A further problem that presents itself is one of perspective. At what imaginary location does the mapmaker stand before beginning to map the world? The answer, as we have already seen, invariably depends upon the mapmaker’s prevailing world view. In the case of the Babylonian world map, Babylon lies at the centre of the universe, or what the historian Mircea Eliade has called the ‘axis mundi’.19 According to Eliade, all archaic societies use rites and myths to create what he describes as a ‘boundary situation’, at which point ‘man discovers himself becoming conscious of his place in the universe’. This discovery creates an absolute distinction between a sacred, carefully demarcated realm of orderly existence, and a profane realm which is unknown, formless and hence dangerous. On the Babylonian world map, such sacred space circumscribed by its inner ring is contrasted with the profane space defined by the outer triangles, which represent chaotic, undifferentiated places antithetical to the sacred centre. Orienting and constructing space from this perspective repeats the divine act of creation, shaping form out of chaos, and placing the mapmaker (and his patron) on a par with the gods. Eliade argues that such images involve the creation of a centre that establishes a vertical conduit between the terrestrial and divine worlds, and which structures human beliefs and actions. Perhaps the hole at the centre of the Babylonian world map, usually regarded as the result of a pair of compasses marking out the map’s circular parameters, is rather a channel between one world and the next.
The kind of perspective adopted by the Babylonian world map could also be called egocentric mapping. Throughout most of recorded history, the overwhelming majority of maps put the culture that produced them at their centre, as many of the world maps discussed in this book show. Even today’s online mapping is partly driven by the user’s desire to first locate him- or herself on the digital map, by typing in their home address before anywhere else, and zooming in to see that location. It is a timeless act of personal reassurance, locating our selves as individuals in relation to a larger world that we suspect is supremely indifferent to our existence. But if such a perspective literally centres individuals, it also elevates them like gods, inviting them to take flight and look down upon the earth from a divine viewpoint, surveying the whole world in one look, calmly detached, gazing upon what can only be imagined by earthbound mortals.20 The map’s dissimulating brilliance is to make viewers believe, just for a moment, that such a perspective is real, that they are not still tethered to the earth, looking at a map. And here is one of the map’s most important characteristics: the viewer is positioned simultaneously inside and outside it. In the act of locating themselves on it, the viewer is at the same moment imaginatively rising above (and outside) it in a transcendent moment of contemplation, beyond time and space, seeing everything from nowhere. If the map offers its viewer an answer to the enduring existential question ‘Where am I?’, it does so through a magical splitting which situates him or her in two places at the same time.21
• • •
This problem of defining where the viewer stands in relation to a map of the world is one geographers have struggled with for centuries. For Renaissance geographers, one solution was to compare the viewer of a map to a theatre-goer. In 1570 the Flemish mapmaker Abraham Ortelius published a book containing maps of the world and its regions entitled Theatrum orbis terrarum – the ‘Theatre of the World’. Ortelius used the Greek definition of theatre – theatron – as ‘a place for viewing a spectacle’. As in a theatre, the maps that unfold before our eyes present a creative version of a reality we think we know, but in the process transform it into something very different. For Ortelius, as for many other Renaissance mapmakers, geography is ‘the eye of history’, a theatre of memory, because, as he put it, ‘the map being laid before our eyes, we may behold things done or places where they were done, as if they were at this time present’. The map acts like a mirror, or ‘glass’, because ‘the charts being placed, as it were certain glasses before our eyes, will the longer be kept in memory, and make the deeper impression in us’. But, like all the best dramatists, Ortelius concedes that his ‘glasses’ are a process of creative negotiation, because on certain maps ‘in some places, at our discretion, where we thought good, we have altered some things, some things we have put out, and otherwhere, if it seemed to be necessary, we have put in’ different features and places.22
Ortelius describes the position from which a viewer looks at a world map, which is closely related to orientation – the location from which we take our bearings. Strictly speaking, orientation usually refers to relative position or direction; in modern times it has become established as fixing location relative to the points on a magnetic compass. But long before the invention of the compass in China by the second century AD, world maps were oriented according to one of the four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. The decision to orientate maps according to one prime direction varies from one culture to another (as will be seen from the twelve maps discussed in this book), but there is no purely geographical reason why one direction is better than any other, or why modern Western maps have naturalized the assumption that north should be at the top of all world maps.
Why north ultimately triumphed as the prime direction in the Western geographical tradition, especially considering its initially negative connotations for Christianity (discussed in Chapter 2), has never been fully explained. Later Greek maps and early medieval sailing charts, or portolans, were drawn using magnetic compasses, which probably established the navigational superiority of the north–south axis over an east–west one; but even so there is little reason why south could not have been adopted as the simplest point of cardinal orientation instead, and indeed Muslim mapmakers continued to draw maps with south at the top long after the adoption of the compass. Whatever the reasons for the ultimate establishment of the north as the prime direction on world maps, it is quite clear that, as subsequent chapters will show, there are no compelling grounds for choosing one direction over another.
