General geography

The general geography or "systematic geography" It is the part of geography that studies the variations of both spatial distributions and of the terrestrial surface, as well as the relationship between the natural environment and the human being. It differs, therefore, from the description and study of the regions of the earth's surface (what was called Special or chorological Geography).

It is divided into physical geography, astronomical geography, mathematical geography, and human geography.

History

It has been rightly said that geography is a science with a brief history and a long past (). This appreciation refers to the fact that the works of an explanatory geography, and not only descriptive, are relatively recent, from the end of the 19th century, but have antecedents in Greece during the Ancient Age, about 25 centuries ago. The first books of Geography are those of Eratosthenes and Strabo and they were a descriptive vision of the known world, with geographical features, its location and its towns and inhabitants.

After the classical Greek period, we find representatives of descriptive geography, increasingly explanatory, with the use of some more elaborate maps, in the work of Hellenistic culture, becoming the city of Alexandria, with its famous Library, that came to gather a million works, while the contributions of Ptolemy, his maps and his geocentric theory of the world made him the most important author in the field of Geography from the century onwards II, in the Old Age and long after. The Roman Empire promoted knowledge of the vast territory in which it spread, with the creation of thousands of km of highways, the foundation of cities, extension of crops, irrigation, bridges and aqueducts, all achieved through a great effort. development of engineering and architecture. During the Middle Ages, the descriptions of travelers, mainly Romans, Arabs and southern Europeans, such as the Venetians, Byzantines, Majorcans (with the development of the so-called portolan charts, the compass, the caravel and other developments of navigation) stand out. and trade). The development of trade in the cities of the Mediterranean was joined by that of the cities of the Hanseatic League, already during the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, when the era of great advances in transoceanic navigation began.

It is a very important science for the world, it has an approach aimed at understanding the problems of nature-society interaction and at reorienting the attitude of human beings towards geographic space and the environment.