Imagining the world

Asia was also supposed to be the home of the priest-king Prester John, an early medieval European legendary hero who would, it was said, help the Christian world against the Muslims in the Holy Land. By the mid-fifteenth century, though, Prester John's kingdom was believed to be in Ethiopia, part of an India which extended over much of Africa as well as Asia. After 1488, by which time the Portuguese had opened a new seaway to India round the southern tip of Africa and past Abyssinia, maps of Africa showed an enthroned Prester John, his palace, or the royal mountain, Mount Amaro, in which his sons were supposed to have been incarcerated until the order of succession called each to the throne in turn.

Fictional as well as philosophical literature has spawned a different category of imagined historical places, where the entire country or region depicted on the map is mythical. An early example is the woodcut map produced by Hans Holbein in 1518 for the second edition of Thomas More's Utopia. The tradition continues today.

Imagination and power

Maps have also carried graphic messages about the imagined political supremacy of nations or societies. They may have been drawn to back territorial claims or support chauvinistic notions about status (such as maps drawn by Nazi archaeologists to show the distribution of Neolithic "Germans" in Greece and Bronze Age "Germans" in Scandinavia).

One traditional conception of China placed the heartland of the royal domains in the centre of four concentric zones, the outermost of which represented the zones of "allied barbarians" and, most distant of all, of "cultureless savagery". The Chinese were thus less than impressed when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived and showed them maps of the world in which Europe and the Atlantic occupied the central positions. Tactfully, Ricci drew another map centered on the Pacific Ocean.

Maps may reflect the economic competition that so often underlies political concerns. Maps from the period of European discovery represented the often fabulous mineral wealth of the "new" lands to justify the discoverers' exploits and to encourage further investment in their voyages.

From the Americas came the legend of the alluring Kingdom of Gold and the even more attractive El Dorado. The latter was the legendary city of the king of "Manoa", situated on the shores of an equally mythical "Lake Parima", which the Spaniards heard about in 1530 and which they supposed to lie in the basin of the Orinoco river. The legend gave rise to numerous expeditions to the highlands of Guiana, one of which was dispatched from England by Sir Walter Raleigh. Part of Raleigh's manuscript map (1595) survives, showing "that mighty, rich and beautiful Empire of Guinea, and...that great and golden city which the Spaniards call El Dorado and the naturals [call] Manoa". The Frenchman T. de Bry engraved a copperplate map in 1599 on which the elusive Lake Parima was prominently shown, with equally fabulous creatures nearby, such as headless men and fearsomely armed women--the Amazonians of another ancient myth.