Perhaps the most complex problem of all that confronts the mapmaker is one of projection. For modern cartographers, ‘projection’ refers to a two-dimensional drawing on a plane surface of a three-dimensional object, namely the globe, using a system of mathematical principles. It was only consciously formulated as a method in the second century AD by the Greek geographer Ptolemy, who employed a grid of geometrical lines of latitude and longitude (called a graticule) to project the earth onto a flat surface. Prior to this, maps like the Babylonian example provided no apparent projection (or scale) to structure their representation of the world (though of course they still projected a geometrical image of the world based on their cultural assumptions about its shape and size). Over the centuries, circles, squares, rectangles, ovals, hearts, even trapezoids and a variety of other shapes have been used to project the globe onto a plane, each one based on a particular set of cultural beliefs. Some of these assumed a spherical earth, some of them did not: on the Babylonian world map the world is represented as a flat disc, with its inhabited dimensions encircled by sea, beyond which are its literally shapeless edges. Early Chinese maps also appear to accept the belief in a flat earth, although as we shall see this is partly based on their own particular fascination with the square as a defining cosmological principle. By at least the fourth century BC the Greeks had shown that the earth was a sphere, and produced a series of circular maps projected onto a plane surface.
All these projections struggled with an enduring geographical and mathematical conundrum: how is the whole earth reduced to a single flat image? Once the earth’s sphericity was scientifically proved, the problem was compounded: how was it possible to project the sphere accurately onto a plane surface?23 The answer, as the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss conclusively proved in his work on projections in the 1820s, was that it was not possible. Gauss showed that a curved sphere and a plane were not isometric: in other words, the terrestrial globe could never be mapped onto the plane
surface of a map using a fixed scale without some form of distortion of shape or angularity; we shall see some of the many distortions which have been adopted in the course of this book.24 Despite Gauss’s insight, the search for ‘better’, more accurate, projections only intensified (even Gauss went on to offer his own method of projection). Even today, the problem remains hidden though in plain view, invariably acknowledged on world maps and atlases, but buried in the technical detail of their construction.
One of the many paradoxes of maps is that, although mapmakers have been creating them for thousands of years, our study and understanding of them is still in its relative infancy. It was only in the nineteenth century in Europe that the academic discipline of geography came into existence, coinciding with the professionalization of the mapmaker, who was redesignated with the more scientific title of ‘cartographer’. As a result, geography has only recently begun a systematic attempt to understand the history of maps and their role in different societies. In 1935 Leo Bagrow (1881–1957), a Russian naval officer trained in archaeology, founded Imago Mundi, the first journal dedicated to the study of the history of cartography, followed in 1944 by the completion of his Die Geschichte der Kartographie (History of Cartography), the first comprehensive study of its subject.25 Since then, only a handful of popular books on the subject have been published by experts in the field, and the multi-volume History of Cartography edited by Harley and Woodward (who have both tragically died since the project’s inception) will not be brought up to the present for years to come. Cartography remains a subject in need of a discipline, its study generally undertaken by scholars trained (like myself) in a variety of other fields, its future even more uncertain than the maps it seeks to interpret.
• • •
This book tells a story which shows that, despite the strenuous efforts of generations of cartographers, the ultimate claims of scientific cartography have never been realized. The first great national survey of a nation based on Enlightenment principles of science, the Carte de Cassini, discussed in Chapter 9, was never really finished, and its global equivalent, the International Map of the World, conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, and whose story is told in the Conclusion, was abandoned towards the end of the twentieth. Geography’s erratic development as an academic and professional discipline over the last two centuries has meant that it has been relatively slow to question its intellectual assumptions. In recent years, geographers have developed serious reservations about their involvement in the political partition of the earth. Belief in the objectivity of maps has found itself subject to profound revision, and it is now recognized that they are intimately connected to prevailing systems of power and authority. Their creation is not an objective science but a realist endeavour, and aspires to a particular way of depicting reality. Realism is a stylistic representation of the world, just like naturalism, classicism or romanticism, and it is no coincidence that the claims for cartography’s objectivity reached their height at the same moment as the ascendancy of the realist novel in Europe in the nineteenth century. Instead of arguing that mapmaking follows an inexorable progress towards scientific accuracy and objectivity, this book will argue that it is a ‘cartography without progress’, which provides different cultures with particular visions of the world at specific points in time.26
The book takes twelve world maps from cultures and moments in world history, and examines the creative processes though which they tried to resolve the problems faced by their makers, from perception and abstraction to scale, perspective, orientation and projection. The problems are constant, but the responses are specific to the mapmaker’s particular culture, and we discover that what drove them was as much personal, emotional, religious, political and financial as geographical, technical and mathematical. Each map either shaped people’s attitudes to the worlds in which they lived, or crystallized a particular world view at specific moments in global history – often both. These twelve maps were created at particularly crucial moments, when their makers took bold decisions about how and what to represent. In the process they created new visions of the world that aimed not only to explain to their audiences that this was what the world looked like, but to convince them of why it existed, and to show them their own place within it. Each map also encapsulates a particular idea or issue that both motivated its creation and captured its contemporaries’ understanding of the world, from science, politics, religion and empire to nationalism, trade and globalization. But maps are not always shaped exclusively by ideology, conscious or unconscious. Inchoate emotional forces have also played their part in making them. The examples here range from the pursuit of intellectual exchange in an Islamic map from the twelfth century, to global conceptions of toleration and equality in Arno Peters’s controversial world map published in 1973.
