Maps That Changed The World E-Book

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 409

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

An ancient Chinese proverb suggests, "They are wise parents who give their children roots and wings – and a map." Maps That Changed the World features some of the world's most famous maps, stretching back to a time when cartography was in its infancy and the 'edge of the world' was a barrier to exploration. The book includes details of how the Lewis and Clark Expedition helped map the American West, and how the British mapped India and Australia. Included are the beautifully engraved Dutch maps of the 16th century; the sinister Utopian maps of the Nazis; the maps that presaged brilliant military campaigns; charted the geology of a nation; and the ones that divided a continent up between its European conquerors. Organised by theme, the book shows the evolution of map-making from all corners of the globe, from ancient clay maps, to cartographic breakthroughs such as Harry Beck's map of the London underground. There are also famous fictional maps, including the maps of the lost continent of Atlantis and Tolkien's Middle Earth. With an introduction written by acclaimed cartographic historian Jeremy Black.

Leseprobe

Joan Blaeu’s map of Ghent (1649). The Blaeu family’s atlas of city maps, Theatrum Urbium Belgicae, contained dozens of maps in the same style and with the same meticulous skill. The Bleaus’ quickly became renowned for the great beauty and high standard of workmanship shown in their maps, and their printing house grew into the largest press in Europe (see here).

Edited by O. E. Clark

Introduction by Professor Jeremy Black

Contents

Introduction by Professor Jeremy Black

The Choice of Maps

THE EARLIEST MAPS

Ancient Clay Maps

The Mapping of the Dream Time

The Nazca Enigma

Islamic Guardians of Knowledge

Chinese Cartography

The Nine Worlds of the Norsemen

The Music of the Spheres

CARTOGRAPHIC BREAKTHROUGHS

Ptolemy

The Peutinger Table

Celestial Charts

Saxton’s Elizabethan England

Edmond Halley

Alexander von Humboldt

A Single Map Creates a New Science

Pathfinder of the Seas

The Killer Cholera

The City Panorama Map

Booth’s Poverty Map

Harry Beck’s Map

Distorting to Reveal the City

Surveying Venus

Mapping the Tsunami

Invisible Values, Invisible Lives

THE AGE OF EXPLORATION

Portolan Sea-Charts

The Greatest Navigational Error in History

Apian’s Cosmographia

The Fourth Part of the World

Ortelius Brings the World to Book

Kaerius

The Blaeu Family

Frederick de Wit

John Smith and John White

The First Accurate North American Maps

The Chickasaw Map

Japanese Isolationism

Australia Becomes an Island Continent

Lewis and Clark

The Royal Navy ‘Conquers’ Antarctica

MILITARY MAPS

Da Vinci’s New Viewpoint

‘Make Me a Map of the Valley’

The Battle of the Modder River

Colenso

Thiepval Sacrifice, 1916

Passchendaele

Plan D in Belgium

Dunkirk

Defences of Dover

Omaha Beach

Cold War Subversion

DRAWING THE LINE

The Anglo–French Map Wars

A Triumph of Trigonometry

Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884–85

Transcontinental Railroad

John F. Kennedy and Laos

Maps of Israel

FANTASIES, FOLLIES & FABRICATIONS

The Lost Continent of Atlantis

King Arthur and the Isle of Avalon

New France or Fake America?

Utopia in Texas

Mocking National Stereotypes

Propaganda Maps

Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

The Vinland Map

Propaganda Projections

The Pizzigano ‘New World’ Map

Bibliography & Acknowledgements

Index

Picture Credits

Introduction

Maps have the capacity to open worlds of reality and imagination. Their lines, points and spaces depict both hopes and fears, and urge the wanderings, and wonderings, of the mind. This collection exemplifies how cartography is both a science and an art. Maps existed before the written word and today exploit the most up-to-date computer technology and imaging systems. Many inform us about the cosmological beliefs of the people who made them, as much as they do about geophysical reality. Maps are also representations of social and political aspiration and power, making statements about the ownership and control of territory. The history of the development of cartography, both east and west, is indivisible from the history of grasping space, both imaginatively and in reality, from depictions of human relations with the heavens to the worlds of invasion and conquest. Cartography also responds to technological developments, from cuneiform to computer-aided design. It is hoped that this collection of varied maps, and the stories of their creation, will illuminate the ever-changing relationship between cultures and their graphic representation through cartography.

The basic Mercator projection (this is not actually standard Mercator, but close) is no longer a map, it’s a kind of world logo. You could stretch it, or maybe add a half-inch strip in the Pacific, and you might accidentally create something more accurate, particularly with regards to area representation.

This cannot be a complete history of maps. As some kind of indication of just why not, The History of Cartography, published by the University of Chicago Press, had its first volume (of six), Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, published in 1987. The final instalment, the 1,960-page Cartography in the Twentieth Century was published in 2015. Maps that Changed the World is emphatically not an academic treatise, but the maps featured should enthuse and intrigue.

