Thomas Reinertsen Berg (born 1971) is a journalist and writer. He has written for several Norwegian papers such as Morgenbladet, Klassekampen and Dagsavisen, where he has worked especially with cultural and scientific subjects.

THEATRE OF THE WORLD

The Maps that Made History

THOMAS REINERTSEN BERG

Translated from the Norwegian by Alison McCullough

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Norway in 2017 by Forlaget Press
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Thomas Reinertsen Berg 2018
Translation copyright © Alison McCullough 2018

The right of Thomas Reinertsen Berg to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 47368 864 3
Hardback ISBN 978 1 47368 862 9

This publication of this translation has been made possible through the financial support of NORLA, Norwegian Literature Abroad.

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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 andNoua 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 values 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.

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 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.

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 even 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.

But on the other hand, we can compare prehistoric works with each other. Minusinsk, Russia, is home to a large rock carving similar to the Bedolina Map, which also features houses, people and animals scattered across a large area almost ten metres in length – this too is a representation of a village. Here, however, the stonecutter was more interested in reproducing the houses than showing how they were situated in relation to each other, and everything is drawn in profile. It is also difficult to say whether the rock carving was created as a single picture; whether the houses were drawn together, or whether new ones were simply added where there was space to draw them on the rock. The comparison suggests that the rock carving at Bedolina is a map, while that in Minusinsk is an image.

MAPS IN THE MIND | The ability to communicate geographical information was developed by certain species long before the age of modern humans – the most widely known of these techniques is the dance honey bees perform to tell each other where flowers can be found. The bee moves up the honeycomb while waggling its tail, before turning to the right in a semicircle, back to the starting point, and beginning the dance again. Then the bee turns down to the left. If the flowers it has found are in the direction of the Sun, the bee dances straight up the honeycomb; if the other bees must fly to the left or right of the Sun to reach the flowers, the bee marks the exact angle in the dance. The further forwards the bee dances, the further away the flowers are; the more intensely the bee waggles its tail, the more enthusiastic it is about its findings. Aristotle noticed that bees must be able to give each other directions: ‘[…] each bee on her return is followed by three or four companions,’ wrote the Greek philosopher in his History of Animals over 2,000 years ago.

The dance of the honey bee has a clear function – the hive gets richer when bees who know where food can be found share this information with the others. The same must have been true of prehistoric peoples – those who were able to communicate where prey, plentiful fruit or fresh water could be found ensured that the community would grow fat and survive. The early humans were nomads, and while our closest relatives, the other apes and Prosimians, lived mainly in the forests, we spent much of our time out on the plains. This resulted in us developing better sight than our predecessors, along with a different relationship to distances, space and direction. Spatial awareness was probably the first part of our primitive consciousness.

Humans also acquired four additional traits that were central to the development of our ability to think in maps. First, the ability to go on exploratory expeditions; second, the ability to store acquired information; third, the ability to abstract and generalise; and fourth, the ability to know what to do with the information. While our ancestors were generally only able to talk about what was happening in the here and now, humans learned to link events in terms of the past, present and future – and to physical space.

Putting the world into words – this tree, that lake and that mountain – makes the world simultaneously larger and smaller, and more comprehensible. It facilitates the dissemination of information, and it is therefore easy to see how the development of spatial awareness and language have helped each other. Because they wished to articulate the maps they had in their heads, prehistoric peoples may have built up a vocabulary to express long and short distances, directions, landmarks and the time it takes to reach a specific location. They may then have created the first maps from sticks and stones, using sand, earth and snow, and making marks with their fingers or a brush on cave walls.

PREHISTORIC MAPS | Humans began creating representations of the world around 40,000 years ago – or at least, the oldest images we know of – depictions of animals painted in black, red and yellow on the walls of the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain – are from this period. The cave-dwelling peoples here used the pigments they found in clay and soot, and mixed them with fat, wax, blood or water. Rock carvings discovered in Australia are also estimated to be around 40,000 years old.

