Mappings

Denis Cosgrove

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781861898364
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Mappings explores what mapping has meant in the past and how its meanings have altered. How have maps and mapping served to order and represent physical, social and imaginative worlds? How has the practice of mapping shaped modern seeing and knowing? In what ways do contemporary changes in our experience of the world alter the meanings and practice of mapping, and vice versa?In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. The map's spatial fixity, its capacity to frame, control and communicate knowledge through combining image and text, and cartography's increasing claims to scientific authority, make mapping at once an instrument and a metaphor for rational understanding of the world.Among the topics the authors investigate are projective and imaginative mappings; mappings of terraqueous spaces; mapping and localism at the 'chorographic' scale; and mapping as personal exploration.With essays by Jerry Brotton, Paul Carter, Michael Charlesworth, James Corner, Wystan Curnow, Christian Jacob, Luciana de Lima Martins, David Matless, Armand Mattelart, Lucia Nuti and Alessandro Scafi

1
Mapping in the Mind: The Earth from Ancient Alexandria

CHRISTIAN JACOB

-Ce n’est pas le géographe qui va faire le compte des villes, des fleuves, des montagnes, des mers, des océans et des déserts. Le géographe est trop important pour flâner. Il ne quitte pas son bureau. Mais il y reçoit les explorateurs. Il les interroge, et il prend en note leurs souvenirs. Et si les souvenirs de l’un d’entre eux lui paraissent intéressants, le géographe fait faire une enquête sur la moralité de l’explorateur.

– Pourquoi ça?

– Parce qu’un explorateur qui mentirait entraînerait des catastrophes dans les livres de géographie. Et aussi un explorateur qui boirait trop.

– Pourquoi ça? fit le petit prince.

– Parce que les ivrognes voient double. Alors le géographe noterait deux montagnes là où il n’y en a qu’une seule.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince, ch. 15

How is it possible, and, indeed, why is it necessary, to depict and to make visible something invisible, something that does not exist as such in front of the human eyes until an analogical rendering has been achieved?¹

Here, I focus on the small-scale mapping project of large areas, indeed the whole world, and investigate some of its technical, logistic and scientific components as well as some of its intellectual and social dimensions. I am concerned with the intellectual process that leads from gathering partial and empirical field data to assembling these within a single general frame and thus producing a new object, the map of the ‘inhabited world’. Such questioning is probably the best way to understand what a map is, to interrogate its power and its social function. One could also interrogate the map’s claim to represent the world in a way that challenges the concept of mimesis itself. Beyond its technical aspects and its cultural contexts, the history of small-scale cartography deals with this challenge: giving a material reality to something that human senses cannot grasp and providing this graphical device with a symbolic power, a social (and political) authority and an intellectual (or spiritual) efficiency. Any map is an interface – pragmatic, cognitive, metaphysical – between its users and the world that surrounds them. Those who look at it and who share the scientific, semiological keys to its understanding are assumed to concur that they look at something beyond the drawing itself. As an optical as well as an intellectual prosthesis, maps allow human senses and the human mind to achieve a new level of reality. Maps are impossible without such a shared belief about the materiality and the reality of the world they display, about the claim of the drawing to stand as a substitute for this world, more accessible to study than the reality itself. Even if such a map is criticized, corrected and completed, its power as a representation is never denied.

Cartographic history should not be confined within the frame of the history of sciences and of geographical knowledge stricto sensu. It encompasses many other components of a culture: its conception of the world, physical and metaphysical, its cognitive categories that bring knowledge and truth within reach of the human mind, the social construction and sharing of such knowledge about the world. Cultural context is a key to variation in the history of cartography Chinese, Indian, Native American, Islamic and early European cartographies, beyond the apparent similarities of their maps as graphic artifacts, reflect deeply different intellectual and visual universes.

A precise and culturally specific investigation is perhaps the best way to contribute to a general understanding of the many implications and indeed the peculiarity of the mapping project itself.² My topic is a particular step in the development of ancient Greek cartography I underline both its cultural specificity and its contribution to a broader reflection on the nature and the power of maps in general.

INVISIBLE MPS, CARTOGRAPHIC DISCOURSES

In fact, we have lost most of the ancient small-scale maps.³ I do not include Byzantine and early Renaissance Ptolemaic plates as specimens of ancient Greek cartography stricto sensu.⁴ The Tabula Peutingeriana is an obvious exception, but it belongs to the class of Roman itinerary maps, and is a thirteenth-or fourteenth-century reproduction of a late Imperial Roman original. What we do possess, however, is a corpus of ancient texts and a set of statements about small-scale maps. Such sources provide the historian with indirect, diversely focused traces of the use and the impact of maps in the ancient world. They allow us to draw precise limits around the visual, intellectual and pragmatic area occupied by maps in this society.⁵ Any mapping culture should itself be mapped, as a topography of interacting and sometimes overlapping intellectual zones, and the result of such a research, in ancient Greece, clearly suggests the very limited functions and diffusion of maps in this society.

