Herodotus and the foundation of geography and geopolitics
“1. Rather than starting with an examination of the debate over geopolitics and its relationship with geography and international relations (a point we will eventually come to), I believe that it would be more useful to begin by describing the foundations, so often misunderstood, of the essential discipline of geography—particularly as they are the same as those of the discipline known in France a “geopolitics,” by which is meant any power struggle over a given territory. We are talking therefore not only about the influence of natural givens on balances of power (what Anglo-American experts on international relations sometimes call “geopolitics”) but also about the territorial aspects of rivalries and the localization of forces present in a broad international context. Geographers (teachers of geography, at least) have very different ideas about their discipline and its raison d’être. In fact, the relationship between geography and geopolitics begs the fundamental question of their historical origins and history.
2Just as philosophers refer back to Plato and Aristotle as the founders of European thought over 25 centuries, I am making the claim that Herodotus’ Inquiries—which also go back 25 centuries—mark the beginning of geographical reasoning as a method for analyzing power rivalries over territory. That is why, almost 40 years ago, I placed what would eventually become the French school of geopolitics under the aegis of Herodotus.
3 Most geographers are not familiar with Herodotus or have only heard of him as a historian. Herodotus (484–420 BCE) was an Ionian Greek from the city of Halicarnassus (modern-day Bodrum, in Turkey) on the West coast of Asia Minor. In his youth, he and his family lived through the final years of what we call the Greco-Persian Wars, or Persian Wars. In 500 BC, with support from Athens, the Ionian cities rebelled against the Persians. The First Persian War began soon after with the Persian invasion of the Greek peninsula. The Persians were pushed back at Marathon and launched the Second Persian War (Battle of Thermopylae) but failed once again (Battle of Salamis) in 480 BC. The Greeks lavishly celebrated these victories in a number of literary works. However, because Herodotus believed that the Persians would eventually attack a third time, he carried out (perhaps at Pericles’ suggestion) detailed geographical investigations of the Persian Empire over many years in order to describe its political and military organization and the lands it ruled. He also went back over the events of the Persian Wars, since various cities had effectively rallied to the Persian side. Perhaps they would do the same in a future conflict?
4 Because Herodotus was very precise in his analysis of these alliances (something that led to a great deal of hard feeling against him), he has been viewed mainly as a historian. However, he was also the first great geographer. This is particularly marked in his geographical description of Egypt, which was also under Persian rule and which the Greeks might encourage to revolt in any future conflict. It was Herodotus who created the world “delta” (from the triangular shape of the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet) to describe the layout of the two branches of the Nile in relation to the shoreline before maps existed. He also coined the phrase “Egypt is a gift of the Nile,” and it was he who demonstrated the importance of the Pharaohs. It was also Herodotus who expressed surprise that the Nile was at its highest levels in summer whereas all the rivers in neighboring countries were dry. In response, he came up with the hypothesis (which would not be formulated again until the seventeenth century) that the source of this great river was in a faraway land, where it rained in summer.
5 In his time, the word “geography” did not yet exist. The word istoréo, which Herodotus used to describe his Inquiries and the work they required, did not mean “writing history” but observing, reporting, telling what had been seen or what had happened, what had been reported. Thucydides, a contemporary of Herodotus, was essentially a historian, and the range of his geographical observation was fairly limited since he studied mainly Greece, where the Peloponnesian War (431–404) between Sparta and Athens had taken place. Thucydides is rightly considered the founder of objective historical reasoning.”
The opening paragraphs of the article of Yves Lacoste Geography, Geopolitics, and Geographical Reasoning, published in French in the review Hérodote, volume 146-147, Issue 3-4, 2012, p. 14 to 44.
Source of the English translation https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_HER_146_0014--geography-geopolitics-and-geographical.htm
Lacoste (b. 1929), founder of the review Hérodote, is an an important -although not uncontroversial- French geographer and thinker of geopolitics.
Personally I find that Lacoste’s assertion that “because Herodotus believed that the Persians would eventually attack a third time, he carried out (perhaps at Pericles’ suggestion) detailed geographical investigations of the Persian Empire over many years in order to describe its political and military organization and the lands it ruled” is not backed either by the Herodotean text or by the other extant classical sources and is very reductive concerning Herodotus’ motivations in the composition of the “Histories”. I add also the clarification that Herodotus was not strictly speaking Ionian, but Dorian (some surmise moreover that perhaps he was of mixed Greek-Karian origin), although of course culturally speaking he was part of the Ionian scientific and philosophical movement. But for the rest the paragraphs that I quote are very enlightening on the importance of Herodotus for the foundation of geography and geopolitics.