What is believed to be the world’s oldest map is carved into the tusk of a mammoth. Estimated to be somewhere between 32,500 and 38,000 years old, it was discovered in the Alb-Donau-Kreis region of Germany, and according to German professor Michael A. Rappenglueck is a celestial map of Orion. Rappenglueck also claims that a 17,300-year-old painting discovered in the Lascaux Caves in south-west France, which depicts an ox, a man with a bird’s head and a bird, is a map of the stars Vega, Deneb and Altair, also known as the Summer Triangle – the first stars to become visible on Nordic summer evenings. Rappenglueck illustrates this by drawing three lines between the eyes of the figures.

Not everyone is convinced by Rappenglueck’s theory, but it is logical to think that humans created maps of the stars before creating maps of the landscape – it’s much easier to obtain an overview of the sky than the terrain. The stars hang above us, arranged into formations as if stretched across a canvas or a wall, and are easy to represent using dots. Celestial maps may have played an important role in the earliest agricultural societies – the emergence of certain constellations continues to be used today as a sign of when crops should be sown. But not all prehistoric dot formations are celestial maps.

An illustration of the Bedolina Map, which makes it easier to see what the carving represents. The map depicts six houses and around thirty fields, all connected by small paths, in addition to a ladder, animals and people, all viewed from above. Not until 1934 did anyone begin to wonder whether the carving might be a map.

Rævehøj, on the island of Fyn in Denmark, is situated on a ridge that houses a hidden burial chamber from the Stone Age. Carved into one of the load-bearing stones is an elegant pattern of dots, and in 1920 Danish historian Gudmund Schütte argued that these represented the Plough, Virgo, Gemini, the Tropic of Cancer, Boötes, Leo, Canis and Auriga. But the problem with this theory, as Schütte himself admitted, is that the distances between the various constellations are incorrect, and the carving features more dots than there are stars. It’s easy to see why Schütte was so convinced – the pattern of dots has a striking resemblance to a celestial map. But today’s archaeologists believe the dots form a sun cross – an equal-armed cross within a circle.

In 1967, British archaeologist James Mellaart published a book about the excavations undertaken at the 9,500-year-old city of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, in which he claimed that one of the discovered wall paintings was a map of the city featuring the Mount Hasan Volcano in the background. The map quickly became famous – with many supporting Mellaart’s interpretation.

‘The oldest town plan in existence,’ wrote Jeremy Harwood in To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps That Changed the World; ‘The oldest authenticated map in the world,’ wrote J. B. Harley in the UNESCO Courier; ‘The oldest known [map],’ wrote Catherine Delano-Smith in The History of Cartography; ‘The Catal Huyuk map […] is perhaps 2,000 years older than the oldest known writing system,’ asserted James Blaut in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. But was the painting really a map? In 2006, archaeologist Stephanie Meece wrote an article in which she argued that the ‘houses’ are geometric patterns, which have also been found at other locations in Çatalhöyük, and that the ‘volcano’ is actually a leopard skin. Seven years later, a team of geologists tested the map theory by investigating whether Mount Hasan might have erupted around the time at which the map was created. Rock samples showed that the volcano had in fact erupted around 8,900 years ago – and the eruption would have been visible from the city. Does this ultimately prove that the painting is a map? Not necessarily. but it does illustrate how hard it can be to find clear answers to questions about historical artefacts from so long ago.

Our view of prehistory also influences how we view maps from the period, and may result in the under- or overestimation of their existence. First, it was common to underestimate the presence of prehistoric maps – as late as 1980 only four maps that could be said to be from prehistoric times had been properly studied. Then followed a period in which new theories arose around prehistoric religion, the Stone Age people’s way of thinking, the role of symbols in primitive society and the significance of rock carvings. This resulted in the discovery of a number of ‘new’ maps – when the first edition of The History of Cartography was published in 1987, the chapter on prehistoric times in Europe, the Middle East and north Africa concluded with a list of fifty-seven possible maps. Several of these have since been refuted, while others continue to be debated today.

At Talat n’Lisk, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, is a round cave painting measuring one metre in diameter. Inside the circle is a painstakingly crafted image, thought to show a broad valley flanked by two mountain ranges, and between them a wide river and tributaries as well as two dots, one small and one large, symbolising settlements. The painting is around 6,000 years old.