Some of the maps assessed are neither beautiful, nor technically or scientifically accomplished. They are included for other reasons. Examples of propaganda mapping are a reminder that the language of cartography demands careful reading. Drafting a ‘General map of that part of North America which has been the seat of war wherein is distinguished the roads … rivers … new forts’, Colonel James Montressor in 1760 was certain that ‘it will be very acceptable, as well to the ministry as the military,’ reminding us that maps of exploration were designed to serve the needs of trade and territorial gains. Social issues have also been depicted here, as in John Snow’s cholera map.

Maps have always posed a series of graphic challenges. The accurate depiction of a large sphere in two dimensions on a small scale entails formidable problems, and means that mapmaking is about compromises. Aside from this basic point, there are major issues for particular types of map: in finding the relevant information, in locating it spatially, so that it can be reproduced at a different scale, and in depicting it accurately. This varies by type of map. It is easier to show rail routes than to indicate landscapes of fear (which parts of cities people are reluctant to enter), and yet the latter are as much part of our spatial world as the former. It is possible to show majority religious affiliation – Italy as Catholic, Israel as Jewish and so on – but far harder to depict degree of religious commitment.

This flamboyant 1786 map by Charles Louis Desnos (1725–1812) does not follow the dictum ‘less is more’. The hemispheres show the voyages of Captain Cook. The detailed notes inform us that Africa is the hottest continent, Asia the least-known and richest.

These gores for a 13-inch (33-centimetre) globe (1790) by Giovanni Maria Cassini (1754–1824), printed in Rome, show Captain Cook’s voyages. This map and the Desnos map on the previous page were created at the same time, on the same – evidently saleable – subject, yet they could not be more different. Cassini’s globes enjoyed widespread success, as did his Nuovo Atlante geografico delineato sulle ultime osservazioni, in which the gores were printed.

Maps are a tactile form of spatial perception, and the shifting, unfixed quality of the latter greatly affects how the maps themselves are understood. The extent to which maps are capable of multiple meanings adds to their fascination, complexity and importance. The range of meanings is dramatized in the issue of ‘which way up’ the world should appear.

The idea that the northern hemisphere should appear at the top of the map has been challenged, not least by ‘McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World’ (Artarmon, 1979), which carries a caption ending ‘Long live Australia – Ruler of the Universe’. There is no reason why the map should centre on the Greenwich meridian, with Europe in the middle. Indeed, many early maps did not. Many American maps put the western hemisphere at the centre.

Many of the maps in this collection were originally in atlases; the works of Ortelius and the Blaeu family, for example, feature strongly; the beauty of their creations reason enough. Historical atlases – that is, atlases about history, rather than old atlases – provide an interesting insight into how cartography has changed. Until the 20th century, historical atlases’ content was predominantly defined in terms of international relations – particularly warfare and shifts in control over territory. The state was assumed to be the crucial unit (and objective) in the historical process, and atlases were accordingly concerned with changing state boundaries, especially the rise and fall of empires. The apparently cyclical character of the rise and fall of empires, especially the Roman empire, gave historical atlases the character of morality tales, mirroring historical works of this period, such as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–88). In the 19th century (and before) expansion of European power served to organize and rank the rest of the world. In the introduction to his Historical Atlas in a Series of Maps of the World, as known at Different Periods (London, 1830), London barrister Edward Quin employed colour to depict ‘civilization’, in Eurocentric terms. ‘We have covered alike in all the periods with a flat olive shading … barbarous and uncivilized countries,’ he wrote, ‘such as the interior of Africa at the present moment.’

The same approach to depicting the world 150 years later, in 1942. These 50-inch (127-centimetre) globe gores were prepared for the US War Department by the Office of Strategic Services: ‘Copyright by Weber Costello Co. except as to modifications made and materials added by the Government of the United States.’ It would be interesting to know just what were the ‘materials added’. The OSS was established in that year to collect and analyse strategic information.

Post-1945, there was evidence of a crisis of confidence in the map. Reduced emphasis on physical geography in historical atlases reflected a number of factors, including globalization and analytical shifts away from materialistic explanations. The net effect has been that as maps have become more innovative in design, there has been less confidence in their ability to explain on their own, as opposed to describe.

How autonomous is the cartographer? As pointed out in relation to the great Ortelius (see here), even his productions were the result of teamwork, and driven by commercial considerations. I would question the notion of the cartographer as bringing the panoptic eye of scholarship, or of his or her own views and suppositions. It is clear that, in contrast to most other books, the name on the cover of an atlas – whether of author, cartographer, editor, or all three – tells one only so much. This is because the framework of the atlas is set by the publishers. At the most basic level, they decide how long the work should be and how many maps it should contain. The last is a crucial point because maps, both today and in the past, are expensive, certainly more so than text or pictures. (In earlier times, the cartographer sometimes was the publisher, which simplified matters.)

By way of example, for an atlas on the history of warfare, some years back I produced a map of India in the 18th century designed to show the peripheral nature of the European impact in the first six decades of empire. The standard north–south map places a premium on European penetration, making the relationship between India and the surrounding seas central: India appears primarily as a peninsula. Eye lines focus on Delhi from European coastal positions, such as Bombay, Calcutta, Goa and Madras. The customary maps also indicate only European victories, such as those of Clive at the Battles of Arcot and Plassey, and organize space and time in terms of British annexations. A totally different narrative of Indian history could be told focusing on European defeats, such as the Convention of Wadgaon in 1779, or Haidar Ali of Mysore’s victory over the British at the Battle of Perumbakkam in 1780, or Tipu Sultan’s victory on the Coleroon river in 1782, or the unsuccessful British campaigns against Mysore in 1790 and the summer of 1791.

