Common Sense Geography in Antiquity

Summary

Common sense geography refers to the part of historical geography concerned with implicit or tacit knowledge in ancient cultures. Common sense geography denotes a 'lower' geography, to be distinguished from 'professional' or 'higher' geography: that is, the phenomenon of the spread and application of geographical knowledge outside of expert circles and disciplinary contexts. Common sense geography refers finally to a 'naive' perception and description of space and the use of 'intuitive' arguments in geographical contexts. These three areas taken together have been almost fully ignored in Classical studies. The polyvalence of this concept of common sense geography captures these three aspects of our study.

Common Sense Geography

Ancient Geography can be described as a discipline that explores the general geographical ('physical') conditions people were living under as well as the concepts and mental maps Greeks and Romans had in their minds. Historical geographers of the Mediterranean do basic research for all branches of classics and ancient history. They work primarily with historical, philological and archaeological methods, but also – in an increasing degree – with digital methods and techniques like geographical information systems (GIS).

In the scope of our research project we deal with those notions about space(s) to which Greeks and Romans ascribed, the ways they obtained geographical knowledge, how they made use of this knowledge in terms of political, religious, cultural, scientific thinking, and last but not least how geography as a discipline evolved throughout antiquity.

Geography arose as part of cosmological reasoning. It emerged as a distinct scientific discipline not before Hellenistic times, when – and this needs more discussion – more data became available, the dependency of earthly on these celestial phenomena was called into question, and an environmental awareness and concern developed. This question of spatial hierarchy is one raised in both common almanacs or parapegmata and scientific treatises.

Our goal here is to analyse the cultural assumptions, traditional habits and behaviours, patterns and aims of action and elementary measurement procedures in spaces. The possible scholarly gains promise to be important. Among others, we will learn more about implicit presuppositions of knowledge, review and reappraise customary termini, and offer a way to new perspective on interpreting historical events and processes.

Common Sense Geography

Up to now, the questions of to what extent and how geographical knowledge was spread among and stratified throughout the ancient communities has been vastly neglected, as have been such questions as who taught geography, and where and how geography was instructed in Greek and Roman times. The main reason for this lacuna in the scholarship must lie in the state of our source material. We are pretty well informed about professional geographers like Eratosthenes or Ptolemy – and consequently there are several studies of their work – but to those more practical questions regarding the dissemination of knowledge, our sources provide access only in an oblique way. One type of source which has not been used so far, is, for example, the measurements of distances transmitted in several different ancient texts, and not only those chiefly geographical. Work remains to be done too on the Roman military diploma, portable sun-dials, and even on didactic poems in order for their contribution to thinking about common geography to be valued properly.

Here we would stress the distinction between commonsensical experience and scientific understanding. The following aspects need to be studied: the reception and translation of ideas; forms of discourses among community members; knowledge of laymen in comparison and contrast with that of experts; application of geographical knowledge; 'dia­gnostics' and 'therapy', i.e. the observation and monitoring of spaces and the intervention into them.

Common Sense Geography

Common sense geography was first a topic of discussion in the final decades of the last century when software writers tried to design virtual spaces. These first man-made worlds produced an awkward and phony feeling. The reason for this was these virtual scenarios were designed accor­ding to objective parameters which differ from human sensation and experience. These results agree to a large extent with studies of development psychologists like Piaget who investigated the spatial perception of children and showed its difference from that of adults.

This topic of intuitive perception of space is far from fully explored and understood. I may cite the following as examples of particular human perceptions: the so-called 'hodological' orientation according to routes and streets; the alignment of administrative and religious buildings according to cardinal or compass points and sacral axis; or the neglect of the third dimension, height, in our everyday experience of space; or the impact of insularity, real or felt isolation of peoples and individuals who inhabit islands; and so on.

Our investigations of the subject thus far suggest that the historical aspect has been missing from recent research on spatial perception and spatial representation. Again, to cite a few instances: ancient distances are measured often in 'days', i.e. in a time, not a distance unit stricto sensu; or the puzzling finding that maps or geographical diagrams did not play a major role in antiquity outside of the scientific realm; or the fact that zoological and botanical information was used and applied for geographical purposes: the Indus was identified as the upper part of the Nile because crocodiles and a certain plant, the Egyptian bean, could be found either on the Indus bank and the Nile bank; or, a last example, that the distance between Spain and East India over the Atlantic Ocean was thought to be very small – be­cause elephants live near the Pillars of Heracles and in India, an argument that none less than Aristotle puts forward.

The central feature of common sense is that it concerns the consensus of an epistemic collective or community. Thus 'common' is not only to be understood as 'lower' (vs. 'professional' or 'higher') but also as 'shared' knowledge. Orientation according to shared beliefs and perception was discussed quite late in the history of ancient philo­sophy and science. The sophists were the first to discuss and formulate a theory of knowledge (Protagoras´ famous statement: 'Man is the measure of all things'). Until then, knowledge was mostly justified by divine authority (oracles, epiphanies, dreams etc.). Opinions of – mostly anonymous – groups were often satirized and derided, e. g. by Parmenides, Heraclitus and Xenophanes. Against this background, a history of common sense must identify and denote the authorities for doxai and shared beliefs in geographical matters.

Concluding Remarks

At this point, we would like to point out that common sense geography has been and for the most part still is dismissed as 'knowledge' which is at best of a pre- or sub-scientific sort. The failure to investigate more fully the subject is all the more surprising given that it is an essential prerequisite to know how the paradigms of perception and representation have been predefined or preformed by those we are studying. Whether we want to reconstruct the mental maps of ancient people or to show how they Greeks and Romans moved in space, we must identity their a priori notions about space, the implicit knowledge or the linguistic determinants: these are all important features of common sense geography.

Scheme

Our findings will be collected and outlined in a monograph for which we have already drafted several chapters. It will also serve as an essential part of Geus´ Geschichte der antiken Geographie, to appear in the respected series 'Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft' (edd. Hans-Joachim Gehrke and Bernhard Zimmermann).

Further Reading

Geus, Klaus & Martin Thiering (eds): Common Sense Geography and Mental Modelling. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2012 (MPIWG Pre­print; 426) (Download: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P426.PDF).