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What was so significant about Ptolemys maps?

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What was so significant about Ptolemys maps?

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Ptolemy, who gave Greek astronomy its final form in the second century A.D., did the same–and more–for geography and cartography. His massive work on the subject, which summed up and criticized the work of earlier writers, offered instruction in laying out maps by three different methods of projection, provided coordinates for some eight thousand places, and treated such basic concepts as geographical latitude and longitude. Perhaps the most significant contribution of Ptolemy and his maps is the first uses of longitudinal and latitudinal lines and the specifying of terrestrial locations by celestial observations. When his Geographia was translated from Greek into Arabic in the ninth century and subsequently into Latin in Western Europe at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the idea of a global coordinate system revolutionized medieval Islamic and European geographical thinking and put it upon a scientific and numerical basis. Learn more here:

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