The major theme of my draft map was the contested succession to the Mughal Empire by a number of expansionist powers: Britain of course, but also the Maratha Confederation, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawabs of Bengal, the Carnatic and the Sultan of Mysore. To do this, one would adopt a perspective in which India opens up from the Khyber Pass, with a central alignment thence via Delhi. Marketing considerations prevented the map’s publication. Such a perspective simply was not expected, and giving the public what they want is as good advice for publishers as it is for any other manufacturer. When maps are made by governments or public bodies, the pressures on the cartographer – or rather, the team – are different, but no weaker. If an academic, historical map like mine of India can’t make it, imagine the leverage on a cartographer working for, say, Stalin.

Space and distance look the same on a map, established and measured by the scale. But they are not the same. The very notion of distance has changed over time. The rate of change in perception is not constant. Journeys and concepts of space and time in 1776 were more similar to the situation 223 years earlier than 223 years later. The menace of the dark (as unknown areas were often depicted), when space shrank to the shadowy spots lit by flickering lights, cannot be captured by maps. Similarly, the sense of direct providential intervention, of a daily interaction of the human world and wider spheres of good and evil, of heaven and hell, of sacred places, is heavily constricted today by secularism and science. Those earlier concerns were important aspects of cartography, as the maps of the Australian Aborigines, of the Music of the Spheres, and even of the mythical isle of Avalon, all included in this book, are intended to show.

The Goode projection minimizes surface area and shape distortion. To give it its full technical description, the Interrupted Goode Homolosine Projection is an interrupted, pseudocylindrical, equal-area, composite map.

Frederick de Wit’s early 18th-century map of Ireland is a good example of a problem that no longer vexes the cartographer. The scale bars are provided in German, French, English and ‘Hibernian’ miles. Though the ‘statute mile’ had been defined at the end of the 16th century, the length of a mile varied even within countries. A ‘Lieue de Bourgogne’, for example, was much longer than a ‘Lieue de Paris’. An Irish mile was 2,240 yards. (See here for more on de Wit.)

I became interested in maps as a child. I liked it if the books I read, whether Swallows and Amazons or The Hobbit, contained a map. It made the story solid, comprehensible, real. Growing up in outer London, my world was also defined by maps: the underground Tube map devised by Harry Beck that showed different routes into town, structuring the sprawl of the city with its clear symmetry, and the far more inchoate street maps of my suburb, depicted in the A to Z street atlas, a great help when my paper deliveries took me farther afield than the immediate streets. As a child, I wrote an imaginary history of an invented land, which required maps, and also drew maps for an interpretation of the history of at least one real state. (Readers may have similar memories evoked when considering the last chapter in this book, ‘Fantasies, Follies & Fabrications’.) School meant geography as well as history; it meant ‘where bananas came from’, not the modern ‘where bananas would come from if they read analyses of locational geography’. Maps, therefore, unlocked the real world, excitingly so in my teens when I was the route-planner for family driving trips on the Continent and for walking vacations in England. Still, to this day, I find the maps in aeroplanes (the paper ones in the in-flight magazines, and their electronic counterparts on the monitors) seductive. Their difference is also arresting, showing how the same routes can be presented in contrasting ways.

When I was first thinking about writing this introduction, the British newspapers were full of election maps, which clarified, and yet also misleadingly simplified: constituencies in which more than 60 per cent of the voting electors voted against the winning candidate were defined by the colour of the latter’s party, thanks to the British ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system. At once, this is an accurate account of the result, in terms of who was elected, and a misleading portrayal of voter preferences: they would be better shown in a colour-coded dot map, with the number and colour of dots per constituency proportionate to the votes cast; but that would sacrifice comprehension for the sake of accuracy, a balancing act performed in all the following maps.

My comments will strike echoes with some readers; all will have their own history of understanding and appreciating maps. If this understanding and appreciation varies and is often distinctively personal, that helps unlock the issue of how maps can be presented in very different ways. That this has been exploited for propaganda purposes, often brilliantly so, does not mean that maps are without value, or that they are simply systems to control territory, by allocating it or by manipulating views. Instead, it is necessary to understand the nuances of perception, and therefore representation, at the same time as appreciating the inherent problems of mapmaking.

A bird’s-eye map of the battle fought near Lake George on 8 September 1755. The British with their Mohawk allies defeated a greater French and Indian force. Cartography is a vital tool of warfare, as is made clear in this book in the section on military maps; but some maps are simply post-battle memorials. This is of course an English creation. To the victor, the map.

This book will encourage people to look to the future. In a world in which the visual is increasingly dominant over the literary, maps will play a prominent role. This will in part be because the systems that need depicting, whether natural, such as the human brain, or artificial, such as microchip mechanisms, are ones with which people are unfamiliar, or that cannot be understood in familiar terms. In appreciating the widening world of maps, it will be important to understand the insights that considering the invigorating and splendid history of cartography offers.

