Herodotus wrote a descriptive work called Geographica: it included the first recorded use of the word ‘geography’, derived from the Greek ge, meaning ‘the earth’, and grapho, meaning ‘I write’ or ‘I describe’. Compiling maps and drawing upon travellers' accounts, Greek scholars described the different physical and human geographies of the world, both ‘real’ and ‘mythologised’. They considered places both as discrete units, in what they termed topographies, and as interconnected systems, in chorographies. Thus the Greeks have been credited with ‘inventing’ regional geography. Thereafter, geography as an organised body of knowledge in the Western world made little progress until the Renaissance and the Age of Discoveries.