History of Cartography

Leo Bagrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351515580
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills
• Index: History

This illustrated work is intended to acquaint readers with the early maps produced in both Europe and the rest of the world, and to tell us something of their development, their makers and printers, their varieties and characteristics. The authors' chief concern is with the appearance of maps: they exclude any examination of their content, or of scientific methods of mapmaking. This book ends in the second half of the eighteenth century, when craftsmanship was superseded by specialized science and the machine. As a history of the evolution of the early map, it is a stunning work of art and science.

This expanded second edition of Bagrow and Skelton's History of Cartography marks the reappearance of this seminal work after a hiatus of nearly a half century. As a reprint project undertaken many years after the book last appeared, finding suitable materials to work from proved to be no easy task. Because of the wealth of monochrome and color plates, the book could only be properly reproduced using the original materials. Ultimately the authors were able to obtain materials from the original printer Scotchprints or contact films made directly from original plates, thus allowing the work to preserve the beauty and clarity of the illustrations.

Old maps, collated with other materials, help us to elucidate the course of human history. It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that maps were gradually stripped of their artistic decoration and transformed into plain, specialist sources of information based upon measurement. Maps are objects of historical, artistic, and cultural significance, and thus collecting them seems to need no justification, simply enjoyment.

1
Maps of primitive peoples

Study of the development of an embryo enables the biologist to outline the principal stages in the evolution of a species from immemorial times to its present form. If, in tracing the earliest phases of a particular human activity, we lack the necessary evidence in the form either of tangible relics or of written or oral traditions, we can turn to the corresponding field in the culture of primitive peoples of the present day, still untouched by white civilisation. The same procedure may be applied in studying the early development of geographical maps.

Early maps have been known to us for a much shorter time than many other products of civilisation. The earliest world map surviving from the ancient world — a Babylonian map of the 6th or 5th century B. C. — is of approximately the same date as the first known references to maps of Greek origin; and for several centuries after this there are no maps, but only literary allusions and fragments of plans. To trace the beginnings of cartography and its subsequent development we must therefore look at the primitive tribes of to-day, whose cartographic art has stopped at a certain point in its development. Here we may find evidence suggesting by analogy that the historical peoples who preceded the present Mediterranean races passed through the same stages of evolution.

A man living close to nature relies more on his senses than a city-dweller. His perceptions are not dulled, since his way of life demands a close observation of everything round about him; he feels the pull of instinct more strongly and has a keener sense of place and direction. When finding his bearings he sometimes shows an astonishing ability to pick out features resembling those of a landscape familiar to him, and a sixth sense often shows him the right way. This sense may be inborn, but it can also be acquired and cultivated. Rudyard Kipling, in his novel Kim, describes with insight how a little Indian boy is taught to be always observant and to memorise his surroundings in detail, and how this prepared him for a career as a native pundit, sent by the English to explore and map regions where Europeans could not go. These demands are completely answered by the instinct of a man close to the soil.

Another prerequisite for map-making — an aptitude for drawing — is not present in all races, and where such a gift exists it does not necessarily include the ability to draw maps. It has been observed that, in general, races given to stylisation of animal or human figures and to ornamentation of their utensils draw either no maps or very bad ones. Talent for drawing, though not dependent on a certain stage of development or degree of intelligence, can be gauged by the way in which objects are represented. A primitive savage’s drawing is often like a child’s; the object engaging his attention is placed in the foreground, large and unconnected to other objects around it. Neither child nor savage immediately observes perspective. There is no uniform method of representing objects; some are in plan, some in elevation.

A particular stimulus to map-making is provided by man’s mobility and knowledge of his environment. The farther from his home a primitive man travels, the greater his capacity for making a geographical map ; unable to use the experience and information of others, he can only portray what he himself has seen. (Yet there have been native maps used for instructional purposes: for example, the Marshall Islanders had a special type of map which was used solely for teaching.) The tendency of many primitive peoples to nomadism advances their development in the art of cartography. Indian tribes in the Missouri region used to follow herds of buffalo 1000 miles or more from their villages, and South Sea Islanders made equally long voyages from island to island. As a rule, however, the maps of primitive peoples are restricted to very small areas, perhaps not exceeding 100 square miles. Above all, their maps are concrete, corresponding to reality as seen by them at the given time. They know nothing of abstract maps, conventional generalisation, or data of a general kind. They cannot comprehend a large area solely by applying general considerations; they cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds. They have no world maps, for their own locality dominates their thought. A primitive man who knows the way from point A to point B, and perhaps also the side-track from B to C, cannot conceive of a direct route from A to C. He carries no plan of a whole country in his head, but merely a multitude of local details.

