Around the year 1150 BC, the Egyptian bureaucrat Amennakhte created one of the most beautiful maps to survive from the ancient world, showing the way to gold mines and a stone quarry in eastern Egypt. In addition to being a topographical map depicting mountains, roads and waterways, it is also the world’s oldest geological map, as it indicates which types of stones and metals are present in the area. The map was created for Ramesses IV’s expedition to obtain stone for use in creating new statues of the king.
Two wide roads pass through a pink mountainous area. These are drawn horizontally across the papyrus, which is almost three metres long, and connect to a third road that crosses the papyrus and leads to a fourth. The road at the bottom features gravel depicted in various shades of brown and white, and sparse, green vegetation, typical of a dried-up river bed. The writing on the map specifies where the roads lead, and even explains the pink mountains: ‘the mountains in which gold is worked, they are coloured pink.’ Beside the gold mine are four houses where the workers lived, a temple to the god Amun, a water reservoir and a well.
In modern times, the map has been compared with the place it is intended to replicate–a fifteen-kilometre stretch of the Wadi Hammamat dry river bed–and has been found to be accurate. Archaeological surveys have also shown that gold was mined here during the period. The area runs parallel to the main road, which extended from Qift, by the Nile, through the eastern desert to the port of Quesir, by the Red Sea. From here, the Egyptians embarked on trading expeditions to a country to the south, which they called the Land of Punt. The country’s exact location continues to be debated by historians today.
This map may have been created as a result of the distance calculations performed for purely logistical reasons, which Amennakhte then expressed visually. The question, then, is whether this map was the only one of its kind, or whether other Egyptian cartographers also painstakingly crafted maps that were later lost–or which now lay hidden in a cracked clay pot somewhere out in the desert, awaiting discovery.
FOUNDATIONS | Like those of our own time, prehistoric and ancient maps were influenced by the age in which they were drawn, and designed to fulfil the needs of that age to the best of their creators’ ability. The Sumerian and Babylonian maps illustrating land ownership–and that discovered in Bedolina, if it is true that this map also depicts the possession of property–anticipate our modern economic map series by several thousand years. Religious representations of the world and the universe fulfilled the need to understand one’s place in the bigger picture.
Our view of the past and its peoples influences our interpretations of how they viewed the world. The fact that we have long believed people before Columbus thought the Earth was flat–which is incorrect–has influenced translations of texts from before Columbus’s time, and our belief that creation narratives and cosmogonies were intended to be taken literally has also had peculiar consequences. We interpret old maps and texts through the fog of history–but sometimes the prehistoric terrain might just correspond to the maps we draw of it.
A map of Egypt, featuring Alessandria–Alexandria–on the coast, based on Ptolemy’s coordinates from antiquity. Drawn by Girolamo Ruscelli in 1561, it is one of many Italian Ptolemaic maps published during the Renaissance. The image shows a section of the original map.
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Alexandria, Egypt
31° 12′ 32″ N
29° 54′ 33″ E
During antiquity, Alexandria could be seen from around sixty kilometres away when arriving by sea. On the narrow island of Pharos, just north of the city, stood a lighthouse measuring over 100 metres in height–one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To guide travellers along the seemingly monotonous Egyptian coastline, with its hidden sandbanks and rocks, a fire was lit in the lighthouse at night, and the Sun’s light reflected using a large mirror during the day. But the lighthouse was more than just a landmark to navigate by–it also informed travellers that they had arrived in one of the great metropolises of the age. Julius Caesar was impressed when he visited the city in the year 48 BC, calling it ‘a tower of great height, of marvellous construction.’
Alexandria had been founded around 300 years earlier by another builder of empires–Alexander the Great. One of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, Ptolemy, was appointed governor of Egypt, and succeeded Alexander as Ptolemy I Soter in 304 BC. Alexandria then became the country’s capital, and it wasn’t long before the city became known as the greatest and most important in the Mediterranean. With its position on Egypt’s northern coast, Alexandria sits at the centre of a cultural intersection. Here, Africa and Asia meet; Indian, Arabic and African ships sail the Red Sea to the south-east, and Europe is just a short voyage north across the Mediterranean.
