Theater of the World Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

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  First ebook edition: December 2018

  Originally published in the Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, September 2018

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  ISBN 978-0-316-45078-2

  E3-20181120-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  THE FIRST IMAGES OF THE WORLD

  Prehistoric maps, stories of creation, and Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian maps.

  LIKE FROGS ABOUT A POND

  Ptolemy, one of the greatest geographers of his time, and the Greeks’ increasing knowledge of the world throughout antiquity.

  HOLY GEOGRAPHY

  A world made for humans by God, in which the clerics and cartographers of the Middle Ages depict the holy story of creation.

  THE FIRST ATLAS

  Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator map the world’s expansion as a result of the Europeans’ numerous voyages and the Renaissance thirst for knowledge.

  VENTURING OUT

  A Norwegian map on the move, Dutch nautical charts, the battle for the biggest atlas, and more about Mercator and all he never managed to complete.

  THE GREAT SURVEYS

  France, Denmark and Norway learn to survey large areas. Kongsvinger gets a prime meridian in 1779, and maps play a role in central government administration.

  WHITE SPACES IN THE NORTH

  The second Fram expedition sets out in 1898, in the wake of the many others that had previously tried to map the northern regions.

  AS SEEN FROM ABOVE

  The First World War paves the way for aerial surveys, which in turn pave the way for a Norwegian economic map series and the appearance of maps in most areas of society.

  BLUE PLANET

  About the seven tenths of our planet that are covered by water, and Marie Tharp’s attempts to understand what the ocean floor looks like, and why.

  THE DIGITAL WORLD

  Satellites and computers provide and manage vast amounts of information, and give us maps that are able to speak to us.

  REFERENCES

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  FURTHER READING

  NEWSLETTERS

  For Fredrik and Erlend, With the hope that you’ll see much of the world.

  Preface

  ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

  Oslo, Norway

  59° 56′ 38″ N

  10° 44′ 0″ E

  Human beings took a bird’s-eye view of the world long before learning to fly. Since prehistoric times, we have drawn our surroundings as seen from above to better understand where we are–rock carvings of houses and fields provide early evidence of this need. But it is only relatively recently that we have been able to see how everything really looks. On Christmas Eve 1968, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 8 orbited the Moon and became the first humans to see the entire Earth at once. ‘Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! […] Hand me that roll of colour quick, will you,’ said astronaut William Anders, before taking a photograph of our planet hovering beautiful, lonely and fragile in the infinite vastness of space.

  Apollo was the Greek god who rode across the sky in his chariot each day, pulling the Sun behind him. When Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius published the world’s first modern atlas in 1570, just 400 years before Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, a friend of his composed a tributary poem in which Ortelius sits beside the god in order to see the whole world: ‘Ortelius, who the luminous Apollo allowed to speed through the high air beside him in his four-horse chariot, to behold from above all the countries and the depths that surround them.’

  Ortelius’s atlas opens with a world map, with clouds drawn aside like stage curtains to reveal the Earth. With the book open before us, we look down on Noruegia, Barbaria, Mar di India, Aegyptus, Manicongo, Iapan, Brasil, Chile and Noua Francia. Ortelius called the book Theatrum orbis terrarum–Theatre of the World–because he believed the maps enabled us to watch the world play out before our eyes, as if in a theatre.

  Regarding the world as a theatre was common in Ortelius’s time. The year after Theatrum was published, English playwright Richard Edwardes had one of his characters say that ‘this world was like a stage,/Whereon many play their parts’–a formulation so admired by William Shakespeare that he used it in As You Like It some years later: ‘All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances.’ Shakespeare also named his theatre the Globe.

  Ortelius was no original cartographer. Nor was he an astronomer, geographer, engineer, surveyor or mathematician–in fact he had no formal education within any discipline. He did, however, know enough about cartography to understand what made a good map and what made a poor one, and with his sense of quality, thoroughness and beauty–in addition to a large network of contacts and friends, who either drew maps themselves or knew others who did so–was able to collate a refined selection of maps for inclusion in the world’s first atlas.

  Writing a book about the history of maps is somewhat reminiscent of Ortelius’s work with Theatrum. This book also builds upon the work of many others, and I have studied a considerable number of books, texts and films to identify the most important and interesting material. It has also been necessary to make certain choices–no map can cover the whole world, and no book can contain cartography’s entire history, since the history of maps may be said to be the history of society itself. Maps are of political, economic, religious, everyday, military and organisational significance, and this has necessitated some difficult decisions about what to include. The hardest decisions to make have been those relating to material closest to our present time, since scarcely any aspect of society is unaffected by cartographic questions.

