Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  Ymir was a giant, who in prehistoric times came into being in the wasteland of Ginnungagap, between the scorching-hot realm of Muspelheim to the south and ice-cold Niflheim in the north. One day, the waters of the Élivágar rivers ran so far from their sources that they froze in the northern regions of Ginnungagap. Upon encountering the sparks flying from Muspelheim, the ice melted and began to drip–these drips were given life by the sparks and formed Ymir.

  As he slept, Ymir began to sweat; a man and a woman grew from under his arm, and his feet produced a son–these were the ancestors of the giants. Ymir was nourished by Auðumla, the cow–she too was created from frost and ice, and fed on salted ice-blocks: ‘the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man’s hair; the second day, a man’s head; the third day the whole man.’ This man was named Buri, and he bore a son, named Borr. Borr took Bestla, a giantess, as his wife, and they had three sons: Odin, Vili and Vé.

  A power struggle then ensued in Ginnungagap. Borr and Bestla’s three sons killed Ymir to put a stop to the stream of giants he continued to sweat out. In The Fooling of Gylfe, Snorri retells the story of how the brothers fashioned the Earth from Ymir’s body–adding that his blood became a sea ‘in a ring round about her [the Earth]; and it may well seem a hard thing to most men to cross over it.’

  The Egyptians also believed the world of the living to be surrounded by a vast, chaotic sea; above and below this was the invisible part of the universe, where the Sun, Moon and stars resided when they were not visible in the sky–humans and animals were also believed to travel here when their earthly lives came to an end. An Egyptian map from the year 350 BC shows Egypt and its surrounding areas, with the south at the top. The goddess Nut arches over the world like a bridge, with her hands in the west and her feet to the east. At other times, Nut is represented as lying below the Earth, extinguishing the Sun in the evening to birth it again the next morning.

  The Iliad, the Greek epic first written down some time in the ninth or eighth century BC, describes a similar cosmology featuring a world surrounded by sea. While war raged between the Greeks and the Trojans, the Greek fire god Hephaestus was tasked with forging a substantial shield for the Greek warrior Achilles. The description of the imagery with which Hephaestus decorated the shield is also a description of the Greek universe:

  There earth, there heaven, there ocean he design’d;

  The unwearied sun, the moon completely round;

  The starry lights that heaven’s high convex crown’d;

  The Pleiads, Hyads, with the northern team;

  And great Orion’s more refulgent beam;

  To which, around the axle of the sky,

  The Bear, revolving, points his golden eye

  Hephaestus hammered depictions of the world into the metal, including images of cities, people and animals, warriors and estate holders, and finally the sea, which defined the shield’s outermost edge:

  Thus the broad shield complete the artist crown’d

  With his last hand, and pour’d the ocean round:

  In living silver seem’d the waves to roll,

  And beat the buckler’s verge, and bound the whole.

  Our view of earlier times also influences how we translate their texts. In the Norwegian translation of the Iliad, the Greek Gaia is translated as ‘jordskiven’–‘earth disc’; it assumes that the ancient Greeks believed the Earth was flat.

  A similar problem can be found in the translation of the Bible’s creation narrative. In the King James Bible, Genesis i, 6 reads: ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

  The problem here is that ‘firmament’ is not necessarily a correct translation of the Hebrew word raqiya. The new English Standard Version of the Bible from 2001 instead uses the word ‘expanse’–‘Let there be an expanse’–something that spreads outwards. It is therefore not necessarily the case that the early Jews regarded the heavens as a kind of solid bell jar curving above the earth.

  The Book of Genesis provides certain hints as to how much of an overview the writers of the Bible had of the world. Genesis ii, 10–14 states: ‘A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.’

  Havilah probably refers to the Hijaz Mountains in western Saudi Arabia, where several thousand years ago a river system, now dried up, ran westwards to the Persian Gulf. Cush was a kingdom situated at the current border between Egypt and Sudan, also known as Nubia, and the Gihon has been said to be the Blue Nile. The Tigris is the river that runs from eastern Turkey, down through Iraq and out into the Persian Gulf, and the Euphrates also runs through Iraq.

  Adam and Eve’s son Cain killed his brother, Abel, then ‘went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.’ But since nod is the root of the Hebrew word meaning ‘to wander’, Nod is not usually understood as a specific country or region, but rather to imply that Cain began a nomadic life.

  At the centre of the Bible’s world is Jerusalem. Ezekiel v, 5 states: ‘Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her.’ The temple in Jerusalem was constructed like a map of the cosmos–the outer courtyard represented our visible world, with its countries and seas; the holy space within was an image of the visible heavens and God’s garden. The innermost space represented the invisible Kingdom of God.

  The belief that the world has a central point is found in many cultures. It may have arisen because, over time, people noticed how the stars rotated above them, and therefore assumed that they must be turning around something. Naturally enough, people generally tended to regard the centre of the world as somewhere close to where they themselves lived. Home is the place that people know best; it is constructed and cultivated, while everything at a distance is unknown, representing chaos, night and death. The location regarded as the centre of the world was often an elevated place where earth met sky, such as a mountain, tree or temple.

