A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  41. Johannes Vermeer’s Soldier and a Laughing Girl (c. 1657), with Berckenrode’s map of Holland and Friesland (1620) hanging on the wall.

  42. Double portrait of Gerard Mercator and Jodocus Hondius, in Mercator’s posthumous Atlas (1613).

  43. Willem Blaeu’s printed map of India, published in his Atlas (1635).

  44. Hessel Gerritsz’s hand-drawn map of India (1632). Blaeu simply copied this map and added his name to it after Gerritsz’s death.

  45. A typical VOC chart supplied to its pilots: Joan Blaeu’s hand-drawn chart of Sumatra and the Malacca Strait (1653).

  46. Joan Blaeu’s world map from the Atlas maior (1664 edition). A tentative mixture of tradition and innovation, contrasting Ptolemy’s classicism (left) with Copernicus’s innovations (right). It abandons Mercator’s projection, preferring a twin-hemispherical stereographic method, but endorses Copernicanism by showing the personified planets (at the top) in the correct order of proximity to the sun.

  47. César-François Cassini de Thury’s first map of France, showing Paris and its environs (1756).

  48. Louis Capitaine’s map of France (1790). Drawing on decades of Cassini surveys, it was the first to show the internal boundaries of a new country: the French Revolution replaced the old regional divisions shaped by religious and aristocratic interests with regular departments responsive to the needs of centralized government.

  49. Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich’s map of Africa (1901), showing the limitations of British imperial surveying in Africa. Red shows areas surveyed using triangulation, blue shows areas ‘surveyed in detail’. Everywhere else, including large expanses of grey, is ‘unexplored’.

  50. Halford Mackinder’s map of his journey (in red) from Nairobi, at the bottom, to the summit of Mount Kenya, in the top right-hand corner (1900). To the west is Markham’s Down, named after the Royal Geographical Society’s president.

  51. The first photograph of the whole earth, taken from space by the crew of Apollo 17 (1972), an iconic image of a fragile ‘blue earth’ that inspired the environmental movement.

  52. A virtual world: the home page of Google Earth (2012).

  53. An equal world? Arno Peters’s world map on the Gall Orthographic Projection (1973).

  54. Early geospatial visualization: stills from Powers of Ten, a short film by Charles and Ray Eames (1968), a cult hit with computer engineers.

  55. A cartogram showing the distribution of the human population in 1500 (2008). As the image of the world becomes increasingly familiar, demographic issues assume more importance than debates over geographical methods of projection.

  56. Index diagram of sheets for the proposed International Map of the World (1909) on the scale of 1:1,000,000.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. J. E. Reade, ‘Rassam’s Excavations at Borsippa and Kutha, 1879–82’, Iraq, 48 (1986), pp. 105–16, and ‘Hormuzd Rassam and his Discoveries’, Iraq, 55 (1993), pp. 39–62.

  2. The map’s transcriptions are quoted from Wayne Horowitz, ‘The Babylonian Map of the world’, Iraq, 50 (1988), pp. 147–65, his subsequent book, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, Ind., 1998), pp. 20–42, and I. L. Finkel and M. J. Seymour (eds.), Babylon: Myth and Reality (London, 2008), p. 17.

  3. Catherine Delano-Smith, ‘Milieus of Mobility: Itineraries, Route Maps and Road Maps’, in James R. Akerman (ed.), Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago, 2006), pp. 16–68.

  4. Catherine Delano-Smith, ‘Cartography in the Prehistoric Period in the Old World: Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987), pp. 54–101.

  5. James Blaut, David Stea, Christopher Spencer and Mark Blades, ‘Mapping as a Cultural and Cognitive Universal’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93/1 (2003), pp. 165–85.

  6. Robert M. Kitchin, ‘Cognitive Maps: What Are They and Why Study Them?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 14 (1994), pp. 1–19.