In the North Caucasus mountains, a 5,000-year-old silver vase was discovered, engraved with two rivers running down from a mountain range to meet at a lake or sea. This may have been an attempt to represent the mountains of the Caucasus region, and two of its rivers.

Another vase, from Tepe Gawra near Mosul in Iraq, features a motif depicting hunters in a wide valley containing a river and tributaries, flanked by high mountains. Some believe the design was painted with a specific landscape in mind, while others believe the image to be more schematic and illustrative of a general phenomenon – hunting – rather than a particular place.

The Cangyuan region of south-west China is home to yet another rock carving reminiscent of the Bedolina Map. At its centre is a village, featuring houses constructed on stilts. That the stonecutter’s aim was to denote space, distances and the positions of these houses is evident from the fact that the houses furthest away are painted upside down, to indicate that their stilts are located against the outermost fence. Towards the village run dotted lines – roads – along which people and animals walk.

Another village is reproduced in stone at Lydenburg in South Africa. The rock carving is large – 4.5 by 4 metres – and with its depictions of round settlements within a network of roads is also not unlike the Bedolina Map.

Along the Yenisei River, at Mugur-Sargol in Mongolia, are rock carvings that provide a bird’s-eye view of the local shepherds’ tents and enclosures. Mongolia is also home to many maps of grave sites, some of which illustrate both our world and that of the afterlife.

MAPS OF THE DEAD | Historians estimate that humans first began to imagine the existence of a world other than our own around 100,000 years ago, and graves from this period have been found to contain objects that the dead wished to take with them to the next world. But it was long believed that prehistoric peoples would have been unable to produce maps of anything other than their immediate surroundings – that representing their position relative to the Sun, Moon, stars, realm of the dead and abodes of the gods was far more advanced than their capacity allowed. ‘As a rule […] the maps of primitive peoples are restricted to very small areas […] their maps are concrete […] they cannot portray the world, or even visualise it in their minds. They have no world maps, for their own locality dominates their thought,’ wrote historian of cartography Leo Bagrow in 1964. More recently, however, maps that illustrate how humans viewed themselves in relation to the rest of creation have been discovered. These often feature labyrinths, circles, ladders and trees, and several of them present the various levels that make up the universe, including the heavens, Earth and kingdom of the dead.

A rock carving found in the Sahara depicts a human-like figure surrounded by a pattern of ovals, waves and rectangles, with an opening at the bottom thought to represent the path to the kingdom of the dead.

A small stone statue in Trioria in Italy features a motif comprising the Sun at the top, the Earth in the middle and a ladder leading down to the underworld. In Yorkshire, England, rock carvings have been discovered that depict ladders leading from one circle to the next – perhaps in an attempt to show a connection between the Earth, stars and planets.

A painstakingly crafted cave painting found in Madhya Pradesh, India, shows a sea with rushes, fish and birds at the very top, and a sun surrounded by various geometric patterns at the centre. It is thought that this might be a map of the universe, as understood by the map’s creators.

There is much evidence to suggest that maps were also used in ritualistic contexts. Shamans among indigenous populations in both Australia and Siberia, who have preserved all or parts of their religion over thousands of years, paint maps on the drums they use to enter a trance. These maps prevent the shamans from getting lost when they visit the spirit world.

In the early 1700s, Norwegian missionary Thomas von Westen drew a map taken from a Sami ceremonial drum, with clear cartographic features from both the old beliefs and the new Christian faith. Two lines divide the Earth from the heavens and the heavenly gods from the earthly ones; the Sun is included, and along the Christian road (Ristbaiges) are a horse, a goat, a cow and a church. The kingdom of the dead (Jabmiku di aibmo) features yet another church and a Sami cabin. A fishing lake and the Sami people’s earthly residence are also represented on this cosmic map.

Maps are images of the world – representations of a world view. Religious narratives are related to maps in the sense that they seek to describe what the world is like. They are ways of imposing order and structure on a world that is seemingly endless and difficult to comprehend, and we therefore find cosmogonies – stories about how the world came to be – and cosmologies – theories describing how the world might have been created – in almost all cultures throughout all ages.

