Jerusalem as the 'omphalos' of the world: on the history of geographical concept

Judaism, Spring, 1997 by Philip S. Alexander

To sum up: I would suggest that the doctrine of Jerusalem as the navel of the earth can be traced back no earlier than the Hasmonean revolution of the second century B.C.E. It is first clearly attested in the Book of Jubilees, whose author used it for polemical purposes to support aspects of the political propaganda of the Hasmonean State.

Once launched the idea had a long and vigorous life. I shall conclude by offering some notes on its later career in both Christianity and Judaism. First, the Christian tradition. Though explicit statements occur from time to time in Christian writers asserting the geographical centrality of Jerusalem and calling it the omphalos of the earth, it is Christian cartography that expresses this idea most powerfully. This brings us back to the Hereford mappa mundi. Even at a glance the similarity of the Hereford map to the reconstructed Jubilees map is striking. Is this accidental? I would argue not: a convincing line of transmission can, in fact, be constructed linking the Hereford map direct to Jubilees.

We know that the author or creator of the Hereford map was one Richard of Holdingham and that it was drawn, probably at Lincoln, in the late thirteenth century, though it was taken almost immediately to Hereford, where it has remained to the present day.(10) It belongs to a collection of maps that show a strong family likeness. These include both the large, detailed images like the Hereford mappa mundi, and the little T-O and T-Y maps, which are probably stylized pictograms or logos created by scribes who were daunted by the challenge of copying the complex, full-scale map. P. D. A. Harvey argues that this whole group of mappae mundi belongs to "a single, much ramified tradition which must go back to the Roman period," at least to the fifth century.(11) He suggests that the original was a Roman map "measured" and "reasonably accurate," "showing coastal outlines, mountains, rivers, towns and boundaries of provinces," which has become more and more garbled with successive copying. He raises the question of the possible relationship between this original Roman map and the Marcus Agrippa map, set up in Rome on the orders of Augustus and based on a survey of the empire initiated, according to tradition, by Julius Caesar. He notes that Dilke is in favor of such a link, whereas Brodersen is not, because he believes that the Agrippan map was not in fact an image but a written text.(12)

Parts of Harvey's tradition-history are plausible, but parts are not. That the ancestor of the Hereford family of maps goes back at least to the fifth century is a conclusion demanded by the basic stemmatics of the manuscripts. But that the ancestor-map was some sort of official Roman world map, based on information derived from the efficient Roman methods of surveying, seems to me to be totally off-target. In fact I would suggest that Harvey and other historians of cartography are guilty of naively misreading the Hereford map. The Hereford map, and the others like it, were never meant to be "real" geography. Their significance was symbolic and theological right from the start. The Hereford map was so seriously out of joint with the geographical knowledge of its day that it cannot have been intended to be taken literally. Educated people, as Harvey correctly observes, already accepted by the thirteenth century that the world was not a flat disc but a globe, and many would have subscribed to the theory that in the southern hemisphere lay a continent matching our own, the terra incognita or australis, cut off from northern lands by the burning and impassable tropics.(13) This terra australis has actually been added to the Beatus mappa mundi, thus destroying its symmetry. There is surprisingly little contemporary information in the Hereford map. Its image was already antiquated when it was produced. It is a survival from an earlier age, cherished more for theological than for strictly geographical reasons. It was not meant to function like a modern school atlas to inform people about the "real" world, but as a stylized visual aid to assist pious meditation and reflection.