As travellers sailed through the strait that led into the harbour, with Pharos on the right, the city with its ‘building[s] upon building[s]’ would come into view, as geographer Strabo described the experience while living in Alexandria just before the birth of Christ. The area around the harbour was dominated by the royal quarter, and as soon as the ships docked they would be boarded by bureaucrats tasked with finding out whether any scrolls were aboard. All books brought into the city were borrowed so that scribes could make copies of them.
Demetrius of Phalerum, a former student of the philosopher Aristotle who had been greatly inspired by Aristotle’s library, advised Ptolemy I Soter to collect books from all the peoples of the world. The thinking behind this was simple: trade generates wealth, wealth pays for knowledge and knowledge stimulates more trade. Just a few years later, the library in Alexandria was established as the Mediterranean’s most important knowledge centre.
The books were transported from the ships to the palace area, where the museum and its library were located, and the copies made of them later returned to the boats. The library–the first attempt to collect, categorise and catalogue all available knowledge of the world–appreciated originals.
Alexandria not only housed the world’s largest collection of books–possibly as many as 700,000 when the collection was at its largest–but also acted as a meeting place for scholars from three continents. The Egyptian kings offered food and lodgings, pay and–best of all–access to the library. The city was consequently visited by astronomers, geographers, engineers, literary scholars, mathematicians and physicians, and it was in Alexandria that modern cartography was born.
Around the year AD 150, astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy began searching the library for material so that he could write a book about geography. The result was his Geographike Hyphegesis (Geographical Guidance), later simply referred to as the Geography–a three-part work containing the longitude and latitude values for over 8,000 locations in Africa, Asia and Europe; instructions for how to best represent the round globe on a flat surface; and a discussion of the role of astronomical calculations and other forms of collated knowledge in the study of geography. Never before had anyone written such a comprehensive book on the subject.
We can imagine Ptolemy wandering between the worn colonnades overlooking the museum’s park, a papyrus scroll from one of the library’s many bookshelves tucked under his arm. He’s on his way to the exedra, the large, crescent-shaped stone bench that forms part of the park’s walls, where his colleagues can almost always be found reading or deep in discussion.
Ptolemy is now around fifty years old. On this particular day he’s carrying volume IV of the encyclopedia Naturalis Historia from the year AD 77, written by Roman officer and historian Pliny the Elder, who served in Germania from AD 42 to 52 and while there heard rumours of large islands recently discovered in the northern regions. Ptolemy opens the scroll:
In their country is an immense mountain called Saevo, not less than those of the Riphæan range, and which forms an immense gulf along the shore as far as the Promontory of the Cimbri. This gulf, which has the name of the Codanian, is filled with islands; the most famous among which is Scatinavia, of a magnitude a
s yet unascertained: the only portion of it at all known is inhabited by the nation of the Hilleviones, who dwell in 500 villages, and call it a second world: it is generally supposed that the island of Eningia is of not less magnitude. Some writers state that these regions, as far as the river Vistula, are inhabited by the Sarmati, the Venedi, the Sciri, and the Hirri, and that there is a gulf there known by the name of Cylipenus, at the mouth of which is the island of Latris, after which comes another gulf, that of Lagnus, which borders on the Cimbri. The Cimbrian Promontory, running out into the sea for a great distance, forms a peninsula which bears the name of Tastris.
The immense mountain called Saevo is probably Norway, and the Cimbrian Promontory and Tastris Peninsula are the Danish mainland. The Codanian Gulf is a combination of Skagerak, Kattegat and Østersjøen, and according to Pliny the most famous island here is Scatinavia–the Romans did not understand that Scandinavia is a peninsula. ‘Hilleviones’ is probably Pliny’s collective term for the Scandinavians.
Using these kinds of texts, Ptolemy pieces together an image of the world. He reads travelogues, geographical treatises and astronomical calculations, and studies old maps–all from among the great library’s many scrolls. He also talks to seamen who have travelled to distant harbours: ‘But there is a consensus among those who have sailed there and visited the places over a long period, as well as among those who have come to us from there, that [Simylla] is just south [and not west] of the mouths of the river, and it is called “Timoula” by the natives,’ he writes in his Geography.
