A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  There are virtually no cultural traditions that place west at the top of the map, as it is almost universally associated with the sun’s disappearance, a symbol of darkness and death, exemplified in the phrase ‘to go west’, meaning to die. The final cardinal direction, north, placed at the top of the Babylonian world map, has an even more complicated lineage. In China, north was accorded primacy as the sacred direction. Across the empire’s wide plains, the south brought sunlight and warming winds, and so was the direction towards which the emperor looked down on his subjects. When everyone gazed up at the emperor from a position of subjection, they consequently faced north. Etymologically, the Chinese ‘back’ is synonymous with ‘north’, because the emperor’s back faces that direction. Chinese world maps were oriented accordingly, one of the many reasons that their maps look at first glance to be remarkably modern. The Gnostic and Dualist beliefs of various ancient Mesopotamian communities also celebrated the north as the sacred direction, regarding the Pole Star as a source of light and revelation, and it is possibly for this reason that the Babylonian world map is oriented northwards.

  On world map the four cardinal directions are marked just outside the map’s frame which, taking its inspiration from verses, is composed of a fiery golden aureole. The map itself shows a world indebted to the Greek . The Mediterranean and North Africa are represented in detail, as are a fantastic jellyfish-shaped mountain range with its tributaries in central Africa. Named ‘The Mountains of the Moon’, the range was believed to be the source of the Nile. Egypt, India, Tibet and China are all labelled in Arabic, as are the Caspian Sea, Morocco, Spain, Italy and even England. The map retains a classically vague understanding of southern Africa and south-eastern Asia, although it departs from Ptolemy in showing a circumnavigable Africa, with the entire globe surrounded by an encircling sea.

  Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of this world map is just how at odds it is with the book in which it sits. In contrast to the teeming human geography described in the other maps and the text of the Entertainment, the world map is a purely physical representation of geography. There are no cities, and virtually no discernible traces of the impact of humanity upon the earth’s surface (with the exception of the fabled barrier erected by Alexander the Great in the Caucasus Mountains to keep the mythical monsters Gog and Magog at bay, represented in the map’s bottom left-hand corner). This apparent contradiction between the Entertainment’s evocative description of the earth’s regions and its geometrical world map can only be understood by turning to an explanation of what Roger wanted when he employed : the fruits of the preceding 300-year-old tradition of Islamic mapmaking.

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  The term ‘Islamic maps’ is something of a misnomer. The geographical traditions and cartographic practices that gradually coalesced following the rise of Islam in the Arabic peninsula in the late seventh century were too regionally, politically and ethnically diverse to merit being described as a unified body of mapmaking (although the same can be said to a degree of ‘Greek’ or ‘Christian’ maps). None of the early Islamic languages possessed a definitive noun to define ‘map’. As in Greek and Latin, a variety of terms were used to describe what would today be called a map. These included (meaning ‘form’ or ‘figure’), rasm or (‘drawing’), and naqsh or naqshah (painting).7 Like the Bible, the offered little direct assistance to mapmakers. It does not have a definable cosmology with a clear account of the size and shape of the earth within a larger universe, despite offering a series of intriguing allusions. The sky is described as a canopy spread over the earth, which is held in place by mountains and illuminated by the sun and the moon. God ‘created seven Firmaments and of the earth a similar number’, although the specific dimensions of these worlds are unexplained.8 References to an apparently disc-shaped earth encircled by water, and the description of the Mediterranean and Arabian seas separated by a barrier, appear to draw on early Babylonian cosmology, although allusions to the ‘Sun setting in a spring of murky water’ imply awareness of the Atlantic, a notion inherited from the Greeks.9