If we compare these facts, gleaned from the life of primitive peoples of our own age, with our very imperfect information about mapping in the ancient world, we are led to the conclusion that the maps of early historical races were developed from those of their primitive forebears. It is therefore helpful to examine some types of map found amongst primitive peoples.

The variety of such map-forms is governed by the medium in which they are prepared. The commonest and simplest materials used are stone and wood; bone and leather are rarer. Pictures in stone may be carved, chiselled or drawn. Rock paintings or petroglyphs occur all over the world and, significantly, are most numerous at points of social or economic importance, such as tribal gathering-places, the best hunting-grounds, and dangerous crossings. They have been found in Venezuela and in Africa, in Holstein and France, on the shores of Lake Ladoga, on the Yenisei in Siberia and in the Caucasus. Many rock paintings contain, besides animal and human figures, enigmatic patterns which some experts have tried to interpret as topographical representations of particular localities, that is, as clumsy attempts at map-drawing, but no such drawing have yet been identified beyond doubt with any given locality. Nor has it been proved that two prehistoric bone tablets found in the Schafthausen caves, and covered with a network of lines, are really maps. Their discoverer, Fr. Rödinger, maintained that the lines represented the principal roads of the region where they were found, and comparison with the modern map does reveal a certain similarity; other scholars however, following Rudolf Virchow, have doubted the cartographic character of the tablets. Maps drawn on bark, chiefly birch-bark, are particularly common in Siberia and among the North American Indians. They are easily carried, and this factor contributed to their wide distribution ; Indians of north-west America used to take whole rolls of such maps with them during their wanderings. It has been observed that these Indians have a distinct talent for mapping; though unable to read, they have correctly named the major rivers, lakes and mountains of their country on European maps. Maps drawn on birch-bark or deerskin were collected amongst the Indian tribes of North America, and whole repositories of cartography created, as a Jesuit missionary, J. F. Lafiteau, reported in 1724.

While many savage peoples have shown some skill in drawing maps on a plane surface, the Eskimos are perhaps alone in attempting the delineation of relief features. Captain F. W. Beechey found evidence of this in 1826 among the western Eskimos of Bering Strait. He describes how in Kotzebue Sound they made on sand a relief model of the littoral: “The coastline was first marked out with a stick, and the distances regulated by the days’ journeys. The hills and ranges of mountains were next shown by elevations of sand or stone, and the islands represented by heaps of stones, their proportions being duly attended to .. . When the mountains and islands were erected, the villages and fishing stations were marked by a number of sticks placed upright.. . In time, we had a complete topographical plan of the coast from Point Darby to Cape Krusenstern’. A later anthropologist noted that the Eskimos of Cumberland Sound, off Davis Strait, had recourse to hachure to indicate an elevated shore on a map which they drew on paper. But wood was, and is, the most distinctive medium used by the Greenland Eskimos in mapmaking (Pl. II). Blocks are carved in relief to represent the rugged coastline of Greenland with its fjords, islands, nunataks and glaciers, the shapes of the various islands being linked together with rods. In order to reduce the size of the blocks, the outline of the coast is carried up one side and down the other.

The ancient culture of Mexico, inherited by the Aztecs from their Maya and Toltec predecessors, was highly developed by the time the Spaniards arrived there. Maps were drawn with facility and such accuracy that they could be used with confidence by travellers. In 1520 Hernån Cortes, reporting on an interview with Montezuma to the Emperor Charles V, described how he asked Montezuma about harbours for ships along the coast and the king sent him “a chart of the whole coast, painted on cloth”. These maps were drawn or painted on material woven from agave fibre; some are on fig-bark paper, and a few on prepared skins. Later, in 1526, the envoys of Tabasco and Xicalango drew for Cortes “a figure of the whole land, whereby I calculated that I could very well go over the great part of it”; in fact it extended almost to Panama, and guided him on his difficult journey into Honduras. Almost all such maps perished in the systematic destruction of native documents by the Spanish churchmen. Only two relics of pre-Conquest cartography have been preserved, with a few native maps from the period that followed; and on these our judgment of early Mexican cartography is based. While the post-Conquest maps show some European influence, they retain traditional symbols for communicating topographical and historical information, which is curiously blended. Thus the maps in the so-called Codex Tepetlaoztoc, although drawn on European paper, use a vocabulary of form exactly like that of the ancient Mexican drawings (Pl. III). Many cadastral plans are preserved, covering quite a wide area, and, in these, different colours were used to distinguish state lands and land belonging to the upper and lower classes of the population. Several town-plans of the early Spanish period are preserved; Alonso de Santa Cruz probably based his plan of Mexico City (1567) on older material, and the surroundings of the city in his plan seem to be copied from a much reduced map of the whole country of Mexico.

