Saturday, July 21, 2007

The Global Village and the MAP

Heinrich Bunting was a professor of theology at Hanover. His primary work is entitled, 'Itinerarium sacrae scripturae, published in 1581. It contained woodcut maps that included a world map (Cosmographia Universalis), as well as another world map in clover form. Other maps included Europe as the queen of the World and Asia as a winged horse.
Heinrich Bunting (1545-1606) knew the world didn’t really look like this. There are enough maps in his works (such as Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae) to indicate he knew the continents had an irregular, and not a symbolic shape.Yet he delighted in drawing other symbolic maps, examples of which can be anthropomorphic (Europe as a virgin) or hippomorphic (Asia as a winged horse). This particular map is a tribute to Buntings hometown Hanover, as the text above the map indicates: Die ganze Welt in einem Kleberblatt welches ist der Stadt Hannover meines lieben Vaterlandes Wapen (‘The Whole World in a Cloverleaf, Which Is The Coat of Arms of Hannover, My Dear Fatherland’).The map shows a world divided into three parts (Europe, Asia and Africa), connected at a single central point: Jerusalem. This is essentially still the same symbolic map of the world as the one first devised by Saint Isidore in the seventh century. Isidore’s ’T and O’-shaped map, itself inspired by Scripture, influenced Christian European mapmaking up until the age of discovery.
That age would be the one Bunting grew up in. He and his contemporaries were among the first generations of Europeans to know Isidore was wrong – but it’s almost impossible to resist imagining how this centuries-old archetype of a map took a while to be erased out of the common memory of cartographers.
Bunting’s map is nice in that it combine symbolism with realism: in the bottom left corner a piece of land is named America. Strange is that a similar detached piece of territory at the top of the map is labelled Denmark and Sweden. Bunting must have known that Denmark was contiguous with the European Continent…
Some named countries and places (not all are easily readable) on the three continents are, left to right:
Europe: Hispanien (Spain), Mailand (Milan), Welschland (Welsh? Walloon? Country), Frankreich (France), Lothringen (Lorraine), Roma (Rome), Deutschland (Germany), Ungarn (Hungary), Polen (Poland), Preussen (Prussia), Griechenland (Greece), Türken (Turks)
Africa: Lybia, Egypten, Morenland (Land of the Moors), Königreich Melinde (Kingdom of Melinde) , Caput Bonae Spes (Cape of Good Hope)
Asia: Siria, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Chaldea, Persia, India
Among the earliest cartographic oddities are the famous maps from Heinrick Bunting's unusual travel book based on the Bible. This woodblock map of Asia is presented as the mythical winged horse, Pegasus. The horse is drawn fairly realistically, so that a good deal of imagination is required to view the map. The head represents Asia Minor with the mouth at Istanbul. The wings portray Central Asia and Siberia with the Caspian Sea laying horizontally between the wings and the saddle. Persia is delineated on the horse blanket with the forelegs forming Arabia. The hind legs represent the Indian and Malay peninsulas. A ship, large creature and sirens are in the seas( via stangemaps)

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the info!

    Just found out that "Welschland" in the European part of the map is a French-speaking part of Switzerland. This is a modern nick-name but the region fits geographically quite good between Milan and Rome.

    Sveta

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