Early maps...a few fact & fragments

Last week we had stone/clay maps.

Today we have the earliest known maps NOT carved in stone….so these maps (the originals) no longer exist.

Around 600 BCE, Anaximander (the Greek father of geography) said that the earth is a sphere, and mapped the area he knew (Above). But his work is long gone, so, basically, all we have are rumors of his work. Ancient texts were copied, recopied & summarized…. much like what I’m doing with online information (if Wikipedia were to close shop, people in the future could see remnants of it on my blog). The original authors might be greatly vexed to see what remains of their life’s work……

more info here: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/anaximander/

(Above) https://www.oldest.org/geography/maps/ The World according to Eratosthenes Eratosthenes (another one known as the father of geography)

* is credited with inventing geography and coining the terminology still used today.

* was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria,

* wrote a three-volume work, “Geography “. In the book, he described & mapped the entire known world & divided the Earth into 5 climate zones.

* was the first to place grids over his map and used parallels and meridians to link together every place in the world. His map also featured over 400 cities and their accurate locations, which had never been done before.

This website https://phillipkay.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/second-best-at-everything/ has a great article about Eratosthenes and how he worked.

(Above) Next was Strabo (64BCE -24 CE). Best as I can figure, he is well known because HIS copies, summaries, etc, of Eratosthenes’s work survived longer than others. Here’s an image of Strabo and his map, which looks very much like Eratosthenes’s map.

While we know these maps from their copies, there was no original image of Strabo (or Anaximander or any of them) to copy from. All of these portraits (Below) are supposed to be Strabo:

Then we have Ptolemy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cartography

Ptolemy (90 - 169CE) revolutionized the depiction of the spherical earth on a map by using perspective projection, with fixed positions of geographic features.

Ptolemy's eight-volume atlas Geographia is a prototype of modern mapping and GIS (Geographic Information System https://www.esri.com/en-us/what-is-gis/overview )  It included an index of place-names, with the latitude and longitude of each place to guide the search, scale, conventional signs with legends, and the practice of orienting maps so that north is at the top and east to the right of the map—an almost universal custom today.

Ptolemy made one very influential mistake: his under-estimation of the distance from Europe to Asia, going west, convinced Columbus that he could go that way.

The dates are interesting. Ptolemy (90 - 169CE) lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt under the rule of the Roman Empire. However, the Library of Alexandria’s gradual decline started with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon.

So by the time Ptolemy was working, Alexandria was well past it’s prime.

I’ve been reading books on cartography and it really helps to read several different versions of the same story. Information that didn’t make sense on the first three readings starts to make sense after four or five versions. Then the test of my understanding comes when I try to write an explanation here on my blog. Here’s some of the books I found interesting:

Great Maps (Smithsonian) has wonderful detail photos of the maps, with good explanations.

Mapping the World has good photos, not great info…

The Ghost Map is the great story of how John Snow and Henry Whitehead helped to conquer cholera by mapping out the spread in a section of London. A really good read.

The Phantom Atlas tells all the stories of cartographic mistakes. Some interesting tales, but they all start to blur together about halfway through.

A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton has the fullest background information. I’m truly enjoying it, although that may be due to having read so much other information first. From his book: “Sitting in the ruins of the once great library, Ptolemy compiled a text to describe the known world and which would come to define mapmaking for the next 2 millennia….’Geography’ summarized a 1000 yrs of Greek thinking on the size, shape and scope of the inhabited world…….”

More next week. Contact me at dianesavona@aol.com