Richard Kiepert was a German cartographer born in Weimar

Weimar

Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...

. He was the son of famed geographer

Geographer

A geographer is a scholar whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society.Although geographers are historically known as people who make maps, map making is actually the field of study of cartography, a subset of geography...

 Heinrich Kiepert

Heinrich Kiepert

Heinrich Kiepert , German geographer, was born at Berlin as the son of a wealthy businessman.Already in his youth he traveled with his parents and had a particular interest in the geographic circumstances, which he carefully sketched...

 (1818-1899).

Biography

Richard Kiepert studied geography

Geography

Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

 and history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 and Heidelberg

Heidelberg

-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

. In 1870, he traveled in Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

 and Asia Minor

Asia Minor

Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...

, returning to take part in the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

. In 1874, he received his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Jena.

Kiepert prepared maps from data amassed by German explorers of Africa that included Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs

Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs

Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs was a German geographer, explorer, author and adventurer.He was born at Vegesack, now part of Bremen. There was much pressure on Rohlfs to be in the medicine field, and he eventually joined the French Foreign Legion in a medical capacity...

 (1831-1896) and Heinrich Barth

Heinrich Barth

Heinrich Barth was a German explorer of Africa and scholar.Barth is one of the greatest of the European explorers of Africa, not necessarily because of the length of his travels or the time he spent alone without European company in Africa, but because of his singular character.-Biography:Barth...

 (1821-1865). Two important African geographic works of his were Deutscher Kolonialatlas and Spezialkarte von Deutsch-Ostafrika.

From 1874 until 1878 he worked on the compilation of Ferdinand von Richthofen

Ferdinand von Richthofen

Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen was a German traveller, geographer, and scientist.-Biography:He was born in Carlsruhe, Prussian Silesia, and was educated in Breslau and Berlin. He traveled or studied in the Alps of Tyrol and the Carpathians in Transylvania...

's atlas of China, and from 1875 to 1887 he was editor of the geographical periodical Globus. From 1902 until 1908 he worked on the Spezialkarte von Kleinasien, a map of Asia Minor

Asia Minor

Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...

 which was created on a 1:400,000 scale. After his father's death in 1899, he continued the work on the elder Kiepert's classic Formae Orbis Antiqui.

In 1908 Kiepert was the recipient of the Carl Ritter

Carl Ritter

Carl Ritter was a German geographer. Along with Alexander von Humboldt, he is considered one of the founders of modern geography. From 1825 until his death, he occupied the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin.-Biography:Ritter was born in Quedlinburg, one of the six children of a...

Medal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, and in 1913 was given the honorary title of professor.