  It was not until the Abbasid Caliphate established itself as the centre of the Islamic Empire in Baghdad by the end of the eighth century that a recognizably Islamic practice of mapmaking can be detected. The foundation of the imperial capital of Baghdad in AD 750 by the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur represented the successful culmination of a bitter struggle with the Umayyad Caliphate, which had ruled from Damascus since 661. The shift in power eastwards had a significant effect on Islamic culture, diminishing the earlier tribal Arabic basis of Islamic authority, and bringing the caliphate into closer contact with the scientific and artistic traditions of Persia, India and even China, so complementing the initial assimilation by Islam of Christian, Greek and Hebraic cosmologies. At the same time, the empire’s contact with Latin learning diminished, compounded by the subsequent rise of the rival Umayyad Caliphate established in al-Andalus. The move to Baghdad also centralized Islamic power and authority more effectively than that of any other empire of the period. The ruling caliph became all-powerful, and tribal alliances were absorbed into an absolutist monarchy that appointed a high-ranking minister, or vizier, to oversee diwans, or ministries, which controlled all aspects of public and political life. Almost inevitably, the Abbasid caliphs began to commission geographical descriptions of their dominion.10

  The first recorded commission of a world map in Baghdad came in the reign of the seventh Abbasid caliph, (813–33), who patronized an institute of scientific study which became known as the ‘House of Wisdom’ (bayt ). Referred to by its contemporaries as after its patron, the map has not survived. But a few eyewitness descriptions of it have survived, and provide a startling insight into the level of intellectual exchange taking place at court, which included extensive knowledge of Ptolemy’s Geography. The Arabic historian and traveller (d. 956) recalled with admiration seeing the map ‘that ordered to be constructed by a group of contemporary scholars to represent the world with its spheres, stars, land and seas, the inhabited and uninhabited regions, settlements of peoples, cities, etc.’ He concluded that ‘this was better than anything that preceded it, either the Geography of Ptolemy, the Geography of Marinus, or any other’.11 While the Latin West continued to remain in ignorance of Ptolemy’s Geography for another 400 years, and completely lost Marinus’ manuscript, court was busy incorporating Ptolemy (as well as many of his other works on astronomy and optics) into their world maps.

  The Baghdad court did not limit its research to Greek texts. observed that world map adopted Ptolemy’s concept of longitudinal climates (from the Greek klimata, translated into Arabic as , or ) to divide the known world into seven regions, a tradition that would shape geographical thinking. Ptolemy had drawn on Aristotle for his notion of klimata, but in the creation of their map, scholars had modified this model by drawing on the Persian concept of dividing the world into seven kishvars, or regions. This was in turn derived from archaic Babylonian and Indian cosmographical perceptions of the world as a lotus petal, with regions surrounding a primary zone, usually representing a sacred area or capital city.12 The result was a system that placed Baghdad in its central region – the fourth – around which the other six regions were grouped from north to south. Although not explicitly located at the centre of the map, Baghdad and Iraq were regarded as lying at the heart of the earth, where ‘moderation in all things’, from climate and natural beauty to personal intelligence, could be found in a compelling mix of geography, astronomy and climate.13

  What all this led to is regrettably unknown. ’s court created one of the many lost maps in world history, and probably the most important in the early Muslim world. Perhaps it was circular, reflecting prevailing Islamic cosmological belief that the universe and the earth were both spherical. But if it incorporated the thinking of Ptolemy and Marinus, it could also have been rectangular, and modelled on one of Ptolemy’s two projections.

