Geography literally means writing the Earth
Geography joins the Greek words for Earth and writing: it is the study of the planet's lands, features, peoples and phenomena, asking not only where things are but how they came to be there. Many cultures invented it separately and swapped ideas through trade. Its shared core is space, place, time and scale.
The oldest known attempt at a world map comes from Babylon in the 9th century BC. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who lived from about 276 to 195 BC, may have coined the word geographia, though the first recorded use is as the title of Claudius Ptolemy's book in the 2nd century AD. In the Middle Ages Islamic scholars such as Muhammad al-Idrisi drew detailed world maps, the Age of Discovery added the Americas to European charts, and today geomatics and geographic information science carry the work forward. Other worlds get their own labels: mapping Mars is areography, the Moon selenography.
Space is so basic that geographers struggle to define it, but the rule is simple: if something can be placed on a map by coordinates, a name or an address, it has a geography, just as anything in time has a history. Place is richer. In human geography it combines a location with what people do there and what it means to them, which can differ across groups and eras; Yi-Fu Tuan described geography as the study of Earth as humanity's home. Time enters through movement and flow, and scale matters because the same phenomenon looks different at different map ratios.
The discipline splits into physical geography, focused on the natural environment; human geography, on how people interact with the planet; and technical geography, on building the tools. Methods range from cartography and remote sensing to interviews and field surveys. In 1964 William Pattison instead proposed four traditions: spatial, human-environment, regional and earth science.
The quantitative revolution pushed geographers to seek laws. Waldo Tobler's first law holds that everything is related, but nearby things more so; his second says forces outside an area shape what happens inside it. Others add that geographic variables vary unpredictably and that no location can be measured exactly. Some critics reject the very idea of laws in social science, and Tobler and Michael Goodchild have answered them, but the argument continues.
Source: Geography