  The Japanese viewed the holy Mount Fuji as the centre of the world. In North America, the Cheyenne people viewed Mo’o˙hta-vo’honáaeva–the Black Hills in South Dakota–as the world’s centre. For the Pitjantjatjara people in Australia, Uluru/Ayers Rock was central. The Greeks had the oracle in Delphi; Chinese Taoism describes Kunlun as ‘the mountain at the centre of the world.’ China has also gone a little further than most when it comes to claiming to be the world’s central point: in Mandarin the country’s name is Zhongguó–the Middle Kingdom.

  THE SUMERIANS AND BABYLONIANS | Babylon is at the centre of the oldest world map ever to be discovered–a 2,600-year-old clay tablet found in the Babylonian city of Sippar, south-west of modern Baghdad. Measuring just 12.5 by 8 centimetres, the tablet isn’t large, and was at first of no particular interest; it was among 70,000 other tablets that were sent to the British Museum following excavations undertaken in 1881. But today, the tablet has a prominent position among the museum’s collections as the Babylonian Map of the World.

  The map consists of a small ring within a larger one. The innermost ring contains several other small circles, rectangles and curved lines, and around the outermost ring are eight triangles. The tablet only became comprehensible as a map when the ancient text on the back was deciphered and understood.

  This text tells us that the outer ring is marratu, ‘the salt sea’, and represents the great sea that surrounds the inhabited world. Within the inner ring is a rectangular shape that starts at the top of the ring and extends down past its centre–this is the River Euphrates. Its s
ource is represented by a circle to the north marked ‘mountain’, and ends in a horizontal rectangle to the south representing a ‘canal’ and a ‘swamp’. The rectangle that crosses the Euphrates is Babylon; circles represent the neighbouring areas of Susa (southern Iraq), Bit Yakin (Chaldea in southern Iraq), Habban (Yemen), Urartu (Armenia), Der (eastern Iraq) and Assyria.

  The triangles that stick out from the other side of the sea are labelled nagu, which translates as ‘region’ or ‘province’. Certain ancient Babylonian heroes are said to have been to these areas, and the accompanying text describes the region where ‘the Sun is hidden and nothing can be seen’–a sign that the Babylonians may have heard of the lands to the north and their dark winters. Another region is labelled as being ‘beyond the flight of birds’. Exotic animals are also mentioned, including chameleons, apes, ostriches, lions and wolves. These regions are the unmapped regions–the remote, mystical areas beyond the Babylonian knowledge of the world.

  Why the map was created is unclear. The text states that the map’s creator was a descendant of Ea-bel-ili from the city of Borsippa, situated directly south of Sippar–and that’s as much as it tells us. But this is not the only map to have survived from this time and region.

  Before the Babylonians, the Sumerians were the leading people of the Iraqi plains. The world as they knew it extended from Turkey and Caucasus in the north to Egypt in the south, and from the Mediterranean, Cyprus and Crete in the west to India in the east. Their closest neighbours to the east were the Elamites, a rival people with whom the Sumerians were often at war, while in the west wandered the Martu, a Semitic, nomadic people who lived in tents and kept sheep and goats. In the north lived the Subartu, a people the Martu often pillaged in order to obtain timber, other raw materials and slaves; to the south was Dilmun (Bahrain), a trading post that became associated with both the creation narrative and the land of the dead.

  The golden age of the Sumerian people lasted from around 3500 to 2270 BC, and they left us two things that we continue to use when creating maps today: script and mathematics. The modern method of dividing maps into 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude is based on the Sumerian number system–although their system was based on the digits 6, 12 and 60, rather than 5, 10 and 100.

  There are several theories as to why the Sumerians developed such a system. One posits that it is easy to count to twelve when using your thumb to count the tips and joints of the hand’s four fingers: 1–2–3 on the index finger, 1–2–3 on the middle finger, 1–2–3 on the ring finger and 1–2–3 on the little finger. And if you then lift a finger on the other hand for each time you count to twelve, you have sixty once you have counted five times twelve.

  Sixty is also a useful number in that it can be divided equally by eleven other numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30; this makes it easy to create smaller units such as halves, thirds, quarters and tenths. The Greeks maintained this number system when building upon Sumerian and Babylonian astronomy, geometry and geography, and this is why we continue to use it today.

  The Sumerian writing system–the earliest writing system we know of–made it possible to record geographical information. Advancing armies, and merchants who travelled from place to place to collect metals, stone and timber, created lists that stated how far it was from one city to another and how long each journey would take. One such example is a military travelogue detailing the route from the southern part of Iraq to the city of Emar in northern Syria. All the listed stopping points are around one day’s journey from each other, between twenty-five and thirty kilometres, and if the troops spent more than one night in a location, they recorded for example that this was ‘where the chariot broke down’ or ‘when the troops rested for two days.’