Travelling, exploring, seafaring, war-making, ruling and founding remote colonies did not necessarily imply the use of maps. There is not a single ancient Greek source that depicts someone using maps in a practical situation.⁶ Such a fact has two implications. First, ‘geographical knowledge’⁷ did not depend on maps, but on other media, such as travel reports, sea journeys and periegeses, descriptions of a particular country. Geography relied on words and discourses, on human memory. Second, maps had other functions: the way they were drawn, the information they encompassed, the way they were diffused, simply did not allow practical and field uses.

Literary testimonies about map-making may be read spatially, in concentric circles. Closest to the map itself are texts by cartographers or by geographers who had a technical interest in cartography. The second circle includes authors who occasionally depicted someone using a map. In the third circle are writers using maps to generate and organize a geographical description. Such texts stand in place of the map and had a far greater efficacy in shaping the mental horizon of their listeners or their readers. The information produced by maps was diffused through verbal descriptions, not through maps themselves. Consequently, one should be aware that categories such as vision, audition, memory and imagination do not escape the variations of culture and of history, and that in a precise cultural surrounding, listening to a geographical description could create for the listener mental forms as vivid and efficient as a world map.⁸

I shall focus on the first circle, where Greek cartographers and geographers wrote about maps and map-making. Strabo (b. c. 63 BC; d.AD 21–5), as a witness and a compilator of the Hellenistic cartographic tradition, is a major source for the historian of Greek science. The seventeen books of his Geography provide us with an ambiguous picture.⁹ On the one hand, Strabo was familiar with maps, at least with a certain kind of small-scale map, and he discussed them at length, even reproducing some instructions about how to draw them. He also titled his work ‘Geography’ and as such followed the example of the cartographer Eratosthenes. On the other hand, most of this Geography is a literary description of the world, not a map, and this description relies on traditional patterns: catalogues of place names, terrestrial or maritime itineraries. Strabo’s text thus belongs the third circle, even beyond – a literary geography that did not rely at all on map-making but on the compilation of a library.

When Strabo comments on map-making, he wants us to believe that he is familiar with the construction of maps, and he involves himself in polemical debates with the predecessors whose treatises and maps he read and used. Such a paradoxical situation – no maps in his Geography, but a technical discussion about maps in the first two books of the treatise – should be considered as a relevant sign. In the ancient Greek world, map-making could have implied a different balance between writing and drawing. It was perhaps a process in which debating, commenting, criticizing and correcting previous maps, translating into arguments and descriptions what could be fixed on the diagram, were equally aspects of map-making. We have to investigate the complex meaning of the Greek verb graphein – drawing, writing, depicting – a polysemy inherent in the term ‘geo-graphy’.

GREEK MAPPING CULTURE: AN HISTORICAL OUTLINE

A preliminary question suggests itself: is it possible to write the history of an object such as the map? Are we certain that the presence of maps at successive periods warrants the intellectual cohesiveness of their history, even within the framework of the same culture? Maps were drawn and used in various intellectual contexts, and such variants determine the true meaning of these drawings. Herein lies the positive counterpart of the loss of actual Greek maps: we rediscover them through discourses, through the concepts and words of the Greeks themselves.

In the second half of the third century BC, when Eratosthenes, head librarian in the Ptolemies’ palace in Alexandria, committed himself to rectifying the small-scale maps he probably found in the collection, Greek cartography had existed for more than three centuries.¹⁰ Extant testimonies, although rare and elliptical, give us a clear enough picture of the early development of ancient Greek maps. Map-making did not start from practical needs, from empirical surveys or from a technical and professional tradition among Ionian tradesmen and sailors. The first Greek map was a part of a broader intellectual project: description of the cosmos or, more precisely, accounting for its genesis, from the ‘boundless’ element of its origin to the appearance of humankind on earth. Anaximander of Miletus, pupil of Thales, was one of those sixth-century learned and wise men, private persons and citizens in their small autonomous political communities, who decided to write their own views about the ‘nature’ of the world, as an alternative to the mythico-poetical tales of Homer and Hesiod.¹¹ Anaximander used technical metaphors, geometrical shapes, astronomical observations and calculations in order to understand and to render comprehensible for his listeners the natural phenomena and the order of the world. The map was a by-product of Anaximander’s treatise On Nature. It probably looked like a geometrical drawing of a flat disk surface of the inhabited earth (the oecumene), displaying the rough shapes of the Mediterranean Sea while the outer limit was perfectly circular, surrounded by the river Okeanos. Such a drawing was abstract and indeed unsuited to practical use. It could have encompassed, in a very stylized way, some information about the areas explored by Greek colonization since the eighth-century BC – the Black Sea area, Italy and Sicily, the eastern Mediterranean shore.¹² But it is striking to note that the map did not create geographical knowledge from the ground. Anaximander drew his map at a stage when Homer’s Odyssey and the various accounts of the Argonauts’ saga, poetry, oral and possibly (but not attested) written nautical directions, had already conveyed a geographical knowledge, in lists of place-and tribe-names, orientations and itineraries.

