The men who first described plants and spices and the countries they came from often got their geography wrong, as they frequently relied on hearsay and their world was poorly understood.

However, when they had direct access to plants, their descriptions were often sophisticated and accurate. The main reason for these studies was to catalogue an array of medicines, as that is how most spices were originally used. These early scientists were often, but not exclusively, Greek and Roman. The geographers themselves were a mixture of theoreticians and adventurers. One thing that unites them all is their enormous level of achievement: many were polymaths and made huge discoveries in differing fields of expertise, while others were specialists and prolific writers; each has become legendary, and justifiably so.