Thus we have maps drawn by primitive artists on birch-bark, blocks of wood, skins, and, after the advent of Europeans, on paper too.

The charts of the Marshall Islanders, in the Pacific Ocean, are without parallel in the whole development of cartography (Pl. IV). These charts are constructed from lengths of palm-fibre, tied together by threads of coconut fibre so that they point in various directions. Shells, representing islands, are attached at the intersections. Use of the charts depends on knowledge of ocean swell in the immediate vicinity of the Marshall Islands. The threads represent the prevailing wave-crests and the directions they take as they approach islands and meet other similar wave-crests formed by the ebb and flow of breakers. It is these wave-patterns, rather than the currents, that play the most important role in navigation among the islands and channels. Other fibres indicate the distance at which particular islands come into sight. The islanders distinguish three groups of these maps, according to their nature and purpose: mattang maps (as PL IV), giving only an abstract picture of wave-movements, and thus in effect instructional maps, which cannot be used for a particular navigation; rabbang, maps of the whole island-group (i. e. of the two chains of islands, Rattak and Ralik), or general maps; and finally the third group, meddo, maps of the various parts of the archipelago. To use these maps, the islanders spread them on the decks of their boats and kept constant the angle formed by the deck and the direction of the prevailing wave-crests, which can be seen for up to 15 miles. The method of making these maps was a closelyguarded secret, revealed only to certain rulers and handed down from father to son. A squadron of 15 or more canoes would sail in company under the leadership of a pilot skilled in the use of charts. Unfortunately, as the islanders came to know European maps, they gradually stopped making their own and forgot how to use them.

2
Cartography in the ancient world

Babylonia

If even primitive races are capable of making geographical maps, we may be sure that mapmaking was practised by those peoples of antiquity who possessed a high degree of civilisation and their own literature, and who were no strangers to the mathematical and astronomical sciences and to technology. In these ancient and highly organised empires, maps served specific purposes and were thus functional or thematic in character: military maps, cadastral plans for land-registration, route-maps for merchants, and so on. Only a few isolated examples however have come to light.

Despite the richness of civilisation in ancient Babylonia and the recovery of whole archives and libraries, a mere handful of Babylonian maps have so far been found. They are impressed on small clay tablets like those generally used by the Babylonians for cuneiform inscription of documents — a medium which must have limited the cartographer’s scope. One, dating from about 500 B. C , is a diagrammatic representation of the universe, with Babylon at the centre (Pl. VI)¹ . Its maker seems to have had no detailed knowledge of distant lands, and it presents merely a general scheme of the universe in the form of a disc floating on the sea, similar to the Eskimo conception of the world as a disc-shaped island. The whole kingdom of Babylon is schematically portrayed; the Euphrates flows down from the Armenian mountains, called by the ancients Urartu, to the centre of the city of Babylon, where it enters the Persian Gulf. Another, and much older, geographical relic dates from the Agade period (c. 3800 B.C.) ; it was found near the town of Harran, not far from Nuzi (Pl. V). This clearly shows the northern part of Mesopotamia, with the Euphrates and its tributary the Wadi-Harran, the Zagros Mountains in the east, and the Lebanon or Anti-Lebanon in the west. The mountain ridges are clearly marked, as is the river that crosses the country; circles stand for cities. These two maps, however, hardly provide sufficient evidence on the state of cartography in ancient Babylon; and all the other surviving materials are plans of towns or properties, the earliest of which dates from about 2000 B.C. To Babylon nevertheless is due the sexagesimal system, which has dominated mathematical cartography to the present day.