The Choice of Maps

Asingle volume like this cannot hope to address the whole history of cartography. The maps reproduced in this book have been chosen to highlight specific cartographic themes; this may be a cartographic innovation, such as Harry Beck’s orthogonal schematic map of the London underground system, or Hermann Bollmann’s axonometric city guides. Maps have also been chosen because their creator is an important figure in the history of cartography: so the maps of Christopher Saxton, Philip Apian, Ortelius and Ptolemy are featured. Some maps deserve their place as examples of specific mapping techniques or approaches, such as the computer-generated maps of the 2004 tsunami and the statistical mapping of world poverty. Some of the maps symbolize or encapsulate an entire cosmology, like the Australian Aborigine map and the map of the nine worlds of the Norsemen.

As should become clear, almost all maps are partial, prejudiced representations of the world, compromises among the competing demands of accurate area, shape, distance and direction, even if the sole aim is geographical or physical. If the aim is more complex or even deliberately obscured, as in propaganda maps designed to glorify leaders or nations, or to claim territory, then it is even harder for the map-reader to interpret and decode the image confidently. The maps shown in this volume have been chosen not only for their significance but also their beauty. Beauty played an essential role in 17th-century Dutch maps, which are marvellous works of art in their own right.

The first chapter of this book considers the beginnings of mapmaking and indicates some of the early transfers of cartographic knowledge, from East to West and West to East. The second chapter considers cartographic breakthroughs; most, but not all, associated with individual genius. The third chapter, inevitably, analyses the golden age of exploration. The selection of military maps in the following chapter is consciously circumscribed. So many maps can loosely be defined as military in purpose. Many 19th-century European maps of Africa, for example, if not military, are certainly for the purpose of annexation. Most of the military maps chosen are battle maps, maps that had an actual effect on military outcomes, or reveal the military decision-making process. The chapter entitled Drawing the Line focuses on maps that were expressions of territorial annexation. The final chapter considers map controversies and works of the imagination.

Joseph Perkins’ 1826 colour-coded map of France, showing settlements, district boundaries, roads, canals and topographical features.

The Earliest Maps

The Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea, from a map by an unknown cartographer, commissioned by (or acquired by) ambassador Alberto Cantino for the Duke of Ferrara, manufactured and illuminated in Portugal in 1502. Cantino smuggled this navigational map out of Portugal to Italy. It informed the Duke of the discoveries of Columbus on the northern coast of South America and the Caribbean islands, of Pedro Alvares Cabral (Brazil, 1500), and of the Corte-Real brothers Miguel and Gaspar of the ‘North Cape of Asia’ (probably Labrador, Newfoundland). One question for the Duke was which monarchs would rule the new lands? Would it be the same ones shown here in the first world? This map represents something of a cartographic endpoint; the first printed world map to include the New World.

Ancient Clay Maps

Like the wheel and the plough, maps were probably first used in Mesopotamia, the ancient Middle-Eastern land that lay between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Arguably the oldest existing map was made in that region well over 4,000 years ago.

In about 2350 BC, Sargon the Great founded the Akkad kingdom in northern Mesopotamia. The people’s language, Akkadian, used the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, in which combinations of wedge-shaped marks formed the characters. For permanent records, scribes used a triangular ‘pen’ to impress cuneiform script into damp clay tablets, which were then sun-dried or baked in an oven to preserve them. In 1930–31 archeologists digging at the ruined city of Ga-Sur at Nuzi (present-day Yorghan Tepe in Iraq) unearthed a clay tablet with a difference – instead of the usual cuneiform characters it depicted a map. The site where it was found lies 200 miles (320 kilometres) north of Babylon near the modern towns of Kirkuk and Harran. The archeologists dated the tablet to 2300 BC, making it the oldest known map. It measures 3 by 2.7 inches (7.6 by 6.8 centimetres), slightly smaller than a man’s palm.

The lines inscribed in the clay are difficult to decipher, but experts agree that they represent an area of land, probably the plan of an estate, complete with the owner’s name: Azala. The estate lies between two ranges of hills, which are denoted by overlapping semicircles, and has a waterway running through the middle, either a river or a canal. The central plot has a stated area of 354 iku, which equals about 30 acres (12 hectares). Three inscribed circles probably indicate the cardinal points north, east and west.

Smaller-scale maps or plans of towns and cities on clay tablets also occur from later in the Babylonian period. One tablet from about 1500 BC depicts the city of Nippur, south of Babylon and capital of the Sumerian civilization. It shows major buildings, including the Temple of Enlil in its own square. Among the nearby fields, lines indicate the boundaries of the estates of some of the wealthy landowners, separated by irrigation channels that run down from a curving river. Later still the town of Sippar, on the banks of the River Euphrates just north of Babylon, was the subject of a clay tablet made in about 500 BC. The town is depicted as a rectangular shape, surrounded by an intricate system of canals. The street plan of Babylon itself was also mapped on clay tablets. One of these locates the Temple of Marduk and the route of a processional path through the Ishtar Gate to a smaller temple sited outside the city’s walls.