Ptolemy had previously written the Almagest or Syntaxis Mathematica, a work about the stars and planets, and at the time of its writing his knowledge of the world was little greater than that possessed by those who had lived 300 years before him. He believed Sri Lanka was the southernmost country known to exist, and knew nothing of Africa south of today’s Ethiopia, nor anything of what lay east of the Ganges River other than Serica–the area of China that marked the end of the Silk Road. Towards the end of the Almagest, Ptolemy laments the lack of assured coordinates for the world’s most important cities, ‘but since the setting out of this information is pertinent to a separate, cartographical project,’ he stated, this work would have to wait. But it was this project–a catalogue of the latitude and longitude values of the world’s most important cities–that was the seed that gave rise to the Geography, and soon Ptolemy’s aim was to reproduce ‘through drawing […] the entire known part of the world together with the things that are, broadly speaking, connected with it,’ including rivers, gulfs, large forests ‘and the more noteworthy things of each kind.’
As he worked on the Geography, Ptolemy’s knowledge expanded, the world he would eventually present to us becoming bigger than that described in any other work from classical antiquity either before or after him. It stretches from 16 degrees south of the equator, from Agisymba and Kapp Prasum (Mozambique and Tanzania), east to Sinai (China) and the cities of Zabai and Kattigara–probably in today’s Cambodia–north to the Cimbric Peninsula (Jutland) and the island of Thule–probably Norway–and west to the Fortunate Isles somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. Ptolemy used eight scrolls to describe the world, and when the work was finished had summarised several hundred years of Greek, Hellenic and Roman thinking regarding the Earth’s appearance. For his part, Ptolemy was modest–rather than claiming to have produced a pioneering work, he emphasised how he had built upon the works of those who had gradually and laboriously gathered geographical knowledge before him. The foundations for his Geography were laid 700 years earlier, when the first natural philosophers began to doubt the mythological narratives about the nature of the world.
THE FLOATING WORLD | The ancient city of Miletus is a good example of the fact that any geography is only a temporary truth. When the city was founded, it was situated on the outermost point of a promontory that stretched into a bay, but this was gradually filled by sediment from a river, which caused the coast to move further and further from the city. The city’s inhabitants moved accordingly, and today Miletus lies abandoned and in ruins, around ten kilometres from the sea.
Miletus was a beautiful city in its time. It had a theatre with capacity for 15,000 people, a town hall, a stadium, two large squares, a gymnasium and public baths–and all this despite the fact that the city was often afflicted by war. Around the year 600 BC, the neighbouring kingdom of Lydia attempted to destroy Miletus, while at the same time the city’s ruler abolished the aristocracy. This resulted in the city’s two communities, the Aeinautes and the Cheiromaches, coming to blows in a revolt that lasted for two generations.
Amidst all this, Miletus became the most important cultural centre in the Greek world. The city is situated in modern Turkey, within range of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy, and these played an important role in the development of Greek philosophy and science, which started here. With these disciplines came new thinking regarding what the Earth must look like–philosophers were dissatisfied with mythological explanations; they asked more systematic questions, gave explanations other than the supernatural for what they observed around them, and attempted to describe the Earth and heavens in accordance with scientific principles.
In the 1800s, it was popular to draw world maps based on what various authors had written during antiquity. Here we see the world according to Hecataeus, Herodotus, Strabo and Eratosthenes–as presented in Cram’s Atlas of the World from 1901.
Later Greek writers gave much of the credit for these advances to Anaximander (610–546 BC), who rejected the Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek notions of the Earth floating on water and was the first to imagine that we are living on an object floating in empty space. In Anaximander’s model we float, unmoving, at the centre of infinite space, without anything to support us. The Earth is shaped like a cylinder, ‘a column of stone’, and on one of the two end pieces is a land mass surrounded by sea. How Anaximander managed to imagine something so completely unlike the views of everyone else at the time is shrouded in the fog of history, but his model marked the beginning of modern cosmology. A floating earth opened the possibility that the Sun, stars and planets might be floating around us, not just above us, and paved the way for Greek astronomy. A supposition made by the astronomer Anaxagoras 100 years later–that the Moon shines because it is illuminated by the Sun–would not have been possible without the concept of a floating earth.