The current dominating cosmology – the scientific theory that the universe was created by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago – is not particularly old. It was first suggested by the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître as recently as 1927 – before this, scientists believed the universe to have existed in an eternal and generally unchanging state. But the Big Bang theory was not readily accepted by all astronomers and physicists – that everything had been created in this way sounded far too religious; it reintroduced God as a primary cause, it was said – but the theory has since gained a strong foothold, not least due to astronomer Edwin Hubble, who in 1929 proved that the universe is expanding. But it was not until 1964 and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang that the theory was finally taken seriously in scientific circles.

The Big Bang theory is also embraced by many who hold a religious world view. Hindus believe that their Hymn of Creation, in which everything is described as being interwoven and initiated by heat under unclear circumstances, describes it:

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined cosmic water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.

The Quran states ‘that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them,’ while in 1951 Pope Pius XII declared that the Big Bang theory is not incompatible with the Christian theory of creation.

Every place and time has its own stories of creation and ways of seeing the world. A Finnish creation story tells of an egg that divided to become the Earth and the heavens; in Hawaii people told of how the slime on the seabed gave rise to the Earth. The Inuit believed the Earth fell from heaven; the Greeks told of Gaia, who gave birth to the heavens, great mountains, beautiful valleys and Oceanus – the endless sea. These stories sometimes vary within the same culture at different times and locations, and their mythological descriptions do not always correspond to the geographic knowledge people possessed. This tells us that creation narratives should not necessarily be taken literally. ‘That which at some points in time is regarded as history becomes mythical at others, and the stories regarded as myths today may be considered truths tomorrow, or may have been regarded as such in the past,’ write Tor Åge Bringsværd and Jens Braarvig in the book I begynnelsen: Skapelsesmyter fra hele verden (In the Beginning: Creation Myths from Across the World). What the early cosmologies generally agree upon, however, is that the Earth we live on is situated somewhere in the middle, and that there is also a realm of the dead and a supernatural place where the gods reside.

The Old Norse religion provides a good example of such a world view. At the centre of the world is Yggdrasil, an ash tree. ‘This ash is the best and greatest of all trees; its branches spread over all the world, and reach up above heaven. Three roots sustain the tree and stand wide apart,’ says one of the characters in medieval Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson’s narrative The Fooling of Gylfe. Around the tree’s trunk is Asgard – home of the gods – and surrounding this is Midgard – the home of humans. At the tree’s roots are Niflheim – in Norse mythology the deepest region of the realm of the dead – and the serpent or dragon Nidhogg, who belongs to the dark powers. Encircling Asgard and Midgard is the great ocean, where the Midgard Serpent poses a great threat.

The 13th-century Eddas and Sagas provide no account of how the tree named Yggdrasil came into existence, but describe how the world itself was created from a primordial being. The Prose Edda gives the following version:

Of Ymir’s flesh
was earth created,
of his blood the sea,
of his bones the hills,
of his hair trees and plants,
of his skull the heavens;
and of his brows the gentle powers
formed Midgard for the sons of men;
but of his brain
the heavy clouds are all created.

A ceremonial drum confiscated by Norwegian missionary Thomas von Westen in the 1700s. The drawings form a map of the Sami view of both this world and that of the spirits. ‘Let there be an end to devilish shaman arts, with wands, sorcery and magic drums,’ said von Westen, threatening villages with the bailiff or district sheriff if they refused to hand over their shamanic objects. He collected almost 100 ceremonial drums using this method.

Ymir was a giant, who in prehistoric times came into being in the wasteland of Ginnungagap, between the scorching-hot realm of Muspelheim to the south and ice-cold Niflheim in the north. One day, the waters of the Élivágar rivers ran so far from their sources that they froze in the northern regions of Ginnungagap. Upon encountering the sparks flying from Muspelheim, the ice melted and began to drip – these drips were given life by the sparks and formed Ymir.

As he slept, Ymir began to sweat; a man and a woman grew from under his arm, and his feet produced a son – these were the ancestors of the giants. Ymir was nourished by Auðumla, the cow – she too was created from frost and ice, and fed on salted ice-blocks: ‘the first day that she licked the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man’s hair; the second day, a man’s head; the third day the whole man.’ This man was named Buri, and he bore a son, named Borr. Borr took Bestla, a giantess, as his wife, and they had three sons: Odin, Vili and Vé.