A Babylonian clay tablet from about 600 BC, shows a map of the world, with the Earth as a small disc surrounded by a ring of water. Near the centre is a rectangular box denoting Babylon, straddling the Euphrates River. Small circles indicate neighbouring cities. This is the first known attempt to show the Earth as a whole and predates similar interpretations by the Greeks Anaximander and Hecataeus.

Most ancient clay maps are large-scale representations of small areas, showing irrigation, fields, and most surely, ownership. They are title deeds, necessary records for a new kind of urban society that has abandoned a hunter-gathering existence. Of course these are not the oldest maps, only the oldest to survive.

Babylon’s view of the world was recorded on this clay tablet made in about 600 BC. The city occupies the rectangle just above the centre, with mountains to the north and a south-flowing Euphrates that emerges at the Persian Gulf into a circular river, representing the world’s oceans.

The Mapping of the Dream Time

In Aboriginal Gumatj lore the power of the crocodile is linked to fire. The crocodile Baru brought fire to Biranybirany on Caledon Bay, and from there fire blazed across the country, represented in the diamond designs. The Gumatj – or ‘crocodile’ – people are a clan of the Yolngu from the northeast coast of the Northern Territory. This image represents both the ancestral figure of Baru and the Biranybirany area. Where tail meets body is the river mouth.

The Australian Aboriginal word ‘Alcheringa’ is commonly translated as ‘Dream Time’ and usually signifies a sacred primordial time during the creation of the world when the totemic ancestors of all living creatures roamed the earth. It was believed all-powerful ancestors of caterpillars and kangaroos and scorpions – among the many others – created the world by dreaming it into existence.

Traditional Aboriginal religion maintains that these immortal entities still inhabit (in a ‘hibernating’ dreaming state) sacred rocks and features of the landscape today. Visions of these totemic ancestors and their deeds have traditionally been recorded in bark drawings or on the walls of sacred caves. They are also recited in songs and reenacted through dramatic dances and rituals. In all cases these illustrations or aural tales have served as maps to teach and guide the souls of initiates through the world in the Dream Time. However, as these supernatural beings inhabit geographically recognizable features of the land; they are also maps that are practical guides to the natural world.

The concept of Dream Time, ‘Eternal Dream Time’ or ‘The Dreaming’ is common to all the Aboriginal people of Australia. It denotes not so much a ‘time’ as an eternal ‘dimension’ in the Australian Aboriginal tradition.

Alcheringa describes a dimension common to most mythologies known as in illa tempore – ‘before history began’ – wherein gods or ancestral beings establish the laws and taboos for the human race. To the Aborigines, this was the dimension of the supernatural ancestors who were altjiranga ngambakala or ‘born to eternity’ and shaped the land and filled it with life. These spirits or beings remain in the land and can be conjured up so they can teach us how to survive.

According to Australian Aboriginal traditions, mortals are still able to communicate with these entities. This is, in part, because of the Aborigines’ perceived relationship to the land. In Australian Aboriginal society, everyone has two souls, one mortal and one immortal. The mortal soul inherits its natural powers through his human ancestry. The immortal soul inherits its supernatural powers through its totemic ancestors. One’s immortal totemic ancestor may be that of a wallaby or a caterpillar, depending on the circumstances of one’s birth.

These immortal totemic beings sleep within the land: in rocks, in trees, in springs. However, these supernatural beings are able to enter the wombs of mortal women if these women pass by their sanctuaries during certain stages of their pregnancies. Each totemic ancestor bestows certain supernatural gifts upon each child. This second soul dwells as an immortal twin alongside his mortal soul; and lives within the human body so long as it survives. This totemic being’s spirits may become animated within human forms. However, when the mortal body and soul perish, the immortal soul returns to the ancestral being that resides forever within the land.

In traditional Aboriginal societies, every individual knows how to identify and communicate with these ancestral spirits in the land. Failure to do so could be fatal. To learn the myths and rituals relating to these ancestors was also the means by which one could safely travel from one waterhole to another in the proper seasons; or one hunting ground to another in time with animal migrations. The mapping of these eternal patterns as set down in the traditions of Alcheringa was more than a set of spiritual beliefs. It was also a practical means by which all the Aboriginal tribes managed to survive.

The Nazca Enigma

The Nazca were a South American people who flourished between about 200 BC and AD 600 in the southern part of what is now Peru. They lived in an inhospitable region of arid desert dominated by a windswept plateau, and they left behind two main reminders of their existence – fine, multicoloured ceramics and huge figures drawn on the desert ground.

These so-called Nazca Lines consist mainly of outlines that to our eyes resemble animals – birds, a monkey, a whale, and even a giant spider – as well as trees and flowers. A 310-foot (93-metre) hummingbird sits next to a 935-foot (285-metre) pelican. Due to their gargantuan size they are best appreciated from the air, and that is how they were first brought to public attention, in about 1930. In addition there are regular geometric figures including spirals, triangles, rectangles and arrays of apparently arbitrary dead straight lines. Together the collection of desert designs occupies an area of about 400 square miles (1,036 kilometres).

Anthropomorphic figures are found on the slopes. They include a bizarre being with two enormous hands, one normal and the other with only four fingers. Also represented are objects such as yarn, looms and ornamental clasps. All these figures seem to have clear ‘entrances’, which suggest paths to be followed and places to line up.

