Anthropomorphic Maps

On December 4th, 2008, Izzy Cohen published a note about anthroporphic maps to The Humanist discussion group.  I have requested Mr. Cohen’s permission to repost the entry here, so that others interested in the imaginative dimension of historical maps can be introduced to this concept and to the challenge of dealing quantitatively with maps of this kind.  Examples may be viewed here: Holy Land & European Queen.

Mr. Cohen writes:

I learned about anthropomorphic maps from the linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (deceased) and the anthropologist Stan Knowlton. They described the maps of Napi, the creator of the Blackfoot Indians (aka The Old Man) and his wife (The Old Woman) in Alberta, Canada. I “found” similar Phoenician maps of a male body (Hermes?) in west Asia and a female body (Aphrodite) in north Africa.

Anthropomorphic Maps
Anthropomorphic maps were generated by configuring the body of a god or goddess over the area to be mapped. The name of each part of that body became the name of the area under that part. This produced a scale 1:1 map-without-paper on which each place name automatically indicated its approximate location and direction with respect to every other place on the same map whose name was produced in this way.

You are cordially invited to join the BPMaps discussion group on this topic, a very quiet list that averages less than 2 messages per month. The URL is:http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/

The Challenge:  To produce computer software that will find additional body-part maps elsewhere in the world. Available inputs:

(1) geographic databases with ancient place names (e.g., the Perseus project).

(2) body-part names on Swadesh lists. Unfortunately, the navel is not included.

Attributes of Anthropomorphic Maps

(1) The navel is the center of the body, the center of the map, and usually the center of the map’s language community.

(2) Place names (toponyms) may be reversed, metathesized, misspelled or euphemized for various reasons.

(a) The same part in the same language exists on another map of a different body. [...] Aphrodite is looking backwards over her right shoulder. She is bent at her waist (Misr/Mitzraim = MoSNaiM).

(b) The left (sinister) part is altered in names for left-right pairs (arms, legs, eyes, ears). [...] SHvK = thigh with a T-sound for the letter shin = TvK reversed to Kuwait. [...]

(c) Names that represent taboo body parts or functions are reversed or euphemized.

Semitic PoS (female pudenda) reverses to yam SooF = sea of reeds (Red Sea).
[...]
ZaYiN = weapon (a euphemism for male member) is in Sinai as the desert of Zin.

(3) Names may be loan-translated due to conquest or language-change.

Roxolania (Semitic Ro[chs]SH = head) => Rus *( Ro@SH) => Ukraine (Greek kranion)
* Caused by a change in the sound of the aleph from CHS to a glottal stop. [...]

(4) Rivers and bodies of water may be named after bodily excretions.

[...] Gulf of Aqaba (Semitic QaVaH = digestion/defecation)

(5) Internal body parts may represent subdivisions of external parts.

[...] Goshen exported Arabic QuTN = cotton => Latin Gossypium (English gossamer = cotton-like) [...]

Atlas mountains < atlas = first cervical vertebra that supports the cranium.

(6) Islands near a body’s hands may be named for weapons.

[...] Sicily (< VL *sicila < Latin secula = sickle to harvest wheat; compare Semitic SaKiN = knife). [...]

Best regards,
Israel “izzy” Cohen
cohen.izzy@gmail.com
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps

–Kelly Searsmith

Cultural Geography & Literary Geospaces

The members of our Map History Reading Group have returned to our respective corners to think about what sort of GIS-based research we might do following our upcoming ATLAS training.  I have been considering how I might employ GIS to map the Victorian fantastic, perhaps its regional characters.  I have some question that won’t phrase itself about why that relationship might matter.

Which, as it turns out, is why I was struck by a Chronicle of Higher Education article on “Literary Geospaces” (8/1/08) that discusses two literature-related mapping projects that are well advanced (both were featured in a panel at last year’s December MLA Conference): Janelle Jenstad’s Map of Early Modern London and Matthew L. Jockers’s work on mapping or “georeferencing” the development of Irish-American literature.  Although the article forswears the novelty of the digital humanities, and especially its secondary-stage applications such as GIS (too soon, far too soon), it’s worth a quick read for an introduction to “cultural geography,” in which we track and trace social and cognitive landscapes.

Will this new quantitative method of study lead to the new kind of reading that University of Nebraska digital humanist Stephen Ramsay supposes?  Careful students of literature have long made spatial diagrams as well as temporal charts as they’ve read; we’ve been known to trace fictional and biographical journeys across maps of corresponding, actual terrains, too.  That we can now add to these old methods much increased complexity and enhanced themes may indeed lead us to new insights.  Whether that means a new way of reading (which I take to be theoretical rather than methodological), I doubt.  Yet,  I am eager to see this spectacle performed upon the disciplinary stage and to do some of the dancing across its glinting row of pinheads myself.

Kelly Searsmith

“History of Cartography” vs. “Historical Cartography”

Dear All:

First let me introduce myself: I’m Matthew Edney, director of The History of Cartography series at UW-Madison and Osher Chair in the history of cartography at the University of Southern Maine. Max Edelson has been letting me know about what you are all doing at UI on map history: it is all very cool! I hope you can keep this interdisciplinary group going and productive, in the face of all the other demands we face.

Max sent me the link to this blog this morning, and I had two immediate responses: very nice and “but …” Max immediately suggested that I post my concern, so I am!

The issue is the title of the blog: “Historical Cartography at IPRH.” This runs afoul somewhat of a distinction first drawn by R. A. Skelton in his posthumous work, Maps: A Historical Survey of their Study and Collecting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). To be honest, the distinction might have been made by David Woodward, who edited Skelton’s incomplete typescript for publication. According to this distinction:

historical cartography is the practice of representing past landscapes, events, and other phenomona in maps. As Walter Goffart has shown in his (admittedly complex) Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), this practice was first undertaken by Abraham Ortelius in the Parergon that he added to his wildly successful Theatrum orbis terrarum (1st ed., 1570) and has been pursued by many other people since.

history of cartography is the study of the practices and products of cartography in the past.

From this perspective, historical cartography forms one topic of study within the history of cartography.

Of course, this whole problem can be avoided if we recognize that “cartography” is an idealization created in the early nineteenth century as part of Europeans’ distinction of themselves from the other peoples of the world. In this formulation, Europeans did cartography (rational, liberal, moral), but other peoples did/could not (irrational, despotic, amoral). I have a brief statement of this in my chapter in a book which should be out later this Fall: James R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

From this perspective, I actually have come to refer in my own work to the field of study as map history.