  7. G. Malcolm Lewis, ‘Origins of Cartography’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, pp. 50–53, at p. 51.

  8. Denis Wood, ‘The Fine Line between Mapping and Mapmaking’, Cartographica, 30/4 (1993), pp. 50–60.

  9. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, ‘Preface’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, p. xvi.

  10. J. H. Andrews, ‘Definitions of the Word “Map”’, ‘MapHist’ discussion papers, 1998, accessed at: http://www.maphist.nl/discpapers.html.

  11. Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, p. xvi.

  12. Denis Cosgrove, ‘Mapping the World’, in James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow (eds.), Maps: Finding our Place in the World (Chicago, 2007), pp. 65–115.

  13. Denis Wood, ‘How Maps Work’, Cartographica, 29/3–4 (1992), pp. 66–74.

  14. See Alfred Korzybski, ‘General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Prevention’ (1941), in Korzybski, Collected Writings, 1920–1950 (Fort Worth, Tex., 1990), p. 205.

  15. Gregory Bateson, ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’, in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (London, 1972), p. 460.

  17. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London, 1894), p. 169.

  18. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Rigour in Science’, in Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin, Tex., 1964), p. 90.

  19. Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (Princeton, 1991), pp. 27–56. See Frank J. Korom, ‘Of Navels and Mountains: A Further Inquiry into the History of an Idea’, Asian Folklore Studies, 51/1 (1992), pp. 103–25.

  20. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, 2001).

  21. Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches to Cartography throughout History (Chicago, 2006), pp. 337–8.

  22. Abraham Ortelius, ‘To the Courteous Reader’, in Ortelius, The Theatre of the Whole World, English translation (London, 1606), unpaginated.

  23. David Woodward, ‘The Image of the Spherical Earth’, Perspecta, 25 (1989), pp. 2–15.

  24. Stefan Hildebrandt and Anthony Tromba, The Parsimonious Universe: Shape and Form in the Natural World (New York, 1995), pp. 115–16.

  25. Leo Bagrow, The History of Cartography, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1985).

  26. Matthew H. Edney, ‘Cartography without “Progress”: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking’, Cartographica, 30/2–3 (1993), pp. 54–68.

  27. Quoted in James Welu, ‘Vermeer: His Cartographic Sources’, Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), pp. 529–47, at p. 547.

  28. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), in Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda C. Dowling (London, 2001), p. 141.

  29. Denis Wood with John Fels, The Power of Maps (New York, 1992), p. 1.

  CHAPTER 1. SCIENCE: PTOLEMY’S GEOGRAPHY, C. AD 150

  1. On the stone tower of Pharos, see Rory MacLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London and New York, 2000).

  2. See The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7, part 1: The Hellenistic World, 2nd edn., ed. F. W. Walbank et al. (Cambridge, 1984).

  3. Quoted in James Raven (ed.), Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections in Antiquity (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 15.

  4. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 227, and Christian Jacob, ‘Mapping in the Mind’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London, 1999), p. 33.

  5. Quoted in J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones (eds. and trans.), Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton, 2
000), pp. 57–8.

  6. Ibid., pp. 3–5.

  7. Quoted ibid., p. 82.

  8. On Ptolemy’s life, see G. J. Toomer, ‘Ptolemy’, in Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 vols. (New York, 1970–80), vol. 11, pp. 186–206.

  9. See Germaine Aujac, ‘The Foundations of Theoretical Cartography in Archaic and Classical Greece’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987), pp. 130–47; Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches to Cartography throughout History (Chicago, 2006), pp. 18–19; James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, 1992), pp. 9–10.

  10. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, 1. 1. 1, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1917–32).

  11. Crates of Mallos, quoted in Romm, Edges of the Earth, p. 14.

  12. All quotations taken from Richmond Lattimore (ed. and trans.), The Iliad of Homer (Chicago, 1951).

  13. P. R. Hardie, ‘Imago Mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 105 (1985), pp. 11–31.

  14. G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), pp. 172–205; Andrew Gregory, Ancient Greek Cosmogony (London, 2008).