  One clue to what the map
might have looked like comes from a much later diagram in a manuscript entitled the ‘Marvels of the Seven Climates to the End of Habitation’, written by the little-known scholar calling himself who lived in Iraq in the first half of the tenth century. This treatise, one of the first comprehensive accounts in Arabic of how to draw a map of the world, is an invaluable source of early Islamic conceptions of the inhabited earth, as well as a tantalizing insight into what map might have looked like. Although the diagram in treatise lacks any physical geographical features, it provides a rectangular frame within which to plot the known world. begins by advising aspirant makers how to construct a world map. ‘Let its width’, he wrote, ‘be half its length.’ He then describes adding ‘four scales’ in the map’s borders to represent longitude and latitude. But his primary interest was in ‘the latitudes of the seven climates, beginning the enumeration from the terrestrial equator towards the north’.14 As in Ptolemy, climates were determined by accompanying tables of maximum daylight. The result is a diagram that depicts the seven climates running from 20° S of the equator (shown on the left) to 80° N (on the right), with north facing the reader (at the bottom of the diagram). This assumes that plotted his world map with south at the top. coordinates are distinctly Ptolemaic (although he actually expands Ptolemy’s latitudinal range of the inhabited world), but his overall projection on a rectangle with intersecting lines at right angles is closer to that of Marinus. also substantially reproduced the coordinates in the (‘Picture of the earth’), written by al-Khwārazmi (d. 847), another member of ‘House of Wisdom’, a further indication that the caliph’s world map may have been rectangular, as well as oriented with south at the top in line with prevailing Muslim beliefs.

  diagram provides an insight into the possible shape and orientation of map, although the improved calculations on the size of the earth undertaken subsequently by the caliph’s scholars indicate that further progress was being made in mapping the earth. In response to the caliph’s reported wish ‘to know the size of the earth’,15 surveyors were dispatched into the Syrian desert to measure the sun’s angle of elevation in relation to the cities of Palmyra and Raqqa – a replay of Eratosthenes’ famous attempt to measure the earth’s circumference. Most of the surveyors concluded that the length of a degree of longitude was 562⁄3 Arab miles. Based on current calculations of the length of an Arabic mile as equal to 11⁄15 of a modern mile, this estimate has been converted into a global circumference of just over 40,000 kilometres (25,000 miles). If the equivalence is correct, this meant that surveyors came within less than 100 kilometres of the correct circumference of the earth measured at the equator. The result was all the more astonishing when contrasted with Ptolemy’s massive underestimation of the earth’s circumference, at just under 29,000 kilometres, (18,000 miles).

  All the surviving evidence from the ‘House of Wisdom’ suggests an evolving world picture heavily indebted to Greek scholarship, suffused by Indo-Persian traditions that produced a map based on climatic divisions oriented with south at the top. Although scholars like al-Khwārazmi appropriated Ptolemy to establish a genre of world maps using the generic term , the Geography was only partially (and often erroneously) translated from Greek into Arabic. Al-Khwārazmi and his followers focused almost exclusively on Ptolemy’s tables of latitudes and longitudes, improving on many of his mistakes and omissions. They provided a more accurate measurement of the Mediterranean and also depicted the Indian Ocean as flowing into what would now be seen as the Pacific Ocean, no longer landlocked. But they did not make an explicit connection with Ptolemy’s method of projecting the earth onto a graticule of longitude and latitude, and diagram offered no more than a revised version of Marinus’ rectangular projection, which had been so heavily criticized by Ptolemy. Nor did the division of the earth into continents particularly appeal to the early Muslim scholars. The Islamic Caliphate took mapmaking in a different direction instead.

  One of the earliest indications of this cartographic change is apparent in the works of Ibn (c. 820–911), the director of posts and intelligence in Baghdad and Samarra. Around 846, Ibn produced one of the first books known under the title (‘Book of Routes and Provinces’). Although his book openly acknowledged Ptolemy and contained no maps, it marked a change in Islamic geographical awareness about the appearance of the known world. In contrast to the tradition, the reflects Ibn involvement in the movement of trade, pilgrims and postal correspondence throughout the provinces of the and the growth of the empire under a centralized authority. The book shows little interest in the regions of non-Islamic sovereignty, known as , and virtually no trace of the Greek . Instead, it concentrates on postal and pilgrimage routes, as well as measuring distances throughout the Islamic world. The sea route to China is described, but otherwise Ibn is primarily interested in places that have a direct bearing on the Islamic world.16