A power struggle then ensued in Ginnungagap. Borr and Bestla’s three sons killed Ymir to put a stop to the stream of giants he continued to sweat out. In The Fooling of Gylfe, Snorri retells the story of how the brothers fashioned the Earth from Ymir’s body – adding that his blood became a sea ‘in a ring round about her [the Earth]; and it may well seem a hard thing to most men to cross over it.’

The Egyptians also believed the world of the living to be surrounded by a vast, chaotic sea; above and below this was the invisible part of the universe, where the Sun, Moon and stars resided when they were not visible in the sky – humans and animals were also believed to travel here when their earthly lives came to an end. An Egyptian map from the year 350 BC shows Egypt and its surrounding areas, with the south at the top. The goddess Nut arches over the world like a bridge, with her hands in the west and her feet to the east. At other times, Nut is represented as lying below the Earth, extinguishing the Sun in the evening to birth it again the next morning.

The Iliad, the Greek epic first written down some time in the ninth or eighth century BC, describes a similar cosmology featuring a world surrounded by sea. While war raged between the Greeks and the Trojans, the Greek fire god Hephaestus was tasked with forging a substantial shield for the Greek warrior Achilles. The description of the imagery with which Hephaestus decorated the shield is also a description of the Greek universe:

There earth, there heaven, there ocean he design’d;
The unwearied sun, the moon completely round;
The starry lights that heaven’s high convex crown’d;
The Pleiads, Hyads, with the northern team;
And great Orion’s more refulgent beam;
To which, around the axle of the sky,
The Bear, revolving, points his golden eye

Hephaestus hammered depictions of the world into the metal, including images of cities, people and animals, warriors and estate holders, and finally the sea, which defined the shield’s outermost edge:

Thus the broad shield complete the artist crown’d
With his last hand, and pour’d the ocean round:
In living silver seem’d the waves to roll,
And beat the buckler’s verge, and bound the whole.

Our view of earlier times also influences how we translate their texts. In the Norwegian translation of the Iliad, the Greek Gaia is translated as ‘jordskiven’ – ‘earth disc’; it assumes that the ancient Greeks believed the Earth was flat.

A similar problem can be found in the translation of the Bible’s creation narrative. In the King James Bible, Genesis i, 6 reads: ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

The problem here is that ‘firmament’ is not necessarily a correct translation of the Hebrew word raqiya. The new English Standard Version of the Bible from 2001 instead uses the word ‘expanse’ – ‘Let there be an expanse’ – something that spreads outwards. It is therefore not necessarily the case that the early Jews regarded the heavens as a kind of solid bell jar curving above the earth.

The Book of Genesis provides certain hints as to how much of an overview the writers of the Bible had of the world. Genesis ii, 10–14 states: ‘A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.’

Havilah probably refers to the Hijaz Mountains in western Saudi Arabia, where several thousand years ago a river system, now dried up, ran westwards to the Persian Gulf. Cush was a kingdom situated at the current border between Egypt and Sudan, also known as Nubia, and the Gihon has been said to be the Blue Nile. The Tigris is the river that runs from eastern Turkey, down through Iraq and out into the Persian Gulf, and the Euphrates also runs through Iraq.

Adam and Eve’s son Cain killed his brother, Abel, then ‘went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.’ But since nod is the root of the Hebrew word meaning ‘to wander’, Nod is not usually understood as a specific country or region, but rather to imply that Cain began a nomadic life.

At the centre of the Bible’s world is Jerusalem. Ezekiel v, 5 states: ‘Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her.’ The temple in Jerusalem was constructed like a map of the cosmos – the outer courtyard represented our visible world, with its countries and seas; the holy space within was an image of the visible heavens and God’s garden. The innermost space represented the invisible Kingdom of God.

The belief that the world has a central point is found in many cultures. It may have arisen because, over time, people noticed how the stars rotated above them, and therefore assumed that they must be turning around something. Naturally enough, people generally tended to regard the centre of the world as somewhere close to where they themselves lived. Home is the place that people know best; it is constructed and cultivated, while everything at a distance is unknown, representing chaos, night and death. The location regarded as the centre of the world was often an elevated place where earth met sky, such as a mountain, tree or temple.