Greek geography thus leads from a shared knowledge about more or less mythical places and tribes, from a general cosmological frame (structured by the sun’s progression in the sky, and its variation, in summer and in winter) to this first visual model, elaborated by a thinker in search of the hidden rules, order and components of the natural world, beyond the traditional language of myth and poetry. As a result, this first map made possible a new way of conceiving and discussing the inhabited earth, and provided its users with a tool to organize the nomenclature of places and tribes, to gather knowledge about them, to order this information independently from any actual itinerary or travel, as a continuous mapped surface of places.

In the second half of the sixth century BC, Hecataeus of Miletus wrote a Periegesis (or ‘Circuit of the Earth’), apparently attempting, as far as we can tell from the available fragments,¹³ an inventory of places, countries, rivers, mountains and tribes, according to a circuit around the Mediterranean Sea. It is debatable whether he drew a new map or simply modified and completed Anaximander’s. But his Periegesis was a text, gathering information from various sources: personal travels, information drawn from sailors and tradesmen, saga and poetry. Such an inventory of place-and tribe-names would have been impossible without the frame of a map: it helped to organize the distribution of names according to a methodical and abstract movement around the Mediterranean Sea. Herodotus, in the second half of the fifth century BC, is another witness to the use of maps to organize literary descriptions of space. He sought to translate the visual patterns into various geometrical metaphors, but we know that he did not draw a map himself.

During the sixth and fifth centuries BC, one can see the origins of both a distinction and interaction between map and discourse. The map helped to gather, organize and unify a heterogeneous knowledge about places and tribes, but its purpose was also more abstract and theoretical. Like the metaphor or the geometrical figure, illustrating the sphere of the universe, the map gave a material and visual reality to an invisible reality. It was an a priori and abstract device; it imposed a shape, borders and patterns of symmetry on the inhabited earth, whose Mediterranean shores only were known to the Greeks. If such maps sometimes interacted with and influenced geographical descriptions, all indications are that their development followed a path of its own beyond the mainstream current of Greek geography. Map-making in the Greek classical and Hellenistic world was practised by a tiny number of individuals, scholars interested in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and geometry. During the fourth century BC, map-makers were found in philosophical schools at Athens: in Plato’s Academy, Eudoxus was engaged in various mathematical and astronomical researches, and it seems he drew a map in connection with his treatise ‘Circuit of the Earth’. In Aristotle’s Lyceum, a world map was displayed on the wall of the ‘lower portico’.¹⁴ Aristotle himself used maps, as the Meteorologics treatise testifies. And his pupil and fellow researcher Dicaearchus committed himself to drawing a map, providing it with a new geometrical frame and probably using new topographical data available from Alexander’s Asiatic campaigns.

Pre-Hellenistic Greek cartography displays some consistent characteristics. It dealt with small-scale maps only. We have not the slightest idea about their visual design, but since Anaximander, maps were always linked to written treatises, although they were not necessarily included in the papyrus roll. They were independent plates and we know that one of them, at least, was engraved on a bronze plate. The rarity of available data about maps in the Greek classical world followed from the fact that the political, commercial and military situation of Greek cities did not make necessary either the practical use of such small-scale drawings, nor of large-scale maps. On the contrary, map-making was an activity linked to philosophy and the sciences. There was no social or political control over map-making, upon its diffusion and its use. Nobody fixed norms or criteria regarding maps: each map-maker was absolutely free to propose his own views about the shape of the world, his own calculations of its size, his own geometrical frame, his own selection of places. Control over maps rose from the cartographers themselves, as they began to gather the work of their forerunners and to develop their own research from it.

Nor did the ancient technology of book-making (manuscript papyrus book-rolls) permit a wide-scale diffusion of these drawings, or their precise and exact reproduction. Even had such a technology existed, it is difficult to imagine who could have been the intended audience. Cartography was a part of the mathematical sciences, not of daily life. Descriptive geography and ethnography followed their own parallel paths, mainly among historical writers. There was no Greek cartographic school comparable to the Hippocratic school of medicine, for example, with its organization, its methodological and deontological rules, or to the philosophical schools, organized around the writings of their founders.

MAP-MAKING AND POWER IN PTOLEMAIC ALEXANDRIA

Did the shift from Athens to Alexandria, from the classical Greek city to the Hellenistic kingdoms, change this situation and create new functions for small-scale maps?

To answer this question, we need to evoke the new historical background. First, a vast volume of new field data was gathered during Alexander’s expedition in Asia: road measurements, geographical and ethnographical observations, diaries, samples and such like. Second, the Ptolemaic rule in Egypt was a model example of the new Greek kingdoms created ex novo in the former satrapies of the Persian Empire. Greeks...