Anaximander was also ‘the first to draw the outline of the sea and the land’, and ‘published the first geographical map [geographikon pinaka],’ wrote biographer Diogenes Laertius around the year AD 200. In Anaximander’s time, the Greeks had no specific term to describe a map, but began to use the word pinax–a tablet or metal plate used for writing or drawing–around the third century BC.
Unfortunately, nothing that Anaximander drew or wrote himself has survived, but based on what we know of his beliefs and from later Greek maps, we can deduce that his map must have been round, and that he placed either Miletus or the Oracle of Delphi at the centre of the world. Three continents must have been situated around the Aegean Sea–Europe, Asia and Africa–and around these Oceanus, the great river encircling the world. Europe would have been separated from Asia by the Black Sea and the River Tanais (Don), and from Africa by the Mediterranean. Africa would have been separated from Asia by the Nile.
The Greeks called these three continents oikoumene. The word stems from oikeo, ‘to dwell’, and means ‘the inhabited world’. Oikoumene stretched from Gibraltar in the west to India in the east, and from Ethiopia in the south to the mystical Hyperborea in the north.
Hyperborea means ‘beyond the north’. Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind, depicted as a bearded and dishevelled man with ice in his hair, and father of Chione, goddess of snow. He ruled over the Riphæan mountain range to the far north, and beyond these mountains was Hyperborea, a land with a pleasant climate because the sun shone twenty-four hours a day, and whose inhabitants lived for ever, without illness or hunger.
Another Greek myth tells of Callisto, who had a son with the god Zeus. Zeus’s furious wife then turned Callisto into a bear as punishment. Later, when Callisto’s son grew up, he came close to killing his mother the bear while out hunting, but Zeus prevented the tragedy by lifting them up into the sky as the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor–the Great Bear and Little Bear.
The Greeks believed that the Riphæan mountains were located directly below Boötes, the Great Bear and Little Bear, because these constellations are always seen in the skies to the north. The northern regions were named the Arctic because arktos is the Greek word for ‘bear’. The Pole Star is the brightest star in Little Bear.
The Strait of Gibraltar, the westernmost area known to the Greeks and where the Mediterranean Sea met a great, unknown ocean, was also shrouded in myths. One of these tells of how the brawny demigod Hercules had to perform twelve tasks after killing his wife and six sons. One of these tasks was to steal cattle from a giant who lived on the mystical island of Erytheia out in the sea to the west of Africa. Instead of climbing over the Atlas mountain range in modern Morocco, Hercules used his strength to smash through it, opening the strait between the two continents. One part of the destroyed mountains formed the Rock of Gibraltar; another the Jebel Musa mountain in Africa. The Greeks therefore named these two formations the Pillars of Hercules.
What lay beyond the great Oceanus was uncertain. Perhaps there was an unknown country there, or mythical islands such as the Hesperides, Erytheia or the Fortunate Isles–a paradise for the heroic dead.
Hecataeus of Miletus (550–476 BC) is thought to have significantly improved Anaximander’s map when he wrote the world’s first geographical treatise. Periodos ges (Journey Around the World) was divided into two parts: one about Europe, and one about Asia and Africa–Hecataeus was probably the first person to think about the world as being made up of different continents. The book was written as a travelogue, first describing Europe from east to west, mainly along the Mediterranean but with a detour up to Scythia–the region north-west of the Black Sea. The section about Asia and Africa stretched as far west as the Atlantic, and to India in the east. Hecataeus described cities, distances, borders, mountains and nations, occasionally taking a detour up a river. Attempts to reconstruct his map in retrospect have revealed that unlike Anaximander, Hecataeus included the Red Sea, linked Africa and Asia at Suez, and was aware of both the Indus River and the Caspian Sea.
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