The Nazca made the huge designs in the desert by removing the weathered brown stone from the surface of the Pampa Colorada (‘Colored Plain’) to expose the much lighter sand beneath. The persistent winds keep scouring any accumulated sand from the grooves, which may have been deepened originally by the countless feet of the Native Americans as they tramped around the lines. The Nazca plain is ideal to preserve the markings, owing to the climate (one of the driest on Earth, with only 20 minutes of rainfall per year) and the flat, stony ground, which minimizes the effect of the wind at ground level. But if that is how they were constructed, what were they for?

There have been various theories about the function of the Nazca Lines. It has been suggested that they are plans – large-scale maps – for (now defunct) irrigation systems. Some rivers from the high Andes do intersect the desiccated Nazca territory, and ensuring the water supply must have been high on the agenda of its water-starved inhabitants. Some of the giant ‘pictures’ resemble the designs on Nazca pottery and may, like some of the pots, have had a religious significance. The image of worshippers or pilgrims ritually walking around the patterns in the desert, perhaps while offering sacrifices to propitiate the gods to guarantee the crucial water supply, adds weight to this theory. Perhaps, in this case, the figures and lines are all that remain of a huge outdoor temple. The long straight lines, some diverging from a central point, are supposed to lead to particularly sacred positions on the plain. One ingenious suggestion is that the priests took to the air in hot-air balloons so that they could look down on the proceedings; this would account for the scale of the Nazca figures and why they can be appreciated only from high above the ground.

The Nazca lines are found in southern Peru in the Pampa region on the coast in the province of Nazca, 250 miles (400 kilometres) south of Lima. They cover nearly 400 square miles (1,036 square kilometres) of desert. This hummingbird design was executed in a single continuous line and is 310 feet (93 metres) long.

One of the most famous of the Nazca drawings. This 105-foot (32-metre) image has been seen as a representation of a human figure, a god or even an extraterrestrial being.

Another possibility, put forward by American historian Paul Kosok in 1941, is that the designs were made from the people’s observations of the heavens. With the eye of faith the shapes of some of the animals do correspond to groupings of stars, rather like the fanciful animals associated with the constellations by early first-world astronomers. According to this theory, the whole site might be a vast celestial map or calendar of some sort. But American astrophysicist Gerald Hawkins poured cold water on this idea in 1967 when he could find no match between the Nazca patterns and the constellations, even allowing for changes in star positions over the last 2,000 years. Six years later Dr. Hawkins studied 186 lines with a computer program and found that only 20 per cent had any astronomical orientation; no more than by pure chance. Nevertheless, if the Nazca figures and lines are the remnants of some ancient celestial map, they must constitute the biggest map ever constructed by human beings. The Nazca enigma is insoluble: we cannot even be sure that the Nazca people made the lines, since the lines cannot be radiocarbon dated. They have been associated with cat cults, zodiacal symbols, running races and even visitors from outer space.

Islamic Guardians of Knowledge

The course of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are shown in the 11th-century ‘atlas’ of al-Istalhry.

Much of the great body of knowledge generated by the Classical world has only survived into modern times thanks to the efforts of Islamic scholars in the early Middle Ages. One of the most notable contributions from Islamic learning to cartography was made by the geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed al-Sharif al-Idrisi.

Born in the Moroccan city of Ceuta on the straits of Gibraltar in 1100, al-Idrisi went to study in the major cultural centre of Córdoba in al-Andalus (Spain) before undertaking a wide-ranging series of journeys that took in Northern Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor. These travels lasted for some 15 years, and laid the practical groundwork for the theoretical writings and mapmaking that occupied his later years.

Al-Idrisi’s great aptitude in cartography eventually came to the attention of the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II (1095–1154). Roger’s court at Palermo was renowned not only for its splendour, but also for the dialogue that this enlightened ruler fostered there between Christian and Muslim scholars. Although the Normans had only recently wrested the island from Arab rule at the end of the 11th century, Roger had no thought of purging Islamic influence. Being especially interested in geography, he commissioned a number of important works from the Moroccan cartographer, from around 1140 onwards. The most renowned of these was a globe of the world, partitioned into sections and containing all the most up-to-date geographical information that was available. Engraved on the surface of a ball of silver weighing some 880 pounds (400 kilograms) al-Idrisi’s magnificent creation – sadly now lost – depicted the seven continents and also included detailed information such as rivers and lakes, major cities and trade routes.

Accompanying the globe (and how we come to know about its existence in the first place) was a compendium of diverse information on countries of the world, such as their religion, languages, and customs. This work, which has survived to the present day, was called the Al-Kitab al-Rujari (Tabula Rogeriana, or ‘Book of Roger’), and included 70 maps of different regions. Although these maps display some inevitable inaccuracies, like major islands scattered throughout the Atlantic Ocean or the portrayal of Scandinavia as an island, they are decidedly superior to contemporary maps of the same kind produced in Europe. The text of the Tabula Rogeriana is at pains to point out that all the distances given, along with the positions, height and length of certain topographical features, are as accurate as possible, having been meticulously based on data gathered by al-Idrisi and other recent (mostly fellow Muslim) travellers.