  By the end of the ninth century Islam found itself being pulled in two different geopolitical directions. At the same time as centralizing itself under the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, Islam’s rapid expansion across the inhabited world inevitably led to division and secession. The most obvious conflict came with the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate in al-Andalus, but tenth-century dynasties like the Fatimids, the Seljuk Turks and the Berber Almoravids all created their own hereditary states that began to challenge Abbasid supremacy. By the time was compiling his Entertainment, the was composed of at least fifteen separate states.17 Although each was nominally Muslim, many were either openly hostile or indifferent to political or theological rule from Baghdad. This dispersal of a centralized authority had obvious consequences for mapmaking, the most significant of which was the further erosion of Greek traditions and the heightened interest in the portrayal of routes and provinces recommended by Ibn , which now became more important than ever in understanding an increasingly diffuse Muslim world. The result was a noticeably different kind of world mapping that no longer centred itself on the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, but placed the Arabian peninsula in the centre of the world, with Mecca and the , the holiest site in the Islamic faith, at its heart.

  This tradition of mapmaking is usually referred to as the School of Geography, taking its name from a scholar born in north-eastern Iran, Zayd ibn Sahl (d. 934). Little is known of life and career except that he spent most of his life in Baghdad and wrote a short commentary on a series of maps, entitled (or ‘Picture of the Climates’), none of which have survived. His work nevertheless influenced a later group of scholars who all produced regional and world maps explicitly indebted to him.

  The tradition drew on Ibn example of compiling detailed geographical itineraries, with the crucial difference that they also added maps. One of disciples wrote that his master ‘intended in his book chiefly the representation of the earth by maps’,18 and the importance of these maps soon developed a format that looks so close to a modern-day atlas that one critic described them as representing an ‘Islam-atlas’.19 followers produced treatises that contained a world map, preceded by maps of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Caspian Sea, and then up to seventeen regional maps of the Islamic empire as it appeared in the tenth century. The regional maps are rectangular with no projection or scale, although they do offer distances between places, measured in terms of , or a day’s journey. In contrast, the world maps are circular, although they are similarly indifferent to longitude, latitude, scale or projection. Geometry no longer informs their outlines, although the land and its features are drawn using straight lines, circles, semicircular arcs, squares and regular curves. The Greek klimata have been replaced by provinces which are labelled , a sign of just how far the Greek tradition had been absorbed into Islamic conceptions of territory. The maps also restricted themselves to depicting the Islamic world, with little or no interest in the . And virtually all of these maps, both regional and global, place south firmly at the top.

  One of the School’s most sophisticated practitioners was ibn (d. c. 367/977). Born in Ir
aq, Ibn travelled extensively throughout Persia, Turkestan and North Africa. He is best known for his (‘Picture of the Earth’), which, in acknowledgement of its debt to the more recent Islamic geographical writing, is also known, like Ibn book, as .

  As well as illustrating his text with regional maps, Ibn also drew world maps, the first of which exemplifies the School’s perception of world geography, forgoing projections and climates and focusing almost exclusively on the Islamic world. The map is oriented with south at the top, although elements of Ptolemy are still recognizable. The world is surrounded by an encompassing sea, with the unseen, other side of the sphere understood as uninhabitable and composed purely of water. The inhabited world is divided roughly into three: the largest land mass, Africa, dominating the top half, Asia, occupying the bottom left-hand corner, and Europe, squeezed into the bottom right-hand side. In Africa, the most prominent feature is the Nile, curving up through East Africa to its apparent source in the Mountains of the Moon. Egypt, Ethiopia and the Muslim states of North Africa are all clearly labelled, in contrast to Europe, where only Spain, Italy and Constantinople are conspicuous. Unsurprisingly, Asia, including Arabia, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, is shown in considerable detail and broken down into separate administrative regions. Further east, as Islamic influence wanes, the geography becomes sketchier. Although China and India are shown, their outlines are utterly notional, and Taprobana (modern-day Sri Lanka), whose name originated with the Greeks, is not even depicted; indeed, the Indian Ocean is divested of any islands whatsoever. This is a new map of the world, dominated by Islam and shaped by its administrative and commercial interests.