The Japanese viewed the holy Mount Fuji as the centre of the world. In North America, the Cheyenne people viewed Mo’ȯhta-vo’honáaeva – the Black Hills in South Dakota – as the world’s centre. For the Pitjantjatjara people in Australia, Uluru/Ayers Rock was central. The Greeks had the oracle in Delphi; Chinese Taoism describes Kunlun as ‘the mountain at the centre of the world.’ China has also gone a little further than most when it comes to claiming to be the world’s central point: in Mandarin the country’s name is Zhongguó – the Middle Kingdom.

THE SUMERIANS AND BABYLONIANS | Babylon is at the centre of the oldest world map ever to be discovered – a 2,600-year-old clay tablet found in the Babylonian city of Sippar, south-west of modern Baghdad. Measuring just 12.5 by 8 centimetres, the tablet isn’t large, and was at first of no particular interest; it was among 70,000 other tablets that were sent to the British Museum following excavations undertaken in 1881. But today, the tablet has a prominent position among the museum’s collections as the Babylonian Map of the World.

The map consists of a small ring within a larger one. The innermost ring contains several other small circles, rectangles and curved lines, and around the outermost ring are eight triangles. The tablet only became comprehensible as a map when the ancient text on the back was deciphered and understood.

This text tells us that the outer ring is marratu, ‘the salt sea’, and represents the great sea that surrounds the inhabited world. Within the inner ring is a rectangular shape that starts at the top of the ring and extends down past its centre – this is the River Euphrates. Its source is represented by a circle to the north marked ‘mountain’, and ends in a horizontal rectangle to the south representing a ‘canal’ and a ‘swamp’. The rectangle that crosses the Euphrates is Babylon; circles represent the neighbouring areas of Susa (southern Iraq), Bit Yakin (Chaldea in southern Iraq), Habban (Yemen), Urartu (Armenia), Der (eastern Iraq) and Assyria.

The triangles that stick out from the other side of the sea are labelled nagu, which translates as ‘region’ or ‘province’. Certain ancient Babylonian heroes are said to have been to these areas, and the accompanying text describes the region where ‘the Sun is hidden and nothing can be seen’ – a sign that the Babylonians may have heard of the lands to the north and their dark winters. Another region is labelled as being ‘beyond the flight of birds’. Exotic animals are also mentioned, including chameleons, apes, ostriches, lions and wolves. These regions are the unmapped regions – the remote, mystical areas beyond the Babylonian knowledge of the world.

Why the map was created is unclear. The text states that the map’s creator was a descendant of Ea-bel-ili from the city of Borsippa, situated directly south of Sippar – and that’s as much as it tells us. But this is not the only map to have survived from this time and region.

Before the Babylonians, the Sumerians were the leading people of the Iraqi plains. The world as they knew it extended from Turkey and Caucasus in the north to Egypt in the south, and from the Mediterranean, Cyprus and Crete in the west to India in the east. Their closest neighbours to the east were the Elamites, a rival people with whom the Sumerians were often at war, while in the west wandered the Martu, a Semitic, nomadic people who lived in tents and kept sheep and goats. In the north lived the Subartu, a people the Martu often pillaged in order to obtain timber, other raw materials and slaves; to the south was Dilmun (Bahrain), a trading post that became associated with both the creation narrative and the land of the dead.

The golden age of the Sumerian people lasted from around 3500 to 2270 BC, and they left us two things that we continue to use when creating maps today: script and mathematics. The modern method of dividing maps into 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude is based on the Sumerian number system – although their system was based on the digits 6, 12 and 60, rather than 5, 10 and 100.

There are several theories as to why the Sumerians developed such a system. One posits that it is easy to count to twelve when using your thumb to count the tips and joints of the hand’s four fingers: 1–2–3 on the index finger, 1–2–3 on the middle finger, 1–2–3 on the ring finger and 1–2–3 on the little finger. And if you then lift a finger on the other hand for each time you count to twelve, you have sixty once you have counted five times twelve.

