We’ll need a lot of space for our guides: boastful dealers, finicky surveyors, guesswork philosophers, profligate collectors, unreliable navigators, whistling ramblers, inexperienced globe-makers, nervous curators, hot neuroscientists and lusting conquistadors. Some of them will be familiar names – Claudius Ptolemy, Marco Polo, Winston Churchill, Indiana Jones – and some will be less well known: a Venetian monk, a New York dealer, a London brain mapper, a Dutch entrepreneur, an African tribal leader.
You hold in your hand the catalogue to this show, and it begins in a library on the coast of Egypt.
Chapter 1
What Great Minds Knew
Maps began as a challenge of the imagination and they still perform that role. So imagine yourself in your bedroom. How good would you be at mapping it? Given a pencil and pad, could you draw the room well enough so that someone who’s never been there would get a fair picture? Would the size of the bed be in proportion to the door and the bedside table? Would the scale be right in relation to the height of the ceiling? Would your kitchen be harder or easier to map than the bedroom?
This shouldn’t be too hard really, because these are places you know well. But what about the living room of a friend? That would be partly a test of memory – would you get it right or would you be struggling? But what about your first school: would you remember where your classroom was in relation to others? Or the world? Could you draw that? Could you correlate the relative size – and geographic relationship – of Mongolia and Switzerland? Would you get the oceans even half right in the southern hemisphere? And what if you’d never seen another map before, or a globe, and you’d never been to any of these places yourself? Could you construct a map of the world based purely on what people had told you, and what people had written down? And if you did manage this, would you be happy for it still to be used as the principal map of the world some 1350 years after you had drawn it?
Only, I imagine, if your name was Claudius Ptolemy.
Considering his impact on the world, and beyond the fact that we should regard the P in his surname as silent, we know curiously little about Ptolemy. But we do know where he worked – at one of the greatest buildings in ancient Egypt, lying just a little way inland on a small cloak-shaped port on the banks of the Mediterranean.
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The story of the vanished Great Library of Alexandria is one of the most romantic of the ancient world, and it appeals partly because we are unable to imagine a modern equivalent. Today’s British Library is a library of record, receiving a copy of each new work in the English language, but it has no ambitions to house a complete collection of the world’s manuscripts, nor to contain the sum of human knowledge. The same with the Bodleian in Oxford, and the New York Public Library. But the Great Library of Alexandria did aspire to such ambitions, and it existed at a time when such a thing was broadly achievable.
From its inception in around 330 BC, the Library was intended as a place where every scrap of useful information found a home. Other private libraries were commandeered for the common good; manuscripts arriving in the city by sea would be transcribed or translated, and only some were returned; often the ships would sail away again with the originals replaced by copies. At the same time, Alexandria became Europe’s principal supplier of papyrus, from which the majority of its Library scrolls were made. And suddenly the supply of papyrus for export dried up: some claimed that all the papyrus was required to supply the Great Library, though others detected a plot designed to inhibit the growth of rival collections – an elitism, passion and quest that all obsessive book and map collectors will recognise.
The Great Library was the legacy – like the city itself – of Alexander the Great. During a journey along the western reaches of the Nile Delta, Alexander had come across a site that, according to the Roman historian Arrian, he predicted would be ‘the very best in which to found a city.’ Its subsequent foundation signalled the shift of governmental and cultural power from Athens.
Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle in the ways of morality, poetry, biology, drama, logic and aesthetics, and it was through Aristotle that he became devoted to Homer, taking the Iliad into battle and living by its teachings. His conquest of the Persian Empire was followed by the destruction of Tyre and the rapid capitulation of Egypt, and it was here that he became afflicted with immortal ambitions: he wanted his legacy to be a symbol of learning rather than destruction, a place from where the Hellenistic worldview would be spread through the empire and beyond. And so he laid plans for a city marked by a devotion to scholarship, high ideals and good governance, and its vast Library was to be its pantheon.
The Library, completed several decades after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, was in effect the world’s first university, a place of research and colloquy, whose scholars included the mathematician Archimedes and the poet Apollonius. They discussed scientific and medical principles as well as philosophy, literature and political administration. And they were responsible for drawing up the first accomplished maps of the world: a role for which, living in a port city at the heart of both western and eastern trade routes, and with first-hand testimonies from travellers and sailors, they were ideally placed.
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If we stumbled across a map of ancient Alexandria today, we would see an orderly place, a grid system of boulevards and thoroughfares. A heavily populated Jewish Quarter lies to the east, while the Library and Museum stand in the Royal Quarter in the centre. The city is surrounded by water, with the Great Harbour (home of the royal palaces) on small islands in the north. At the city’s northern harbour rises the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, more than a hundred metres tall, with a flame at its top reflected by a mirror and visible some thirty miles out to sea. It would be difficult to miss the metaphor: Alexandria was a beacon city, a landmark both liberated and liberating in a city pulsing with illuminated thinking.
