Marinos of Tire

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marinos of Tire was an ancient Greek geographer who lived in the late first and early second centuries AD. His creative period can be dated to the years between 107 and 114/115, since he names cities in his writing that go back to Trajan's Dacian Wars (107 ended), but places that were founded or renamed in his Parthian Wars (114–116) , not yet know.

Tradition and meaning

The work of Marinos is almost only known through Ptolemy , who cites him as a source in his work Geographike Hyphegesis and who probably built heavily on his work. Marinos is also quoted by Arab geographers such as al-Masʿūdī , but they probably did not know his work directly, but only referred to him through Ptolemy 's work. Marinos therefore often appears as its predecessor only in the context of the history of science, although in Muslim times it is incorrectly dated to the reign of Nero .

Despite the great scientific importance that Ptolemy attached to Marinos, his work was already forgotten in antiquity due to the Geographike Hyphegesis. Ptolemy corrected the data and cartography methods of the Marinos on the basis of astronomical calculations and developed them further. The lunar crater Marinus is named after the geographer from Tire.

Content of the work

Sources and structure

According to the secondary and tertiary information provided by Ptolemy and the Arab authors, Marinos had created a map of the world with detailed annotations that also included topographical information and corrected older errors. However, there were also sections of text that did not have a corresponding map and that are likely to have resembled a list of place names broken down by provinces / regions with geographical notes on their location.

The entire work was probably based primarily on the reports of travelers, especially seafarers, who had given Marinos von Tire distance information. From this and other numerous pieces of information, he compiled the data and coordinated them with one another. Important sources were the Indian traveler Diodoros of Samos , the governor of North Africa Septimius Flaccus , the Africa trader Iulius Maternus , for the east coast of Africa a Diogenes, a Theophilos and a Dioskoros, further the Macedonian merchant Maēs Titianus and the Greek geographer Philemon . This method was very error-prone and was largely made obsolete by Ptolemy's more precise calculations. The compass rose was taken over by Marinos from Timosthenes of Rhodes , some astronomical bases from Hipparchus .

Geographical world view

Ernst Honigmann designed a map of the Oikumene based on the Marino's instructions. This is constructed as a cylinder projection and is therefore rectangular, its central orientation line is the latitude of Rhodes (36 °), which runs across the Mediterranean.

In the west, the map extends to the Macaronesian islands , in the east to Seres , i.e. eastern China. In between there are 15 hour segments, between which there is a time difference of one hour and which are delimited by meridians . An hour segment is 15 °, the world map a total of 225 °. On the latitude of Rhodes, Marinos assumes that 1 ° corresponds to about 400 stadiums , which results in 90,000 stadiums for the whole map.

In north-south direction, the map is bounded by the mythical land of Thule and Agisymba , located in sub-Saharan Africa . There were seven climates in between , resulting in eight latitude zones, between which the length of the longest day of the year should differ by 30 minutes each. Marinos calculated a north-south orientation of 87 ° or 43,500 stadiums. The division into seven climates was already present in the work of Eratosthenes , while the west-east division for the time before Marinos is not documented.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Marinos of Tire
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marinos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek geographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1st century
PLACE OF BIRTH Tire
DATE OF DEATH 2nd century