Globes
A globe can be terrestrial-a spherical representation of the Earth- or celestial-a spherical representation of the heavens. Both types were constructed in ancient Greece and China. The earliest globes were small and made of marble, metal, or wood, with atched or painted surfaces. The earliest known celestial globe forms part of the '' Farnese Atlas,'' a Roman copy of a Greek statue. Atlas holds a sphere some 26 inches across showing the constellations.
In 1492 the Nurnberg mapmaker martin Behaim made a globe from a mold using wood strips, plaster,and fiber. soon other mapmakers were covering balls with map segments called globe gores, printed map segments with tapered points. Dutch artist Albrecht Durer published rules for preparing globe gores in 1525. A more formal illustrated guide appeared in 1527. published in basel by Henricus Glareanus. He proposed using 12 globe segments, each representing 30 degrees of longitude and extending from pole to pole.
Antonio Florian's 1555 world map portrays the Northern and southern Hemispheres, both subdivided into 36 gores of ten degrees. It may have been intended as a flat map or as the surface cover for a globe, each segment to be cut, moistened, pasted over a ten-inch sphere Today terrestrial globes depict Earth's physical features and may include features on the ocean floor as well. Most globes commonly show political features such as countries and cities. Globes typically are mounted with the axis tilted at 23 1/2 degrees to simulate Earth's inclination as it orbits the sun. Globes also depict other spheres, such as the moon
- What is an Armillary Sphere?
An armillary sphere is a globe made of movable, concentric rings that depict such things as horizon, meridian, Equator, tropics, and polar circles, The earliest known complete armillary is attributed to the Greeks in the early second century A.D. Ptolemy created one to promote his geocentric vision of the cosmos.In 1543, German mathemmatician caspar Vogel constructed an armillary sphere that supported ptolemy'stheory, In the same year, Copernicus published his revolutionary treatise placing the sun at the center of the solar system.
Afterward, Ptolemaic and Copernican spheres were exhibited together to display the differences between the two versions of the cosmos.
- IBN Battuta / Chronicler of Travels
Among the wide-ranging Arab historian-geographers of the Middle Ages, Ibn Battuta (1304-1369) covered more distance than anyone. for all his journeys he earned the epithet Traveler of Islam. His 29 years of travels began in 1325, when at the age of 21 he undertook the pilgrimage to mecca on the Arabian peninsula-some 3,000 miles from his brithplace in Morocco, in western Africa. for most of the rest of his life, his wanderlust kept him on the move through the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. In all, he traveled 75,000 miles, three times the distance covered by Marco polo. The narrative of his journeys, titled Rihlah, or Travels, remains one of the premier sources of early cultural geography.
0 Comments