  15. Quoted in Aujac, ‘The Foundations of Theoretical Cartography’, p. 134.

  16. Quoted in Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960), p. 87.

  17. Quoted ibid., pp. 76, 81.

  18. See Jacob, ‘Mapping in the Mind’, p. 28; on omphalos and periploi, see the entries in John Roberts (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World (Oxford, 2005).

  19. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (London, 1954), p. 252.

  20. Ibid., p. 253.

  21. Ibid., p. 254.

  22. Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford, 1975), 108c–109b.

  23. Ibid., 109b–110b.

  24. Ibid., 110c.

  25. See Germaine Aujac, ‘The Growth of an Empirical Cartography in Hellenistic Greece’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, pp. 148–60, at p. 148.

  26. Aristotle, De caelo, 2. 14.

  27. Aristotle, Meteorologica, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 338b.

  28. Ibid., 362b.

  29. D. R. Dicks, ‘The Klimata in Greek Geography’, Classical Quarterly, 5/3–4 (1955), pp. 248–55.

  30. Herodotus, The Histories, pp. 328–9.

  31. See C. F. C. Hawkes, Pytheas: Europe and the Greek Explorers (Oxford, 1977).

  32. Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, 1991), p. 73.

  33. Jacob, Sovereign Map, p. 137.

  34. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 32.

  35. Aujac, ‘Growth of an Empirical Cartography’, pp. 155–6.

  36. Strabo, Geography, 1. 4. 6.

  37. O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (London, 1985), p. 35.

  38. See chapters 12, 13 and 14 in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, and Richard J. A. Talbert, ‘Greek and Roman Mapping: Twenty-First Century Perspectives’, in Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard W. Unger (eds.), Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Leiden, 2008), pp. 9–28.

  39. Strabo, Geography, 1. 2. 24.

  40. Ibid., 1. 1. 12.

  41. Ibid., 2. 5. 10.

  42. Ibid., 1. 1. 18.

  43. Quoted in Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics, p. 31.

  44. See Toomer, ‘Ptolemy’.

  45. Quoted in D. R. Dicks, The Geographical Fragments of Hipparchus (London, 1960), p. 53.

  46. Ptolemy, Almagest, 2. 13, quoted in Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 19.

  47. Ptolemy, Geography, 1. 5–6.

  48. Jacob, ‘Mapping in the Mind’, p. 36.

  49. Ptolemy, Geography, 1. 1.

  50. Ibid., 1. 9–12; O. A. W. Dilke, ‘The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy’, Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, p. 184.

  51. Ptolemy, Geography, 1. 23.

  52. Ibid., 1. 20.

  53. Ibid., 1. 23.

  54. Ibid.

  55. David Woodward, ‘The Image of the Spherical Earth’, Perspecta, 25 (1989), p. 9.

  56. See Leo Bagrow, ‘The Origin of Ptolemy’s Geographia’, Geografiska Annaler, 27 (1943), pp. 318–87; for a more recent summary of the controversy, see O. A. W. Dilke, ‘Cartography in the Byzantine Empire’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 1, pp. 266–72.

  57. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 47.

  58. T. C. Skeat, ‘Two Notes on Papyrus’, in Edda Bresciani et al. (eds.), Scritti in onore di Orsolino Montevecchi (Bologna, 1981), pp. 373–83.

  59. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 50.

  60. See Raven, Lost Libraries.

  61. Ptolemy, Geography, 1. 1.

  CHAPTER 2. EXCHANGE: AL-IDRĪSĪ, AD 1154

  1. See Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Normans in the Mediterranean’, in van Houts, The Normans in Europe (Manchester, 2000), pp. 223–78.

  2. For the best account of life and works in English, see S. Maqbul Ahmad, ‘Cartography of ’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago, 1987), pp. 156–74.