  Around the year 3000 BC, the Sumerians developed units of measure, and 200 years later used geometry to survey arable land and calculate taxes. They used a measuring rope and a peg that was driven into the ground to hold the rope–a method known as triangulation, so simple and effective that it continued to be used right up until the present day. To triangulate an area, you first measure a baseline on the ground. You then find a point a couple of hundred metres away, such as a house or a tree, which becomes the last corner of the triangle. You then walk to one end of the baseline and measure the angle between this and the point, before doing the same from the other end. The length of the baseline and the size of the two angles gives you all the information you need to calculate the distance to the point.

  A papyrus map from the time of the pharaohs, probably from around the 1100s BC, which shows the quarry in Wadi Hammamat–the Valley of Many Baths–in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The map was found in the early 1800s in a grave near the city of Luxor. Over the years the original map, which was 210 centimetres wide when created, has broken into several pieces. On the most well-preserved it is possible to make out four houses, a temple to the god Amun, a water reservoir, a well and the mountain where the Egyptians mined gold.

  A 3,500-year-old Sumerian map shows a landscape with several fields and canals at a location where the river makes a sharp turn. A map of the holy city of Nippur from the same period shows the city’s most important temple, a park, the Euphrates, two canals that run through the city and seven gates–all of which have names. But what is possibly unique about this map is that it may be the first to have been drawn to scale–that is, the various elements are reproduced in the same relationship to one another as in reality. Numbers given beside several of the buildings also specify their size, and modern excavations of Nippur have resulted in claims that the city looked exactly as it appears on the map. The accurate reproduction of this fortified city may indicate that the map was of military significance.

  Occasionally, the Sumerians also attempted to create maps of places situated greater distances from each other–a map discovered in Nippur depicts nine cities along three canals and a road.

  The Babylonians built upon Sumerian mathematics, developing it further, and surviving tablets provide evidence of a high level of skill–particularly within geometry. The Babylonians also developed specific units for indicating distances and lengths, which were based on the time it took to reach the location in question. The main unit was the beru, the ‘double-hour’–around ten kilometres.

  The Babylonians used this mathematical knowledge to create maps of estates, territories, houses, named streets, temples, and rivers and canals–sometimes even using wavy lines to denote the water. One fragment of a city map is thought to show a temple in Babylon and the surrounding streets; another shows the city of Uruk and a building within it.

  The importance of the Babylonian Map of the World has already been noted, but equally important in cartographic history is the first map to indicate the cardinal directions east, west and north, with east at the top. This was discovered close to the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The map was created around the year 2300 BC, and shows a valley with a river running through it. Text in the bottom left corner states that the map is of a place called Mashkan-dur-ibla. At its centre is an area of land specified as measuring 354 iku, or around 12 hectares, and its owner is named as ‘Azala’. Most of the text is otherwise unreadable.

  If the Babylonians were indeed the first people to indicate compass points on a map, and the Sumerian map of Nippur was created to scale, then two of today’s most important cartographic principles were already being used in ancient Mesopotamia.

  THE GOLD MINE MAP | Like the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the ancient Egyptians were a people who undertook agricultural activities beside a great river–they were dependent upon the Nile flooding its banks each year to produce fertile mud for them to cultivate. The floods also resulted in frequent changes to the landscape, and meant that the ancient Egyptians–like the Sumerians and Babylonians–needed to survey their lands.

  In his Histories, written between 450 and 420 BC, Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris, stating that he ‘divided the country a
mong all the Egyptians by giving each an equal parcel of land, and made this his source of revenue, assessing the payment of a yearly tax. And any man who was robbed by the river of part of his land could come to Sesostris and declare what had happened; then the king would send men to look into it and calculate the part by which the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally imposed.’

  The age of the pharaohs began with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC, and the first Egyptian maps were created during this period. Decorations discovered in tombs feature elements of landscapes and buildings drawn both from above and in profile along strips representing the horizon, and may be said to be simple forms of pictorial map. The difference between cities and the countryside is denoted using trees.

  The Book of the Dead, a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary texts composed on papyrus around the year 1400 BC, includes a drawing of a garden in which the dead may work. The garden is rectangular and divided by canals, and the use of colour strengthens the impression that the image is a map. Other maps associated with the realm of the dead have been discovered painted inside coffins from around the year 2000 BC, and show a landscape with two paths: one is blue and runs via water, while the other is black and crosses the land. Both paths lead to the god Osiris, ruler of the afterlife.

  A map from around 1300 BC shows the military conquest procession of Seti I as it travels past watering holes and boundaries along the desert road to Canaan, where Israel, Palestine and Lebanon are situated today. Seti I’s successor, Ramesses II, attacked a fort in Kadesh, where the Orontes River meets a smaller river near Homs in what is now Syria, and a graphic reproduction of this battle has clear cartographic qualities. The rivers encircle the city, separating the two armies.