But the world beyond Alexandria – how did that look at the beginning of the third century BC?
Despite the Great Library’s accomplishments in science and mathematics, the study of geography was still in its infancy. Its first scholars constructed an important proto-map of the world, based largely on the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. His nine-volume Researches had been completed a century and a half earlier but his description of the rise and fall of the Persian empire and the Greco-Persian wars remained the most detailed source on the known world. Homer, too, was regarded as an important source for geographical knowledge, not least through the travels depicted in the Odyssey.
It is thought that this Alexandrian map depicted the world as round, or at least roundish, which by the fourth century BC was commonly accepted. It is possible that Herodotus shared this view, though he may have seen it as a flat disc floating on water. Homer, certainly, was a flat-earther, back in the eighth century BC, believing the earth was a place where if you continued sailing you would eventually fall off the end. But by the fifth century BC, Pythagoras had argued persuasively that the earth was a sphere. (The myth that the earth was still considered flat until the time of Columbus is an oddly enduring one. Why should this be? A combination of general ignorance and our love of a good story: the image of Columbus returning home with the news that his fleet did not in fact topple into a great abyss is madly appealing.)
Herodotus upheld the common wisdom that the world was divided into three sections – Europa, Asia and Libya (Africa) – but argued against a widespread belief that they were the same size and made up the whole of the earth. Neither Britain nor Scandinavia featured in his accounts, and the Nile ran throughout Africa to Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Only a small section of Asia was examined, and it was dominated by India. Herodotus admitted to uncertainty over whether Europe was surrounded wholly by water, but he suggested Africa might be. He also saw the Caspian Sea – accurately – as a vast inlet, unlike many of his successors.
As the Great Library developed its collections, the variety and reliability of its sou
rces yielded a vast collection of fragmentary information about the world – and the possibilities of creating maps to reflect this. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya) was one of the first scholars able to marshall the city’s new geographical knowledge into the art of cartography. Born in 276 BC, he studied mathematics and astronomy in Athens, combining the disciplines to form the first primitive armillary sphere (or astrolabe), a series of metal rings arranged as a globe that showed celestial positions with the earth at its centre.
At the age of forty, Eratosthenes became the third Librarian at Alexandria and began his great treatise Geographica shortly afterwards. There was no study of geography comparable to that of medicine or philosophy (indeed, Eratosthenes is believed to have coined the word ‘geography’ from the Greek words Geo/Earth and graphien/writing) but at the Great Library he would have encountered an abstract map created in the sixth century BC by Anaximander of Miletus for his treatise On Nature. This map, long extinct, showed the world as a flat disc with named parts for the Mediterranean, Italy and Sicily. He may also have benefitted from an inventory of countries and tribes – a ‘Circuit of the Earth’, but in truth more a circuit around the Mediterranean – provided in the same period by Hecataeus of Miletus. (Miletus, in modern-day Turkey, was something of a Classical geographical hothouse. In the fifth century BC it was also home to Hippodamus, a forefather of urban planning responsible for some of the earliest civic maps).
But Eratosthenes’ own geographic study was to be on an altogether grander scale, making fullest use of the Library scrolls, the accounts of those who had swept through Europe and Persia in the previous century, and the pertaining views of the leading contemporary historians and astronomers. His world map was drawn in about 194 BC. No contemporary version exists, but the cartographer’s descriptions were interpreted for a Victorian audience, and this remains the generally accepted and widely used reproduction. It peculiarly resembles a dinosaur skull. There are three recognisable continents – Europe to the north-east, Africa (described as Libya and Arabia) beneath it, and Asia occupying the eastern half of the map. The huge northern section of Asia is called Scythia, an area we would now regard as encompassing eastern Europe, the Ukraine and southern Russia.
Three continents in a fountain: Anaximander imagines a disc-like earth surrounded by water in sixth century BC.
The map is sparse but sophisticated, and noteworthy for its early use of parallels and meridians in a grid system. Eratosthenes drew a main parallel running east-west through Rhodes, and a main meridian running north-south, again with Rhodes at its centre. His map was then divided into unequal rectangles and squares, which appear to the modern eye as locational grids but served the Greek geographer more as an aid to achieving accurate proportions. They affirmed the common belief that the earth’s length from west to east was more than double its breadth from north to south.
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Eratosthenes viewed the earth in the contemporary way: as a sphere at the centre of the universe with the heavenly bodies in full rotation every twenty-four hours. In his view, there were two distinct ways of interpolating and depicting the world: the whole planetary earth as it hung in space, and the known world as it existed to scholars, navigators and the beneficiaries of trade. The inhabited world (something the Romans would later call ‘the civilised world’) was believed to occupy about one-third of the northern hemisphere and was wholly contained within it. The northernmost point, represented by the island of Thule (which may have been Shetland or Iceland), was the last outpost before the world became unbearably cold; the most southerly tip, labelled enticingly as Cinnamon Country (Ethiopia/Somaliland) was the point beyond which the heat would burn your flesh.
