Ptolemy established his own latitude and longitude places in the Roman Empire.
Since he was wrong by about 30 % he estimated the earth to be one third smaller
than it actually is. Even though a fellow by the name of Eratosthenes had much
better arithmetic than Ptolemy, 13 centuries later, Columbus sailed out and took
into consideration that the world was much smaller than it actually is, thus
taking into considration of Ptolemy rather than Eratosthenes. 1000 years after
the Roman Emopire, development of geographic findings was quite slow. Still,
they still had undiscovered lands and oceans and that sustained the attention of
some scholars. The ancient Greeks had said that the Earth’s equalatorial zone
was so hot that human life was impossible there and the sun had scorched black
the skins of people living near. But the Arabs sailed acroos the equater and
proved that equatorial regions were habitable. Arab geographers made
interpretations of the evolution of mountain ranges and the depositon of
sediments and analized the atmospheric processes that produce particular weather
patterns.