Although this book makes no claim to provide anything approaching a comprehensive story of the history of cartography, it does offer several challenges to prevailing assumptions about the subject. The first is that, however we interpret the history of maps, it is not an exclusively Western activity. Current research is revealing just how far pre-modern, non-Western cultures are part of the story, from the Babylonian world map to Indian, Chinese and Muslim contributions. Secondly, there is also no hidden agenda of evolution or progress in the historical mapping of the world. The maps examined are the creation of cultures which perceive physical, terrestrial space in different ways, and these perceptions inform the maps they make. This leads to the third argument, that each map is as comprehensible and as logical to their users as the other, be it the medieval Hereford mappamundi or Google’s geospatial applications. The story told here is therefore a discontinuous one, marked by breaks and sudden shifts, rather than the relentless accumulation of increasingly accurate geographical data.
The map, whatever its medium or its message, is always a creative interpretation of the space it claims to represent. The critical ‘deconstruction’ of maps as objective representations of reality by writers like Korzybski, Bateson and others has left them looking like malevolent tools of ideology, weaving a conspiratorial web of deceit and dissimulation wherever they are to be found. Instead, the maps in this book are interpreted more as a series of ingenious arguments, creative propositions, highly selective guides to the worlds they have created. Maps allow us to dream and fantasize about places we shall never see, either in this world or in other, as yet unknown worlds. Perhaps the best metaphorical description of maps was graffitied in 45-centimetre letters on a wall next to the railway line approaching Paddington Station in London: ‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere.’ A metaphor, like a map, involves carrying something across from one place to another. Maps are always images of elsewhere, imaginatively transporting their viewers to faraway, unknown places, recreating distance in the palm of your hand. Consulting a world map ensures that faraway is always close at hand.
‘How valuable a good map is,’ wrote the seventeenth-century painter Samuel van Hoogstraten in a similar vein, ‘wherein one views the world as from another world.’27 Oscar Wilde developed Hoogstraten’s transcendental sentiment when he famously remarked that a ‘map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail.’28 Maps always make choices about what they include and what they omit, but it is at the moment such decisions are made that Wilde dreams of the possibility of creating a different world – or even new worlds beyond our knowledge (which is one of the reasons that science fiction writers have been drawn irresistibly to maps). As Ortelius admitted, every map shows one thing, but therefore not another, and represents the world in one way, and as a consequence not in another.29 Such decisions might often be political, but they are always creative. The ability expressed by all the mapmakers in this book to rise above the earth and look down on it from a divine perspective repr
esents an idealistic leap of imaginative faith in humanity, but so powerful is this vision that various political ideologies have sought to appropriate it for their own ends.
This legacy brings the discussion right up to the present day, and the ongoing controversy surrounding the increasing domination of digital online mapping applications, exemplified by the subject of my final chapter, Google Earth. After nearly two millennia of being made on stone, animal skins and paper, maps are now changing in ways unknown since the invention of print in the fifteenth century and are facing imminent obsolescence as the world and its maps become digitized and virtual. Perhaps these new applications will create an unprecedented democratization of maps, allowing greatly increased public access, even giving people the ability to build their own maps. But it seems more likely that the corporate interests of multinational companies will bring a new world of online maps in which access is prescribed by financial imperatives, subject to political censorship and indifferent to personal privacy. One of the arguments of this book is that anyone who wants to understand the consequences of online mapping and why the virtual, online map of the world looks like it does today needs a longer perspective, one that reaches back as far as the first Greek attempts to map the known world and beyond.
The world is always changing, and so are maps. But this book is not about maps that have changed the world. From the Greeks to Google Earth, it is not in the nature of maps meaningfully to change anything. Instead, maps offer arguments and propositions; they define, recreate, shape and mediate. Invariably, they also fail to reach their objectives. Many of the maps chosen were heavily criticized at the moment of their completion, or were quickly superseded. Others were neglected at the time, or subsequently dismissed as outdated or ‘inaccurate’, falling into obscurity. But they all bear witness that one way of trying to understand the histories of our world is by exploring how the spaces within it are mapped. Space has a history, and I hope this book goes a little way towards telling that history through maps.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 3