Al-Idrisi’s 1154 world map (this is a 1553 copy) is superior to other maps of the time in its use of curved parallels. The map is based in part on Ancient Greek periploi, or sailing instructions.

Al-Idrisi died around 1166, and his renown quickly spread around Europe as a result of Sicily’s position on several trade routes. His mapping shows a certain influence from Ptolemy, whose works had been translated into Arabic in the ninth century, but is otherwise strikingly original.

Chinese Cartography

The earliest surveys of China coincide with the earliest mapmaking activities of the Greeks. The Chinese astronomer Chang Heng, who introduced the rectangular grid to eastern cartography, was a contemporary of Ptolemy. The geographical literature of ancient China and Greece show that both cultures were dividing up the world with ‘geometrical’ lines.

China as a discrete nation was unified for the first time in 221 BC, when the western frontier state of Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of its rival states. The repressive centralization initiated by the first emperor did not ensure the longevity of the first dynasty, but the imperial system and its bureaucratic control would set the pattern for two millennia. As demonstrated elsewhere in this book, bureaucracy needs maps. Cadastral maps – those produced to define the extent, value, and ownership of land for the purposes of taxation – are found in early Chinese maps (as they are in Ancient Egypt). This need, and the pressing need for military mapping of the constantly threatened Chinese state, produced cartography with a clearly understood viewpoint, scale and symbolism; plus the square and rectangular grid. As early as the third century AD, minister Pei Hsiu set down the rules or principles for official mapmaking, including altitude measurement, having considered the problems of mapping uneven terrain on a plane surface. To these accomplishments we must add the invention of paper in the previous century, and the earliest known printed map, of western China and dated about 1155. The compass is in use in the 11th century (and probably earlier), finding its way west within the next hundred years. China also gave us the first celestial globe in AD 440; but their mapping of the globe was Sinocentric even after the arrival of European cartographic sciences from the 16th century. The planets and stars were of more interest than Africa or the Americas. One final characteristic of Chinese cartography, linked to this Sinocentrism, is that despite its great practical value, mapmaking was not divorced as a graphic practice from the literary and visual arts. It didn’t become its own ‘science’ until late in the 19th century.

This 1136 stone map shows China during the Nan Song Dynasty (1127-1279), including part of Korea. The Yangtze and other rivers are shown, and more than 400 place names are given.

These Korean ‘Ch’onha’ and ‘Chungguk’ maps, created in pen and ink and watercolour in about 1800, show the world (above) and the Ming Empire (below), which lasted from the mid-14th century to the mid-17th. ‘Ch’onha’ is Korean for world while Chungguk’ means China. Chinese cartography strongly influenced that of Korea.

The Nine Worlds of the Norsemen

Kevin Crossley-Holland’s map of the Viking cosmology does what all maps should do: it simplifies information. The three levels of life and death and their interconnections are shown here. Crossley-Holland points out that a familiar sight in Iceland, outside the few towns, is a lone farmhouse with a single tree growing right up against it. These trees are a ‘20th-century echo of the traditional guardian tree … the first and greatest of such trees was Yggdrasill.’

The Viking cosmos was shaped by the supernatural traditions of shamanism, a set of beliefs common to most tribal peoples, and practised since the dawn of history. Here we consider not an actual old map, but one of the oldest ‘psychic maps’.

The shaman is a magician, mystic, healer, and poet. At the heart of his multi-levelled universe is the unifying concept of a cosmic pillar, a towering mountain or a great tree. The World Tree is the most vital and powerful. It is a life force in itself that binds and nourishes all elements and levels in the shaman’s universe. In Norse mythology there are nine worlds bound together by Yggdrasill the Great Ash. Beyond its purpose as central pillar of support for the nine worlds, Yggdrasill is the means by which shaman spirits ascend to the world of the gods or descend to the world of the dead.

Yggdrasill literally means ‘the steed of Ygg (Odin)’. Odin was the Norsemen’s King of the Gods. He was also the supreme shaman. For just as the shaman’s spirit climbs his tree in a trance, so Odin rode Yggdrasill through all the nine worlds to become the lord and master of each. For a long time, Odin was a wanderer and seeker of wisdom and visions. He travelled through all the nine worlds and questioned every living thing: giants, elves, dwarfs, nymphs, and spirits of the air, water, earth and wood.

He questioned the trees, plants and the very stones themselves. Odin endured many trials and dangerous adventures, but from each he wrung what wisdom there was from all things he encountered. It was, however, on Yggdrasill that Odin underwent his most harrowing rites of passage. Like the crucified Christ, Odin was wounded by a spear and hung from the sacred tree for nine days and nine nights. Hanging from the tree in great pain, Odin maintained a state of meditation on the markings cut in the stone by Yggdrasill’s roots. By the ninth night Odin discovered the secret power of the runes, and brought about his own resurrection. From Yggdrasill he cut the limb and made his magician’s staff. And by his magician’s wisdom, Odin learned to cure the sick, make the dead speak, render weapons powerless, gain women’s love, and calm storms by land and sea.

