Posts from — November 2007

An enthusiastic article appears in today’s Antiques and Arts Online, describing some of the many maps to behold at “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” at The Field Museum in Chicago through January 28.

Attendees can discover how early maps were made, how mapmaking has changed over time as well as see how map technology like GPS is being used by scientists today.

[tags]maps, antique maps, map exhibits, chicago festival of maps, map festivals[/tags]

The 800 year old Tabula Peutingeriana has been deemed a “Memory of the World” by UNESCO, and was briefly put on display today in Vienna today.

The map is composed of 11 segments of parchment totalling 7m long by 30 cm high. It was made at the end of the 12th century as a medieval facsimile imitating the book scroll used by Roman administrators and couriers. Although the map contains many distortions and inaccuracies, it covers the British Isles to north Africa.

Read the story here and here.

[tags]antique maps, historic maps, roman maps, Tabula Peutingeriana, ancient maps[/tags]

The Vermont State Archives is putting 18th Century maps online. People will get a chance to view them and, by putting them online, lawyers, surveyors, landowners and historians will be able to analyze old roads, boundary lines and titles.

The Minnesota Historical Society has also put old maps online where they act as tools for surveyors and other land professionals.

Read more about the projects in this article. 

An article by Mohamed Elmasry outlines a few of the contributions and achievements made to many fields by the Islamic culture, including many in the of cartography:

The leading 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi, a star product of the brilliant Islamic culture that flourished in Sicily, was commissioned by the Norman King Roger II to compile a world atlas. 

…knowledge gained by Muslim geographers and cartographers was passed to the West largely through translators appointed by Christian kings, who were eager to advance their own nations by enriching them with Islamic scientific and intellectual achievements.

In his article yesterday in the New York Times, “From the Glove Compartment to the Shelf“, William Grimes goes over several recent books centred around antique maps and cartography, (including the aforementioned Vincent Virga’s “Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations”.) Grimes notes how maps have “a strange charisma unrelated to practical value.”

The strange appeal of maps may have something to do with the recent “surge” in books on cartography. In addition to Virga’s book, other books covered in the article include Mark Ovenden’s “Transit Maps of the World,” “The Mapmaker’s Opera,” by Béa Gonzalez, “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,” the catalog for a current exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The “Complete Map of Taiwan Province of the Great Qing Dynasty“, a 259 year old map of Taiwan from the Qing Dynasty, will go up for auction at the Beijing Poly International Auction House in Beijing on November 30, with a reserve price of 3 million yuan (US$400,000).

The map, completed in AD 1748 on the orders of the Chinese emperor, was drawn using the brushwork of traditional Chinese paintings. More details can be found in this article.