Egypt

Egypt, which exercised so strong an influence on the ancient civilisations of southeast Europe and the Near East, has left us no more numerous cartographic documents than her neighbour Babylon. Geographical knowledge was highly developed in early Egypt. The Pharaohs organised military campaigns, trade missions, and even purely geographical expeditions to explore various countries. One of the earliest of such journeys known to us was undertaken in the years 1493–92 B. C. by sea to the land of Punt (probably Somaliland). This is described in an inscription in the temple of Derel-Bahri; the ship used for this journey is delineated, but there is no map. Herodotus tells of another voyage, under the Pharaoh Necho (c. 596–94 B. C.) on which the Egyptians sailed down the Red Sea, round Africa, and back to Alexandria by way of the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar). Many other pieces of geographical information are to be found in inscriptions on temple walls and in papyri, but without maps; unless we count the portrayals of the Fields of the Dead often found on sarcophagi (Pl. VII)² . Only later, when Egypt was hellenised, do we find the first approach to theoretical problems connected with map-making, and we can assume that maps were then in fact produced under the influence of Greek geographical thought. For want of maps, we must read with scepticism both Herodotus’ statement that, during the Egyptian campaign in Scythia under the Pharaoh Sesostris (c. 1400 B. G) , all the conquered lands were mapped, and the reference by Apollonius Rhodius, in his Argonautica (IV, 272), to maps made in connection with this campaign, showing the roads, boundaries, and coasts.

There can be no doubt that the ancient Egyptians had cadastral drawings. Indeed, land-surveying must have been highly developed, since the frequent Nile valley floods often washed away field boundary-stones, and the boundaries had to be measured anew. Although the Egyptians are credited with the invention of geometry, no geographical maps have survived, but only plans of buildings, palaces and temples. In this class may be included a remarkable schematic map of the Nubian goldmines, drawn on a papyrus roll now in Turin, c. 1300 B. C ; this is really a plan, showing the gold-bearing basin to the east of Coptos, in red, and the principal road with the temple of Ammon and a few houses.

Greece

In early Greece too, it seems that only small areas could be portrayed. Even if an attempt was made to map a large region, the result was merely schematic, lacking geographical detail. We have only to read the ironic comments of Herodotus and Aristotle on the maps of Greek geographers to be convinced that maps, as we understand them, simply did not exist in their day. Strabo held geography to be a science derived from philosophy and developed by the philosophers. Not until the time of Ptolemy was geography to be defined as a graphic representation of the known world, in other words, as what we now call cartography.

All this shows that in the classical world it was not geometers (land-measurers) but philosophers who engaged in cartographic practice. They were interested in the nature of the earth, which they visualised variously as a disc floating on the sea, or a segment of a cylinder, or a globe. Their explanations were accompanied by drawings that aroused disputes on matters of principle, such as the number of gulfs or seas in the world and the extent of the continents. It is no wonder that such academic activities aroused ridicule in sailors and travelled scholars like Herodotus. While Ionian scholars were basing their schematic drawings on the assumption that the ocean encircling the earth formed four gulfs (the Caspian Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean with its branches), Herodotus knew the Caspian to be land-locked. Anaximander of Miletus (610–546 B. C.) is accounted the first Ionian to have drawn a world map, although neither Herodotus nor Aristotle saw it. Hecataeus (c. 550—480 B. C) , also from Miletus, and a forerunner of Herodotus in many travels, might have drawn a map to accompany his account of them, but it is not known if in fact he did so. A manuscript by a Milesian scholar (6th century B. C) , recently discovered, describes the supposed composition of the earth, which is said to have seven parts: head and face in the Peloponnesus, backbone in the Isthmus, diaphragm in Ionia, legs in the Hellespont, feet in the Thracian and Cimmerian Bosphorus, epigastrium in the Egyptian Sea, hypogastrium and rectum in the Caspian.³ If this anonymous natural philosopher, not content with theory, actually sketched out his map, we can draw instructive conc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Preface
• List of illustrations
• Foreword The early map
• 1 Maps of primitive peoples
• 2 Cartography in the ancient world
• 3 The Christian Middle Ages
• 4 Islamic cartography
• 5 Mediaeval sea-charts
• 6 World maps of the later Middle Ages
• 7 Ptolemy and the Renaissance
• 8 The first printed maps
• 9 The end of the Middle Ages
• 10 The cartography of the Great Discoveries
• 11 Nautical cartography in the 16th century
• 12 Map workshops and the world map of the 16 th century
• 13 The mapping of European countries
• 14 The century of atlases
• 15 The mapping of America
• 16 The cartography of Asian peoples
• Postscript Craftsmanship and design in early cartography
• Notes
• Plates
• List of Cartographers (to 1750)
• Bibliograpliy
• Index