Ever thirsting for more knowledge and power, Odin went to the spring of Mimir – the fountain of wisdom and inspiration – but for this too there was a price. For one deep draft from the spring, Odin must sacrifice an eye. Without hesitation, he drank, and from that time he was always the one-eyed god. Resurrected as King of the Gods, Odin was a fearful god to look on. He was stern, one-eyed, grey-bearded and gigantic. He wore a grey cloak with a broad blue mantle and a warrior’s eagle-winged helmet. Upon his golden throne, Hlidskialf (‘the watchtower of the gods’) Odin’s one eye could see all that happened in all the nine worlds in a single terrible glance. At his feet crouched two fierce wolves (Ravener and Greed) and on one shoulder perched two ravens (Thought and Memory).

In his definitive The Norse Myths, poet and author Kevin Crossley-Holland has given the most lucid and instructive map of the Norse cosmos. His World Tree reaches the heavens, and upon its topmost branches is a great eagle. Its leaves drip with honeydew, and deer chew at its bark and shoots. The squirrel Ratatosk is the messenger who passes insults from the great eagle upon the highest branch down to the dragon gnawing on its deepest root.

Crossley-Holland describes the Norse cosmos as a tricentric structure – like three plates set one above another. Yggdrasill the World Tree has a root sunk in a well or spring on each of these levels. The first root is sunk in the Well of Urd (Fate), the second is the Spring of Mimir (Wisdom) and the third is the Spring of Hvergelmir (Underworld). A tree, a column or a mountain at the centre of the world (or universe) can be found in many world mythologies; and the division of three cosmic regions fed by, or feeding, a tree is found in Vedic Indian and Chinese cosmologies.

The simplest way of roughly categorizing these three levels would be: heaven, earth and hell. However, the Norse cosmos is much more complex. The first level encompassed three separate worlds: Asgard, Vanaheim and Alfheim.

The Old Stone Mill at Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island. Some claim the structure is of Norse origin, either a lighthouse or church. No English unit of measurement seems to have been used in its construction.

Asgard is the World of the Aesir, where the most powerful warrior gods and goddesses have their great halls. The greatest was Valhalla, Odin’s ‘hall of the slain’, and heaven of warriors. Vanaheim is the World of the Vanir, the home of fertility gods and goddesses. And the third world is Alfheim, the World of the Light Elves.

The second level is encircled by the monster Jormungand. This is the world serpent who holds his tail in his jaws and sleeps upon the ocean-river bed. The Gods of Asgard descended to the worlds on this second level by passing over the fiery rainbow bridge, known as Bifrost, ‘the Trembling Roadway’. This was the preferred route for Thor when he rode his goat-drawn chariot down to the land of mortals.

On this second level there were four separate worlds. The first was called Midgard, the World of Men. The second world was to be found in the eastern mountains of Jotunheim, the World of Giants, with its citadel of Utgard. The third and fourth were subterranean realms to the north and south of Midgard: Nidavellir is the World of the Dwarfs and Svartalfheim is the World of the Dark Elves.

On the third and deepest level are two final worlds: Hel and Niflheim. Both are Worlds of the Dead. The first world of the dead was Hel. It is a massively walled world with a great gate guarded by a demonic monster known as Garm the Hound. This realm of the dead was ruled by the hideous female monster, half black and half white, also called Hel. Evil men pass through the gates of Hel, and seem to die again, and travel into an even more terrible world of the dead. This place is called Niflheim. It is a misty land that is bitterly cold and endlessly dark. It is also the dwelling place of slithering serpents, and the evil dragon Nidhogg.

In the cosmos of the Norsemen, even the gods do not live forever. The gods knew that all the inhabitants of the nine worlds were eventually doomed. Fittingly, it would be a warrior’s end. There will be one last mighty final battle between the gods and the giants. It will end in universal slaughter and a fiery conflagration that will consume all the nine worlds.

This was the day of doom the Norsemen called Ragnarok. It was foretold in an ancient prophecy. On that fatal day, the dark celestial wolf Skoll would devour the sun and his brother Hati would devour the moon. Darkness would fall and the mountain would shake and the sea would surge upon the lands. Fenrir the Wolf would break loose from his chains and Jormungand the World Serpent would arise in wrath. All these with the Hell Hound Garm and the Dragon Nidhogg would join the Giant Legions in their war with the gods. And in the end, all would be destroyed. But then too, so would Odin, Thor and all other almighty gods. None would survive but the demons of fire whose flames leapt across all the barriers between the worlds. The nine worlds would then become one vast inferno and all life be consumed in the blaze.

Can we relate this cosmological map to the physical world in any meaningful way? Firstly, the second level, Midgard, was surrounded by a vast and seemingly uncrossable ocean. If anyone knew the truth of that from the ninth to the 11th centuries, it was the greatest seafarers, the Vikings (though of course the Viking cosmology described here is far older). Secondly, Niflheim was specifically described as nine days’ ride from Midgard (just as the vast plain where the last battle is fought, Vigrid, stretches 120 leagues in every direction from Valhalla), suggesting that the Norsemen really did have a geographical, topographical sense of the three regions. And which direction would hell be? North of course; into darkness, into the wasteland.

An eighth-century Viking stele, with depictions of the Norse god Odin riding Sleipnir, his eight-legged horse, and valkyries guarding the gates of Valhalla. The eight legs symbolize the directions of the compass.