Hellenized Egyptian geographer, astronomer, mathematician in ancient Alexandria, Egypt
A hellenized Egyptian, Ptolemy was a native of Alexandria, Egypt,rift gold and a leading scholar and scientist among that city’s Greek intellectual community in the second century A.D. His exact heritage is not known. He may have had Egyptian, Greek, or Roman ancestry, or a combination. He conducted studies in and wrote works on mathematics, astronomy, and geography.
From A.D. 127 to 147, Ptolemy produced an eight-volume work summarizing the geography of the known world. Known as Geographia, or Introduction to the Description of the Earth, it includes a compilation of 8,000 places, along with their coordinates of LATITUDE and LONGITUDE, with relative distances obtained from travel reports and some astronomical observations.
Like other learned Greeks of his day, Ptolemy conceived the world as spherical, although he rejected the notion that all the lands on Earth were surrounded by a great “Ocean Stream,”rift gold and instead suggested that uncharted lands could be located across the unexplored seas. Ptolemy’s Geographia was fairly accurate about the Mediterranean region and correctly located Ireland as lying west of Britain. His northernmost point, known as ULTIMA THULE, has since been hypothesized as one of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. He also mentions eastern Europe’s Volga River and makes the first known reference to the Carpathian Mountains. He was also aware of the lands of western China, citing that region as the ultimate source of silk that was transported along the SILK ROAD.Much of his work was drawn from earlier Greek geographers, including Marinus of Tyre and STRABO.
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