These are old concepts that would remain only on maps. “If geography is prose, maps are iconography,” said Lennart Meri, the Estonian politician, writer, and film director.Īnd at the time his own revolution, Poland’s Lech Walesa foresaw a European Union, or at least some concept of globalisation: “Tomorrow there will be no division to Europe and Asia. But wars of poverty are fought to map change,” said the great Muhammad Ali. “Wars of nations are fought to change maps. Maps represent power and change in the world, as brought about by an understanding of what is where and how to get it. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.” Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Hapgood writes in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age: “It was in the 18th century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It took a long time for longitude and latitude to be corrected combined. Charles H. To be able to wrap their minds around a perspective they'd never seen. Imagine being the first person to think of that. All maps are drawn as though looking down. It sounds simple now, but a thousand years ago it would have been an incredible feat of imagination and imagery. Ptomoly’s maps were highly influential, but as a pioneer, he also got things hopelessly wrong, as this 15th-century reconstruction shows.Īs Louise Penny puts it, in A Great Reckoning: “Maps gave humans control over their surroundings, for the first time ever. The Greeks of course added more, and another great landmark work in Roman times was that of Ptolomy and and mapa mundi from his Geographica, a crucial form of reference until the Middle Ages. But in about 600BC the first known formal map was created, the Imago Mundi, or the Babylonian Map of the World. And in paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) within the animist belief system of Aboriginal Australians connected history, self, story and landscape in songlines or dreaming tracks.Īnd pictorial representations of land dates back at least 25,000 years, discovered in what is now the Czech Republic, near Pavlov, carved on a mammoth tusk. Probably since cave drawings or sticks in the sand, maps have been a way to understand and sense of place, of the self in the world. So, with that in mid, this week we celebrate the art of the cartographer as mentioned in song, in lyrics of evoked in music. From massive old dusty atlases of the world to a crinkly, wind-flapping crinkly Ordnance Survey editions stained by tea and biscuit crumbs, from precious rare artwork maps, to out-of-date maps of past landscapes and retired streets in old bookshops, even the instantly updating screen Google versions and talking GPS, they are like life’s board game ready to roll out, offering an instant glimpse of the local and global, the historical and virtual, a perfect meeting of stay-at-home culture and terra incognita. They are a fixed work of autocracy and discipline that also represents fantasy and adventure. They are the stimulus of holidays without having to go anywhere. They are meticulous, and yet metaphorical, they are recordings that stir the imagination. Who doesn’t love a map? I can stare at them for hours. Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.” – Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. “A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. “And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the thing it was a map of.” – Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time “Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.” – Roseanne Barr There is no more poetic book in the world.” – Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands “Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. “Maps codify the miracle of existence.” – Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
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