July 24, 2002	Wednesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 13,1423

LONDON: In a quiet, air-conditioned wing of the British Library, a pane of glass separates the pushed-up faces of onlookers and some of the oldest maps in the world.

“What is that?” whispers a visitor to his companion.

The yellowed map is of England, circa 1300. Now it is a relic — not be relied upon for navigation. Its coastlines are blob-like, and its cities drastically out of scale. This curling, creased map begs the question: how accurate will our modern maps seem 700 years in the future?

The question embodies a larger debate over the history and purpose of cartography — or map-making. Not confined to mapping coastlines and political boundaries, cartographers through the centuries have also outlined the dominant religious and cultural attitudes of the day.

It is why Africa is at the bottom, America is in the West, and the Prime Meridian runs through London.

“Maps and cartography have played a much bigger role in the way the world works than most people think,” says Ken Atherton of the British Cartographic Society. “Socially, politically, economically — cartography has had a hand in it all.”

The importance of map-making was highlighted in late June, when Oxford University purchased what it described as “the most important Islamic scientific manuscript to come on the market for the last 100 years” — The Book of Strange Arts and Visual Delights containing an hitherto unknown series of colourful maps.

At 400,000 pounds, the book did not come cheap, but to experts its unique insight into medieval concepts of the world is well worth the money.

The social impact of cartography began as early as the first organized civilizations. Maps were — as they are now — ways of defining frontiers, separating and classifying people and places. Anything or anyone unknown was relegated to the fringes — the margins — of the map, classified simply as “Here There Be Dragons” or something similar.

Tellingly, some of the most highly regarded early maps look nothing like the way we see the world today.

During the Middle Ages, most Arab and some European maps frequently depicted the world ‘upside down’, with the Mediterranean near the top, and the equator at the bottom.

“Most of the best maps come from the Middle East. They are usually Jerusalem-centric, and have the South at the top,” Atherton says.

The most famous of these is the Al-Idrisi map from 1154 — reputed to have been Christopher Columbus’ major navigating tool.

Colonial expansion and the commerce that was tied to it was reflected in the new cartography. European powers became the most travelled, and therefore had the most extensive maps. They became the dominating powers of the day, and their maps — their views of the world — became the standard.

More problematic than the Euro-centric orientation of the continents was the politics and economics used in charting the ”New World”.

“The places that people weren’t proud of, just didn’t appear on the maps,” says Atherton.

While sites of victorious battles and fortifications were shown with remarkable accuracy, native settlements, slums, and defeats were often left off. This became not only a by-product of hierarchical attitudes, but in some cases, a cause of it.

The influence of maps in colonialism came to a head in 1894, when the Prime Meridian was to be declared.

There were huge arguments over where the Prime Meridian should be. Every country wanted it running through their own capitals, but at the time, the English had the best maps in the world, and it was declared it would run through Greenwich.

By the turn of the century, the world was divided into hemispheres — with the north and west dominating politically, economically, and culturally. On every map that was mass-produced, Europe and America would always appear on the top.

But that convention, some say, is a side-effect of continually evolving — and improving — cartography.

These days cartography has become so advanced that there is virtually nothing on land that is left uncharted. Satellites and computers can pinpoint a position on the surface of the earth, and cross-reference it with millions of maps to make sure it is accurate.

Mapping a round surface (the earth) on a flat plane causes distance and landmasses to become distorted. One of the most widely used and most recognizable modern maps is the Mercator projection — named after the 16th century cartographer.

The Mercator projection makes sure all the lines of latitude and longitude intersect at 90-degree angles. This is accurate for ocean navigation, but anything near the poles becomes hugely distorted. In a Mercator projection, Greenland is as big as Africa. Some argue that such distortions reflect lingering political and cultural bias. —Dawn/Gemini News Service.