  3. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (Oxford, 2008), pp. 140–42.

  4. B. L. Gordon, ‘Sacred Directions, Orientation, and the Top of the Map’, History of Religions, 10/3 (1971), pp. 211–27.

  5. Ibid., p. 221.

  6. David A. King, World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance of Mecca: Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science (Leiden, 1999).

  7. Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Introduction to Islamic Maps’, in Harley and Woodward (eds.), History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, p. 7.

  8. Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Cosmographical Diagrams’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 71–2; S. Maqbul Ahmad and F. Taeschnes, ‘Djugrafiya’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., vol. 2 (Leiden, 1965), p. 577.

  9. Ibid., p. 574.

  10. On the early history of Islam, see Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge, 1986).

  11. Quoted in Gerald R. Tibbetts, ‘The Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition’, in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, p. 95.

  12. Ibid., pp. 94–5; André Miquel, ‘’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., vol. 3 (Leiden, 1971), pp. 1076–8.

  13. Quoted ibid., p. 1077.

  14. Quoted in Edward Kennedy, ‘ and the World Map of ’, in J. L. Berggren et al. (eds.), From Ancient Omens to Statistical Mechanics: Essays on the Exact Sciences Presented to Asger Aaboe (Copenhagen, 1987), pp. 113–19.

  15. Quoted in Raymond P. Mercer, ‘Geodesy’, in Harley and Woodward (eds.), History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 175–88, at p. 178.

  16. On Ibn and the administrative tradition, see Paul Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilisation (Leiden, 2002), pp. 94–146, and Tibbetts, ‘Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition’, pp. 90–92.

  17. Ralph W. Brauer, ‘Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 85/6 (1995), pp. 1–73.

  18. Quoted in Gerald R. Tibbetts, ‘The School of Geographers’, in Harley and Woodward (eds.), History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, pp. 108–36, at p. 112.

  19. Konrad Miller, Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt- und Länderkas
ten des 9.-13. Jahrshunderts, 6 vols. (Stuttgart, 1926–31), vol. 1, pt. 1.

  20. On Córdoba, see Robert Hillenbrand, ‘“The Ornament of the World”: Medieval Córdoba as a Cultural Centre’, in Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, 1992), pp. 112–36, and Heather Ecker, ‘The Great Mosque of Córdoba in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Muqarnas, 20 (2003), pp. 113–41.

  21. Quoted in Hillenbrand, ‘“The Ornament of the World”’, p. 112.

  22. Quoted ibid., p. 120.

  23. Maqbul Ahmad, ‘Cartography of ’, p. 156.

  24. Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal (Cambridge, 2002), p. 236.

  25. Quoted in Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West (Cambridge, 2002), p. 106.

  26. Helen Wieruszowski, ‘Roger II of Sicily, Rex Tyrannus, in Twelfth-Century Political Thought’, Speculum, 38/1 (1963), pp. 46–78.

  27. Donald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge, 1992).

  28. Quoted in R. C. Broadhurst (ed. and trans.), The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (London, 1952), pp. 339–41.

  29. Charles Haskins and Dean Putnam Lockwood, ‘The Sicilian Translators of the Twelfth Century and the First Latin Version of Ptolemy’s Almagest’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 21 (1910), pp. 75–102.

  30. Houben, Roger II, p. 102.

  31. Ibid., pp. 98–113; Matthew, Norman Kingdom, pp. 112–28.

  32. Quoted in Ahmad, ‘Cartography of ’, p. 159.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid., p. 160.

  36. Quoted in Pierre Jaubert (ed. and trans.), Géographie d’Édrisi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1836), vol. 1, p. 10. Jaubert’s translation is somewhat erratic, and where possible corrected based on a comparison with the partial translation in Reinhart Dozy and Michael Jan de Goeje (eds. and trans.), Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne par Edrîsî (Leiden, 1866).