Sixty is also a useful number in that it can be divided equally by eleven other numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30; this makes it easy to create smaller units such as halves, thirds, quarters and tenths. The Greeks maintained this number system when building upon Sumerian and Babylonian astronomy, geometry and geography, and this is why we continue to use it today.

The Sumerian writing system – the earliest writing system we know of – made it possible to record geographical information. Advancing armies, and merchants who travelled from place to place to collect metals, stone and timber, created lists that stated how far it was from one city to another and how long each journey would take. One such example is a military travelogue detailing the route from the southern part of Iraq to the city of Emar in northern Syria. All the listed stopping points are around one day’s journey from each other, between twenty-five and thirty kilometres, and if the troops spent more than one night in a location, they recorded for example that this was ‘where the chariot broke down’ or ‘when the troops rested for two days.’

Around the year 3000 BC, the Sumerians developed units of measure, and 200 years later used geometry to survey arable land and calculate taxes. They used a measuring rope and a peg that was driven into the ground to hold the rope – a method known as triangulation, so simple and effective that it continued to be used right up until the present day. To triangulate an area, you first measure a baseline on the ground. You then find a point a couple of hundred metres away, such as a house or a tree, which becomes the last corner of the triangle. You then walk to one end of the baseline and measure the angle between this and the point, before doing the same from the other end. The length of the baseline and the size of the two angles gives you all the information you need to calculate the distance to the point.

A papyrus map from the time of the pharaohs, probably from around the 1100s BC, which shows the quarry in Wadi Hammamat – the Valley of Many Baths – in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The map was found in the early 1800s in a grave near the city of Luxor. Over the years the original map, which was 210 centimetres wide when created, has broken into several pieces. On the most well-preserved it is possible to make out four houses, a temple to the god Amun, a water reservoir, a well and the mountain where the Egyptians mined gold.

A 3,500-year-old Sumerian map shows a landscape with several fields and canals at a location where the river makes a sharp turn. A map of the holy city of Nippur from the same period shows the city’s most important temple, a park, the Euphrates, two canals that run through the city and seven gates – all of which have names. But what is possibly unique about this map is that it may be the first to have been drawn to scale – that is, the various elements are reproduced in the same relationship to one another as in reality. Numbers given beside several of the buildings also specify their size, and modern excavations of Nippur have resulted in claims that the city looked exactly as it appears on the map. The accurate reproduction of this fortified city may indicate that the map was of military significance.

Occasionally, the Sumerians also attempted to create maps of places situated greater distances from each other – a map discovered in Nippur depicts nine cities along three canals and a road.

The Babylonians built upon Sumerian mathematics, developing it further, and surviving tablets provide evidence of a high level of skill – particularly within geometry. The Babylonians also developed specific units for indicating distances and lengths, which were based on the time it took to reach the location in question. The main unit was the beru, the ‘double-hour’ – around ten kilometres.

The Babylonians used this mathematical knowledge to create maps of estates, territories, houses, named streets, temples, and rivers and canals – sometimes even using wavy lines to denote the water. One fragment of a city map is thought to show a temple in Babylon and the surrounding streets; another shows the city of Uruk and a building within it.

The importance of the Babylonian Map of the World has already been noted, but equally important in cartographic history is the first map to indicate the cardinal directions east, west and north, with east at the top. This was discovered close to the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. The map was created around the year 2300 BC, and shows a valley with a river running through it. Text in the bottom left corner states that the map is of a place called Mashkan-dur-ibla. At its centre is an area of land specified as measuring 354 iku, or around 12 hectares, and its owner is named as ‘Azala’. Most of the text is otherwise unreadable.

If the Babylonians were indeed the first people to indicate compass points on a map, and the Sumerian map of Nippur was created to scale, then two of today’s most important cartographic principles were already being used in ancient Mesopotamia.

THE GOLD MINE MAP | Like the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the ancient Egyptians were a people who undertook agricultural activities beside a great river – they were dependent upon the Nile flooding its banks each year to produce fertile mud for them to cultivate. The floods also resulted in frequent changes to the landscape, and meant that the ancient Egyptians – like the Sumerians and Babylonians – needed to survey their lands.

