Mapping the whole world

—From the introduction to A History of the World in Twelve Maps, by Jerry Brotton (Penguin, 2013):

In Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the other-worldly character Mein Herr announces that '[w]e actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!' When asked if the map has been used much, Mein Herr admits, 'It has never been spread out', and that 'the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the county itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well' (17). The conceit was taken a stage further by Jorge Luis Borges, who, in his one-paragraph short story 'On Rigour in Science' (1946), recast Carroll's account in a darker key. Borges describes a mythical empire where the art of mapmaking had reached such a level of detail that

the colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this widespread Map was useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters.  In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the wholde Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography. (18)

Borges understood both the timeless quandary and potential hubris of the mapmaker: in an attempt to produce a comprehensive map of their world, a process of reduction and selection must take place. But if his 1:1 scale map is an impossible dream, what scale should a map-maker choose to ensure their world map does not endure the fate he described? Many of the world maps described in this book offer an answer, but none of their chosen scales (or indeed anything else about them) has ever been universally accepted as definitive.

A further problem that presents itself is one of perspective. At what imaginary location does the mapmaker stand before beginning to map the world? The answer, as we have already seen, invariably depends upon the mapmaker's prevailing world view. In the case of the Babylonian world map, Babylon lies at the cntre of the universe, or what the historian Mircea Eliade has called the 'axis mundi' (19). According to Eliade, all archaic societies use rites and myths to create what he describes as a 'boundary situation', at which point 'man discovers himself becoming conscious of his place in the universe'. This discovery creates an absolute distinction between a sacred, carefully demarcated realm of ordinary existence, and a profane realm which is unknown, formless and hence dangerous. On the Babylonian world map, such sacred space circumscribed by its inner ring is contrasted with the profane space defined by the outer triangles, which represent chaotic, undifferentiated places antithetical to the sacred centre. Orienting and constructing space from this perspective repeats the divine act of creation, shaping form out of chaos, and placing the mapmaker (and his patron) on a par with the gods. Eliade argues that such images involve the creation of a centre that establishes a vertical conduit between the terrestrial and divine worlds, and which structures human beliefs and actions. Perhaps the whole at the centre of the Babylonian world map ,usually regaded as the result of a pair of compasses marking out the map's circular paramtersl, is rather a channel between one world and the next.

The kind of perspective adopted by the Babylonian world.map could also be called egocentric mapping. Throughout most of recorded history, the overwhelming majority of maps put the culture that produced them at their centre, as many of the world maps discussed in this book show. Even today's online mapping is partly driven by the user's desire to first locate him- or herself on the digital map, by typing in their home address before anywhere else, and zooming in to see that location. It is a timeless act of personal reassurance, locating our selves as individual in relation to a larger world that we suspect is supremely indifferent to our existence. But if such a perspective literally centres individuals, it also elevates them like gods, inviting them to take flight and look down upon the earth from a divine viewpoint, surveying the whole world in one look, calmly detached, gazing upon what can only be imagined by earthbound mortals (20). The map's dissimulating brilliance is to make viewers believe, just for a moment, that such a perspective is real, that thy are not still tethered to the earth, looking at a mpa. And here is one of the map's most important characteristics: the viewer is positioned simultaneously inside and outside of it. In the act of locating themselves on it, the viewer is at the same moment imaginatively rising above (and outside) it in a transcendent moment of contemplation, beyond time and space, seeing everything from nowhere. If the map offers its viewer an answer to the enduring existential question, 'Where am I?', it does so through a magical splitting which situates hi or her in two places at the same time (21).

This problem of defining where the viewer stands in relation to a map of the world is one geographers have struggled with for centuries. For Renaissance geographers, one solution was to compare the viewer of a map to a theatre-goer. In 1570 the Flemish mapmaker Abraham Ortelius published a book containing maps of the world and its regions entitled Theatrum orbis terrarum—the 'Theatre of the World'. Ortelius used the Greek definition of theatre—theatron—as 'a place for viewing a spectacle'. As in a theatre, the maps that unfold before our eyes present a creative version of a reality we think we know, but in the process transform it into something very different. For Ortelius, as for many other Renaissance mapmakers, geography is 'the eye of history', a theatre of memory, because, as he put it, 'the map being laid before our eyes, we may behold things done or places wheere they were done, as if they were at this time present'. The map acts like a mirror, or 'glass', because 'the charts being placed, as it were certain glasses before our eyes, will the longer be kept in memory, and make the deeper impression in us'. But, like all the best dramatists, ortelius concedes that his 'glasses' are a process of creative negotiation, because on certain maps 'in some places, at our discretion, where we thought good, we have altered some things, some things we have put out, and otherwhere, if it seemed to be necessary ,we have put in' different features and places. (22)

Ortelius describes the position from which a viewer looks at a world map, which is closely related to orientation—the location from which we take our bearings. Strictly speaking, orientation usually refers to relative position or direction; in modern times it has become established as fixing location relative to the points on a magnetic compass. But long before the invention of the compass in China by the second century AD, world maps were oriented according to one of the four cardinal idrections: north, south, east and west. The decision to orientate maps according to one prime direction varies from one culture to another (as will be seen from the twelve maps discussed in the book), but there is no purely geographical reason why one direction is better than any other, or why modern Western maps have naturalized the assumption that the north should be at the top of all world maps.

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(17) Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London, 1894), p. l69.
(18) Jorge Luis Borges, 'On Rigour in Science', in Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin, Tex., 1964), p. 90.
(19) Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (Princeton, 1991), pp. 27-56. See Frank J. Korom, 'Of Navels and Mountains: A Further Inquiry into the History of an Idea', Asian Folklore Studies, 51/1 (1992), pp. 103-25.
(20) Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, 2001).
(21) Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches to Cartography throughout History (Chicago, 2006), pp. 337-8.
(22) Abraham Ortelius, 'To the Courteous Reader', in Ortelius, The Theatre of the Whole World, English translation (London, 1606), unpaginated.





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Now, cartographic mapping is mapping proper, the original and proper use of the term 'to map'. Although, as we have seen, the concept of the map may hark back to other forms of representation such as the theatre, in the case of Ortelius.

It's interesting to read these considerations on mapping with reference to other (derived or metaphorical) forms of mapping, such as temporal maps of historical processes, David Christian's maps of time charting out cosmic evolution—or Fredric Jameson's 'cognitive mapping' which looks truly parochial after the grand sweep of the cosmic scale.

To these we have added (by way of further specification) narrative mapping—a concept which straddles the cognitive representation of processes and the generic awareness of the instruments of representation, the narratives which must themselves be mapped, classified, or charted, before they can be used as instruments to anchor narrative phenomena onto one another.  Not that we claim any foundational originality for the concept—see for instance Berger and Luckmann here on symbolic universes and their narrative mapping or (going further back) Polybius on narrative anchoring and the hermeneutic circle. But one may contend that further reflection on these conceptual instruments will enable to see the way they are used in places where they were invisible before, and our critical awareness of them will be further refined.

Mapas del tiempo