Medieval Arab geographic errors followed logical climate-theory deduction

Evidence

De Moraes Farias has suggested that these medieval “mistakes” of geographical knowledge are “much more complicated than the word ‘mistake’ implies,” that in them can be found ideologies of classification that led to further mythification of Africans’ identities: On the one hand, they were caused by insufficiency of empirical knowledge about the real world; on the other hand, they were caused by a fixed scheme of categories, according to which the world was divided into “temperate” and “extreme” climates; one of the “extreme” climates was the torrid zone, in which life was only possible along the banks of great rivers; it follows, logically, that (a) if there was agriculture and urban life in Kanem, and (b) if Kanem indeed was situated in the torrid climate, then it was to be expected that there was a “Nile” flowing across Kanem. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 144

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely subtle point: the ‘mistakes’ were the product of a coherent deductive system that generated internally logical-but-wrong conclusions — prefiguring how ideology structures ‘empirical’ claims about Africa.
• SHARE: Perfect nerdy tidbit for someone working on the history of cartography or the logic of premodern scientific inference.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 144
• XREF: connects to: Medieval Arab geography of Africa mixed empirical fact with scriptural legend; Medieval map errors sprang from fixed climate categories as much as ignorance; Medieval Arabic maps of Africa mixed myth with empirical knowledge

Broader Connections

• Medieval map errors sprang from fixed climate categories as much as ignorance #corroborates (0.80)
• Medieval Arabic maps of Africa mixed myth with empirical knowledge #expands (0.50)