💼 Packing something to read onboard a ship

Europe’s growing literacy, which was rooted in a return to ancient classics and

powered by the invention of printing, influenced matters much more down-to-earth

than poems and plays. The ancients also wrote serious books about geography and

navigation, and they drew maps that preserved what Greek and Phoenician navigators

had learned about seas and landmasses. After all, Greek and Phoenician navigators

were the greatest travelers of their times. (Turn to Chapter 5 for more about

Phoenicians, their North African city Carthage, and their seafaring empire.) Europeans

of the Renaissance read those books, too.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century advances in navigation and cartography

(mapmaking), like other intellectual advances of the time, had their roots in the

relevant Greek and Roman texts. Explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco

da Gama (more about them in Chapter 21) started with an atlas designed by the

Egyptian-Greek astronomer Ptolemy (90–170 AD) and then radically redrew it. Their

discoveries about the shape and size of the world went hand in hand with the theories

of Copernicus (covered earlier in this chapter) and his heirs, astronomers Johannes

Kepler and Galileo,