New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration
Peter Whitfield (New York: Routledge, 1998) 200 pp. (150 maps, 100 in color), $40
All the great ancient civilizations—in the Near East, China and the Americas—developed in relative isolation. Enclosed by barriers of desert and sea, these ancients saw little reason to stray past the edges of their own civilization, where one would encounter barbaric people.
Of course there were rumors and legends. From time to time, exotic materials reached one ancient civilization from another. But from where? To learn more would require extraordinary effort. Why leave the comforts of civilized life for a trek across the wilderness? Not even Abraham, the great biblical wanderer, ventured far into the great unknown; he traveled from one spot in the Near East, Ur, to another, Canaan.
Ancient civilizations tended to be inwardly focused. Although the Babylonians, for instance, did have a conception of the world in its entirety, it consisted of mostly Babylon (along with a few of its neighbors) surrounded by oceans and uncharted regions. This insularity is beautifully illustrated in a first-millennium B.C.E. Babylonian cuneiform tablet with a map of the world (see Ancient Life), reproduced by Peter Whitfield in New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration. (The photograph in Whitfield’s book is so clear that I scanned it into my computer, enlarged it and redrew the outlines of its main features. Others may find this technique helpful in studying the book’s lovely maps.)
The Babylonian map, in fact, makes one of Whitfield’s key points: Maps may be as old as civilization but their use for exploration is a modern invention. The appearance of relatively accurate maps, beginning around the 16th century, helps explain why the Age of Exploration began in Europe. Although the Greeks, Romans and Muslims did seek to extend their borders, they tended to halt when opposed by natural obstacles. The Egyptians, Maya and Chinese never tarried long outside their homelands. Apparently the Aztec and Inca civilizations had no knowledge of one another. If the Phoenicians really did venture around the African continent, they did not bother to record the event.
None of the ancient Semitic languages had a separate word for map. Nor was there a word for map in ancient Greek or Latin. Yet maps inscribed on clay go back at least to the third millennium B.C.E. Indeed, maps may predate civilization: Some prehistoric rock inscriptions appear to portray landscapes seen abstractly from above. It seems that wherever human beings created images of themselves and their surroundings, they made maps. In the ancient world, however, maps simply 057resembled other representations of cosmic ideas; they did not function as travel guides. Instead, people got from one place to another by relying on lists of places and travel times, and, strangely enough, by asking directions—not by using reference maps.
Most of the maps in New Found Lands come from the British Library. All of them are beautifully reproduced, and a number of them have never been published before.
Whitfield is, of course, largely concerned with the Age of Exploration, when maps finally began to be used as travel guides. Even so, despite all the ingenuity of mapmakers, both ancient and relatively modern, much of the pleasure in examining the maps in this book comes from recognizing the misshapen continents and from the odd place-names that either no longer exist or, perhaps, never really did exist. Now we know so much more about the world; there’s far too little of our globe that can be left entirely to the imagination.
New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration
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