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Imagining the world

UNESCO Courier, June, 1991 by Catherine Delano-Smith

IMAGINATION has played a key role in the history of cartography. Long before the fifth century BC, when Greek scholars found the Earth to be a globe, and in far corners of the Earth never touched by their learning, people imagined the shape of the Earth they lived on. The Aztecs saw their world as five squares; ancient Peruvians as a box; ancient Egyptians as egg-shaped. Some early Chinese also believed the Earth to be like an egg or like a ball, and derided those who thought of it as flat and squarewithin circular heavens. In Japan, before Christian missionaries arrived at the turn of the seventeenth century bringing with them the notion that the world is round, there seems to have been at least one theory of the Earth as a cube.

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Such ideas have been expressed in map form from prehistoric times onwards all over the world. In rock art, circles and squares, thought to represent the world, are common motifs in cave paintings or on carved rocks from Scandinavia to India and from Asia to the Americas. The Korean Ch'uan Chin's image of a cubic Earth is found in a manuscript of 1547. The five squares of the Aztec "world" were painted on the opening page of the Fejervary Screenfold, a ritual book of the pre-conquest period.

To some early societies, symmetry was important. In pre-classical Greece, at the time of Homer, the circle of the world was divided by an equator, roughly along the line of the Mediterranean Sea. The ancient philisopher-geographers of classical Greece drew lines around the sphere dividing the Earth into parallel zones or climata, all places within one zone having roughly the same length of day. Some of the global symmetry was lost when Pliny divided the part of the Earth best known to the Greeks and Romans into seven zones, all north of the equator, in order to allow three for the "wilderness" of the far north.

In Hindu India, some authorities depicted the world with four continents, corresponding to the four cardinal points, although they had as yet no "knowledge" of the Americas. Geographers in the Roman period illustrated their textbooks with diagrams of a spherical Earth subdivided into the three continents they knew about (Asia, Africa, Europe). Some, like Strabo in the first century AD, suspected the existence of other land masses, perhaps even a fourth continent, and a few early historic maps from Europe seem to suggest this.

It was not, however, until after the last decade of the fifteenth century that Europeans could start to put the Americas onto their maps of the world because some of them had seen the "new lands" for themselves. Even so, it was not always easy to know just what to draw. One map of 1502 (the Cantino map) shows the two Americas widely separated; another (1528, by P. Coppo) shows North America as a group of small islands; yet another (1548, by G. Gastaldi) depicts North America as a continuation of Asia.

Several sixteenth-century maps showed a Mare Indicum or Sea of Verrazano, almost bisecting the northern continent. This was the result of one voyager's too-hasty identification of a stretch of inland water along the eastern seaboard of North America with the Pacific. Yet other geographical myths concerned the peninsulas of Florida and Yucatan, discovered by Europeans in 1513 and 1518-1519 respectively but first charted as islands. Then there was the problem of California, first correctly charted as a peninsula after a Soanish fleet sent by Cortes had successfully navigated to the head of the Gulf in 1540, but nevertheless shown as an island on many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps. A similar misconception was a belief in a continuous northwestern sea passage across North America, providing a northern route to China. Ortelius showed it clearly on a map of 1564. In 1592 a Greek sailor reported he had reached its western end. Thereafter, for three centuries, Europeans vied with each other to find this mythical passage, driven by the hope of gain through the trading advantage the way through to the Pacific was thought to bring them.

The location of legends

Many maps depict famous events. These events may be historically testifiable ones such as the sites of recent battles. Others show where a historic event was thought to have taken place. Some Indian maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show not only Vraj (the birthplace of Krishna) but also a host of places sacred to Hindus as part of the Krishna legend. Still others show--without any annotation or stylistic differentiation--the location of wholly imagined events. Atlantis and a host of other legendary islands were shown on maps of the Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries especially.

Long-lived legends about famous personages such as Alexander of Macedonia are other examples of the historical imagination which were depicted on maps. The "Alexander myth" is seen on Ptolemy's maps of Asia in the Columns of Alexander (representing the Caspian Gates through which Alexander was said to have passed). It is found too on a late eighteenth-century Indian map of the world on which Alexander is seen with the men who allegedly asked for his help against the mythical gaints Gog and Magog and with the wall he was said to have built to imprison the accursed ones. A Christian mappamundi of the thirteenth century depicts just such a Wall of Gog and Magog in northeast Asia, probably an echo of the real Great Wall of China.

Imagining the world

UNESCO Courier, June, 1991 by Catherine Delano-Smith

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