Pictures of the World

What Maps Tell about Us and Them?

Human groups tend traditionally to see themselves and their home country situated at the centre of the known world. World maps are collective images of how cultures define themselves in relation to space. This raises many interesting questions. How do different cultures structure the world with maps? How are world maps of different cultures used to enforce their world views in general and spatial order in particular? Why can certain world maps be accepted more easily than others?

In this book I present 30 different world maps and projections from different cultures and time periods beginning from ancient Babylonia to modern projections. They all promote the same attitude: we are located on the navel of the world.

In many mythologies the centre means the place which is inhabitable. It is the place where people usually believe they dwell. This phenomenon can be called an omphalos syndrome. According to Greek mythology, the omphalos (navel) of the earth was situated at the temple of Delphi. Every culture suffers from this syndrome. The Kaabah in Mecca, Mundus in Rome, Mt. Meru for the Hindus, ziggurrats in Babylon, Cuzco for the Incas, Jerusalem for medieval Christians, even Greenwich in London – all propagate the very same idea: that one is in the centre of the world. That applies also to world maps.

So Geographers, in Afric-maps,

With savage-pictures fill their gaps;

And o’er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

(Swift: On Poetry)

Maps, like all other images, can be powerful instruments of propaganda because they convey certain messages to mass audiences without the mental effort required by other forms of communication. Different cultures and nations usually produce images of what the world is believed or wanted to be.   For example the ”rule of ethnocentricity” has led many cultures to place their own territories at the centre of their world maps. Throughout the history of cartography, ideological ’Holy Lands’ have been frequently centred on maps. Such centricity is a kind of ’subliminal geometry’ which adds geopolitical force and meaning to representation. Such world maps have helped to legitimate and promote different world views.

The ancient Greeks and medieval Christians called the known world ”ecumene” (oikoumene). For them the term ”ecumene” meant a (psycho)geographical entity, as the concept has psychological as well as geographical connotations. Oikoumene meant the world that was known to be peopled and capable of supporting life. It originates in the Greek term oikoumenikos, meaning a portion of the earth inhabited by ’our own people’, men of our kind, or belonging to the whole inhabited world. It thus also means a ”shared world”, the totality of our world. By the concept ecumene I refer to a cultural construction which promotes the idea of belonging to some kind of geographical entity. Other cultures have similar ideas of belonging to the inhabited world.

 

In the following sample you can see some of the original word maps from Babylonia, Greece, Rome and Arabia and the same versions with explanations.

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