The Atlas of Atlases: Exploring the Most Important Atlases in History and the Cartographers who Made Them

371 Pages·2022·39.322 MB·English

by  Philip Parker

THE
ATLAS
OF
ATLASES
PHILIP PARKER
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 THE PREHISTORY OF THE ATLAS
(TO C. 1200)
2 THE WORLD EXPANDS: THE EARLIEST ATLASES
(C. 1200–1492)
3 NEW HORIZONS
(1500–1550)
4 THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ATLAS
(1550–1600)
5 THE ATLAS DIVERSIFIES
(1600–1700)
6 MAPPING THE NATION
(1700–1800)
7 THE HEYDAY OF IMPERIAL MAPPING
(1800–1900)
8 THE ATLAS AND WAR
(1900–1950)
9 AN ATLAS OF SOCIETY
(1950–2000)
10 AN ATLAS BY ANY OTHER NAME
(2000–)
ENDNOTES
FURTHER RESOURCES
INDEX
PICTURE CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
F
or a brief (and presumably agonizing) few hours, the Greek hero
Heracles held the whole weight of the World on his shoulders. In exchange
for relieving Atlas, the titan whose fate it was to support this intolerable
burden, Heracles received the stolen golden apples of the Hesperides, which
the hero needed to fulfil the 11th of his 12 labours. It is from this ancient
myth that we derive the title of the genre of books which are designed to
carry the whole weight of our knowledge of the world within their pages
(and which we hope will deliver their own bounty of golden nuggets of
information to us).
The Atlas of Atlases considers the origin and development of the atlas,
from its distant beginnings in mankind’s first attempts to map the world in
the ancient Near East in the fifth millennium BC (thus long predating the
Heracles story), to the digital mapping systems of today which can create a
bespoke map of a region in seconds, a task that once would have taken a
trained cartographer months to complete.
Maps have always carried an ideological freight. The very earliest were
attempts to understand and organize the world in terms that made sense to
the viewers. For example, the Babylonian Map of the World created around
600 BC (here), is not an exact description of terrain, nor a means to navigate
– aims to which far later maps aspired. It is instead a bold statement of the
position of its creator’s hometown at the centre of the world, a sentiment
which was still being echoed in the nineteenth century when British
cartographers used bold red shading to highlight the vast extent of their
empire. Maps could be statements of belief, of power, of agency, long
before they were viewed as an attempt to mirror reality on the ground.
Statue representing Atlas holding up the world, Kolkata, India
Trade and travel have long been two of the primary drivers of mapping.
As time went on, information gathered by merchants, pilgrims and
adventurers added texture to maps (though medieval cartographers were not
above adding fantastical elements such as dog-headed beings, dragons and
giants to their maps, despite the fact that no one could plausibly have
encountered them). Collections of maps in the forms of itineraries, views
and plans of cities, and single maps of countries or of the world (enhanced
by the European voyages of discovery from the fifteenth century)
approached but did not quite reach the bar of encompassing the whole
world within a book.
That was a development that had to wait for the mid-sixteenth century,
by which time the demands of navigators for a convenient form of detailed
mapping which they could hold in their hands (rather than have to unroll),
advances in printing, and the appetites of a growing class of literate city-
dwellers with money to spare led to the issuing of the first atlases. The
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (‘Theatre of the Globe of the World’, here) by
the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius, published in 1570, was the first
modern atlas, consisting of a series of regional maps, which reconciled
recent advances in knowledge with the time-hallowed system of the ancient
Roman geographer Ptolemy, all bound within a single cover. Before long it
was joined by a European atlas published by Gerardus Mercator (here)
(whose devising of a projection to display the curved surface of the Earth
on the flat surface of a map has made him perhaps the most famous
cartographer of all), which was the first publication to bear the world ‘atlas’
in its title.