In his Histories, written between 450 and 420 BC, Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris, stating that he ‘divided the country among all the Egyptians by giving each an equal parcel of land, and made this his source of revenue, assessing the payment of a yearly tax. And any man who was robbed by the river of part of his land could come to Sesostris and declare what had happened; then the king would send men to look into it and calculate the part by which the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally imposed.’

The age of the pharaohs began with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC, and the first Egyptian maps were created during this period. Decorations discovered in tombs feature elements of landscapes and buildings drawn both from above and in profile along strips representing the horizon, and may be said to be simple forms of pictorial map. The difference between cities and the countryside is denoted using trees.

The Book of the Dead, a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary texts composed on papyrus around the year 1400 BC, includes a drawing of a garden in which the dead may work. The garden is rectangular and divided by canals, and the use of colour strengthens the impression that the image is a map. Other maps associated with the realm of the dead have been discovered painted inside coffins from around the year 2000 BC, and show a landscape with two paths: one is blue and runs via water, while the other is black and crosses the land. Both paths lead to the god Osiris, ruler of the afterlife.

A map from around 1300 BC shows the military conquest procession of Seti I as it travels past watering holes and boundaries along the desert road to Canaan, where Israel, Palestine and Lebanon are situated today. Seti I’s successor, Ramesses II, attacked a fort in Kadesh, where the Orontes River meets a smaller river near Homs in what is now Syria, and a graphic reproduction of this battle has clear cartographic qualities. The rivers encircle the city, separating the two armies.

Around the year 1150 BC, the Egyptian bureaucrat Amennakhte created one of the most beautiful maps to survive from the ancient world, showing the way to gold mines and a stone quarry in eastern Egypt. In addition to being a topographical map depicting mountains, roads and waterways, it is also the world’s oldest geological map, as it indicates which types of stones and metals are present in the area. The map was created for Ramesses IV’s expedition to obtain stone for use in creating new statues of the king.

Two wide roads pass through a pink mountainous area. These are drawn horizontally across the papyrus, which is almost three metres long, and connect to a third road that crosses the papyrus and leads to a fourth. The road at the bottom features gravel depicted in various shades of brown and white, and sparse, green vegetation, typical of a dried-up river bed. The writing on the map specifies where the roads lead, and even explains the pink mountains: ‘the mountains in which gold is worked, they are coloured pink.’ Beside the gold mine are four houses where the workers lived, a temple to the god Amun, a water reservoir and a well.

In modern times, the map has been compared with the place it is intended to replicate – a fifteen-kilometre stretch of the Wadi Hammamat dry river bed – and has been found to be accurate. Archaeological surveys have also shown that gold was mined here during the period. The area runs parallel to the main road, which extended from Qift, by the Nile, through the eastern desert to the port of Quesir, by the Red Sea. From here, the Egyptians embarked on trading expeditions to a country to the south, which they called the Land of Punt. The country’s exact location continues to be debated by historians today.

This map may have been created as a result of the distance calculations performed for purely logistical reasons, which Amennakhte then expressed visually. The question, then, is whether this map was the only one of its kind, or whether other Egyptian cartographers also painstakingly crafted maps that were later lost – or which now lay hidden in a cracked clay pot somewhere out in the desert, awaiting discovery.

FOUNDATIONS | Like those of our own time, prehistoric and ancient maps were influenced by the age in which they were drawn, and designed to fulfil the needs of that age to the best of their creators’ ability. The Sumerian and Babylonian maps illustrating land ownership – and that discovered in Bedolina, if it is true that this map also depicts the possession of property – anticipate our modern economic map series by several thousand years. Religious representations of the world and the universe fulfilled the need to understand one’s place in the bigger picture.

Our view of the past and its peoples influences our interpretations of how they viewed the world. The fact that we have long believed people before Columbus thought the Earth was flat – which is incorrect – has influenced translations of texts from before Columbus’s time, and our belief that creation narratives and cosmogonies were intended to be taken literally has also had peculiar consequences. We interpret old maps and texts through the fog of history – but sometimes the prehistoric terrain might just correspond to the maps we draw of it.