In Eratosthenes’ map the oceans are interconnected, the Northern Ocean covering the top of Europe and Scythia, the Atlantic propping up the coasts of Libya, Arabia, the Persian empire and a square-shaped India. There are giant inlets of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, both of which erroneously flow into the oceans. Brettania, vaguely accurate in shape but excessive in scale, is sited to the far north-west, sitting in good proportion to both Ireland and Europe. All three give the impression of being loosely connected, separated only by navigable inland waters or mountain ranges. And they appear purposely huddled together, as if the huge encroaching oceans and the vast areas of the unknown world are joining forces against them. There is no New World, of course, no China, and only a small section of Russia.
Nonetheless, in its reliance on scientific principles, the map made great methodological strides over its predecessors. And although Eratosthenes consciously elongated the continents to fit his workings, he set the template for a new goal – the formulation of a precise and consistent map of the world.
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If it were just for his descriptive map, Eratosthenes would now be regarded as a minor character in the story of ancient cartography (indeed his colleagues referred to him as a ‘Beta’ talent, compared to the ‘Alpha’ virtues of Aristotle or Archimedes). But this judgement should be revised, for he did one great thing which goes beyond mapping: he made ground-breaking calculations as to the earth’s measurements, and his working principles, based on the large Babylonian pole known as a gnomon (a forerunner to the classical vertical sundial), are rightly considered a timeless and fool-proof technique, if rather a clumsy one.
His eureka moment, reported subsequently by the Greek scientist Cleomedes, has now taken on the mythical weight of a Newtonian apple, but it may be true. Eratosthenes had observed that on midsummer’s day the sun shone directly overhead at the Nile settlement at Syene, a fact demonstrated by its reflection in a deep well at noon. He knew, by the time it took to journey between the two towns by camel, that Syene (modern Aswan) lay roughly 5,000 stades (about 500 miles) due south of Alexandria (on the main meridian on which he had plotted Rhodes). By measuring the angle of the sun’s elevation from the Great Library at the same moment (7°) he could plot a circumference of the earth. Assuming the earth to be spherical and made up of 360°, his 7° difference between 500 miles worked out at 1/50th of the whole sphere. Eratosthenes thus declared that the earth had a circumference of 250,000 stades (roughly 25,000 miles), a calculation he increased to 252,000 to fit his desire for a pleasing symmetrical division by 60.
Eratosthenes came remarkably close to the true figure. We now accept the earth’s circumference as 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 km). By some estimates his figure was only two per cent over, although much depends on the definition of the stadion, his unit of measurement, which has both an Attic definition and an Egyptian one. But given that Eratosthenes was operating with such primitive estimates (Syene was not precisely due south, the earth is not perfectly spherical but bulges slightly at the Equator), we may marvel not only at his accuracy, but also at what the great distances said about the size of the unexplored world around him. Was there ever a greater invitation to explorers and geographers to map what was yet unknown?
A skull-like vision of the world from Eratosthenes, with the equator through Rhodes, and Cinnamon Country spicing up the southern tip of Africa in this Victorian recreation.
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The destruction of the Great Library by fire in 48 BC (conceivably an accident caused when Julius Caesar’s troops set ablaze their own ships in an attempt to thwart the invading force of Cleopatra’s brother Ptolemy XIV) was only the first to afflict it. It was destroyed or ransacked at least three times more, though each time succeeded in re-establishing itself, either on the same site or to the south-west of the city. Mark Antony replenished the library’s stocks in 37 BC by raiding the library of Pergamum and donating some 200,000 volumes as a wedding present to Cleopatra.
Several years after the first firestorm, something remarkable happened to our understanding of the world: the emergence, in seventeen volumes, of the Geographica, the most comprehensive account of the world yet written. Its author, the historian and philosopher Strabo, was born in 63 BC in Amasia by the Black Sea, and survived long enough to strad
dle the Common Era.
Strabo was almost sixty before his first volume emerged about 7 BC; the last appeared a year before his death at the age of eighty-five. He was one of the world’s first great travellers and much of the value of his geography lay in the descriptive passages of areas he himself had seen. He was not modest about these travels: in his second volume he boasts of a journey westwards from Armenia to Sardinia and to the south from the Euxine Sea to the borders of Ethiopia. ‘Perhaps there is not one among those who have written geographies who has visited more places than I have between these limits.’
All but one of the volumes of Strabo’s Geographica survive. Their stated purpose was to show how knowledge of the inhabited world had developed in line with the expansion of the Roman and Parthian empires, and the volumes (divided into geographical regions) are invaluable in our understanding not only of cartography, but also of how the civilised world saw itself at the time of Julius Caesar and the birth of Christ. No physical map survives but it seems likely that Strabo was writing with a large manuscript map in front of him, or perhaps a selection of maps from which he drew a mental composite.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 2