  Throughout history, the creation of maps has been guided by value judgements as to what is worthy of inclusion. Maps have always given us more than geographical information alone–as illustrated by the clear contrast between an Aztec map of the city of Tenochtitlan, which only provides details of the rulers of each district, and Norgesatlas (Atlas of Norway) from 1963, where the publisher, Cappelen, due to social considerations, has ‘chosen to include too many place names, rather than too few.’ The Aztec map reflects the hierarchy of a strictly class-based society, while the Norgesatlas represents the golden age of social democracy in which everyone must be included. Both maps were influenced by the value
s of the age in which they were created.

  The same is also true of the writing of this book. I have chosen to give significant attention to the mapping of the northern areas of the world throughout the text–not because the peoples of these areas play any greater role in the history of maps than the Americans, Arabs, British, French, Greeks, Italians, Chinese or Dutch, but simply because this is where I come from and the part of the world in which I live. To the best of my ability, I have attempted to show how broader historical developments–those concerning improved surveys and new methods, new measuring instruments and a greater understanding of the ways and areas in which maps may be used–eventually reached this corner of the world and were taken into use by a poor country with a vast and difficult geography. Norway is characterised by mountains, plateaus, great forests, 25,148 kilometres of coastline and 239,057 islands, and was a Danish colony from 1380 to 1814. The country was also part of a union with Sweden between 1814 and 1905. A number of changes have been made to the original Norwegian text to make the book more accessible to an English-speaking readership.

  In 1969, American cartographer Waldo R. Tobler formulated what is known as the First Law of Geography: ‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.’ When looking at a new map, the first thing most people seek out is their home town. ‘Some will perhaps search this theatre of ours for a performance of a particular region (since everyone, because they love their place of origin, would like to see it among the rest),’ wrote Ortelius in his preface to Theatrum, so the phenomenon is an old one. And yet once we have found our home town, many of us experience a thrill as we journey through an atlas–pausing to look at Takoradi, Timbuktu and Trincomalee; running our finger along the route taken by the Orient Express, the Silk Road, the Western Front and the boundaries of ancient Rome–and realise that we are just as equally an exotic and inevitable part of the world as any other.

  Distance and nearness are relative. Seen from space, the Earth must have seemed like the home town of all humanity. As astronaut William Anders said: ‘We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’

  The oldest surviving map from the Middle Ages was drawn in the late 600s or early 700s. At the top, Christ is shown ruling over the globe, his arms outstretched. Africa is named Cam for Noah’s son Ham, who was said to have travelled south after the Great Flood, while Europe and Asia are named after Noah’s other two sons, Japheth and Shem, although this is difficult to see here. South of Africa is a large Terra inhabitabilis–uninhabitable land. The two longest sets of lines represent the Mediterranean Sea and an unknown sea south of Africa, which cross the Don River and the Nile. The diagonal lines represent the Sea of Azov. Read more here.

  The Bedolina Map, carved in stone, probably from around the year 1000 BC. If you make the trip to Val Camonica in the Italian Alps north of Brescia, to the western side of the mountain just past the small town of Capo di Ponte, you can see it for yourself. The area contains several thousand rock carvings, and is therefore protected.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are many people I would like to thank for helping me through the process of writing this book. First, editor Trygve Riiser Gundersen, who pulled the text in the right direction; Benedicte Gamborg Briså at the National Library of Norway for inspiring lunches, discussions and general enthusiasm, and librarian Siri Røsbak Glosli for sending me maps; Bjørn Ragnvald Pettersen for all the articles he sent me about modern surveys of Norway; designer Dimitri Kayambakis for giving the book such an attractive appearance; Astrid Sverresdotter Dypvik and Tor Ivar Østmoe for translations from the German and Latin; Erling Sandmo, an exceptional consultant and source of information about Protestant sea swine; the Norwegian Polar Institute for their help and friendly responses to my enquiries; Ellen Giilhus and Sidsel Kvarteig at the Norwegian Mapping Authority; and my parents, who gave me a world atlas when I was eleven years old–an atlas I still use to this day. But most of all I would like to thank my partner, Maria, who has patiently listened to an endless range of more and less interesting cartographical anecdotes, given me time to write and read through my work in progress.

  All errors–whether these be a city listed at the wrong latitude, an omitted name, the size of a lake given incorrectly or a river running out into the sea at the wrong location–are of course my own.

  As a father, I have an excellent vantage point from which to observe my sons as they gradually map their world. Once tiny tots who surveyed the rooms of our apartment, from one bedroom to the next and from living room to kitchen, as they have grown their geography has expanded to include their kindergarten and school, the local shops, bakery and playground and the homes of friends. Over the coming years they will continue to explore the vastness of our world. This book is therefore dedicated to them.

  THE FIRST IMAGES OF THE WORLD

  Bedolina, Italy

  46° 02′ 00″ N

  10° 20′ 29″ E

  Val Camonica is a fertile valley in northern Italy, where people have lived for several thousand years. Today it is located somewhat off the beaten track–route E45 and the railway line weave their way from south to north through Verona and the Alps slightly further east. But the valley is a cradle of cartography–home to the 3,000-year-old Bedolina Map.

  The map is carved in stone, high up on a mountainside with a good view of the valley. A large, advanced rock carving measuring 4.3 metres wide by 2.4 metres high, it depicts people, animals, warriors and deer in addition to houses, footpaths and rectangular dotted fields–a total of 109 figures representing a village and agricultural landscape as seen from above. But who created this map so long, long ago–and why?

  The Romans called the area Vallis Camunnorum–Valley of the Camuni–after the people who had lived there since the Iron Age. Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo mentioned them in his Geographica around the year 1 BC: ‘Next, in order, come those parts of the mountains that are towards the east, and those that bend round towards the south: the Rhaeti and the Vindelici occupy them […]. The Rhaeti reach down as far as that part of Italy which is above Verona […]; and [the] Camuni belong to this stock.’

  Around 2,500 years ago, the Camuni came into contact with the Etruscans, a people who lived further south, from whom they learned how to write alphabetic characters. The rock faces near the map feature over 200 textual inscriptions, although nobody has ever managed to decipher and read them. But we can therefore say with some degree of certainty that this was indeed a map, carved into the stone around 3,000 years ago, although we have no written sources to confirm this.

  The Bedolina Map is not a geographically correct map–it can’t be used to find the route from one place to another. So then what was its purpose? Italian archaeologist Alberto Marretta believes that the map should be understood in purely symbolic terms–according to Marretta, it represents a crossroads in the history of the people who created it: the transition from a hunting society to an agricultural one. Other rock carvings and archaeological findings from the area show that the Camuni had a landowning aristocracy, and the purpose of the map, Marretta believes, was to show the symbolic power the aristocracy held over the landscape. Maps are always created to fulfil a need, and many of the oldest maps we know of were made to demonstrate ownership of certain areas. Others are more elaborate, and fulfil a religious need to show the place of human beings within the cosmos.

  When encountering prehistoric rock carvings and cave paintings, we have to ask ourselves what a map actually is. What distinctive qualities distinguish a map from other motifs? How can we recognise a map when we know little of the society in which it was created? In their preface to the classic work The History of Cartography, editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward provide the following definition: ‘Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.’ This definition therefore includes eve
n the most primitive representations of space, and ‘the human world’ refers to our surroundings in the broadest possible sense–including cosmic space and the afterlife. But what constitutes a map ultimately remains a question of interpretation.

  Norwegian archaeologist Sverre Marstrander studied rock carvings across the Scandinavian peninsula. In his book Østfold’s jordbruksristninger (Østfold’s Agricultural Rock Carvings), published in 1963, he described ‘some strange, irregular, grid-like patterns,’ which he believed were ‘primitive schematic depictions of a specific type of field complex used in Bronze Age agriculture.’ There could ‘no longer be any doubt,’ Marstrander asserted, ‘that these formations depict ancient fields.’

  But Marstrander decided not to call these depictions of fields maps. Instead, he viewed them in the context of the fertility rites intended to ensure that the fields would bear crops. Might another archaeologist have interpreted them along the lines of maps indicating land ownership?

  Modern maps are always equipped with explanations–legends that clarify the symbols depicting roads, cities, footpaths, schools and ski trails. Of course, no such explanatory material is available to us when we encounter what we suspect may be a prehistoric map, so we are forced to guess and make interpretations–and anyone who has ever attempted to navigate the icons on an unfamiliar mobile phone knows how difficult this can be. Maps can never be fully translated, and societies have a tendency to simplify symbols to an ever-greater extent, until they ultimately become completely incomprehensible to outsiders. Hidden, symbolic and coded messages are first revealed when cartographers have studied not only what they believe to be a map, but also the entire society that surrounds it. And studying a map created by people who lived thousands of years ago is a demanding exercise.