Ancient Maps: 2000-1500 BCE near Hampi, Karnataka, India

From the Bangalormirror.com
Prehistoric man drew maps
Archaeologists from Bangalore discover maps near Hampi; unlike modern maps that rely on technology, ancient man banked on his eyesight and memory
Niranjan Kaggere and Suchith Kidiyoor
Posted On Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 12:14:31 AM

Satellite technologies have made the task of locating places easily, thanks to GPS or global positioning systems.  However, a team of researchers from Bangalore have unearthed maps in Karnataka that date back to 1500-2000 BC.

A team from the Archaeological Survey of India has found the proto-historic man, who had inhabited the region around Tungabhadra river near Hampi, had drawn maps similar to those found on the internet.  The map was depicted on the roof of their cave dwellings. What was once thought to be a megalithic burial site with just paintings of animals and humans, is proof of the proto-historic man’s cartographic skills.

The discovery by deputy superintending archaeologist T M Keshava and his colleagues a few months ago in the caves of Chikramapura village on the Tungabhadra river’s left bank (Koppal district) has drawn the attention of many researchers across the country.  Keshava’s finding is believed to be the first-ever aerial map of a region drawn by a pre-historic man.

While the present-day maps rely heavily on satellite images and other optical instruments for precision, the proto-historic man had only his eyes and memory to bank on.

While paintings of animals such as cows, hunting scenes and human figurines are common across pre-historic settlements, only the Chikramapura village caves, also called Kadebagilu rock shelters, feature maps.

“We were stunned by the discovery,” said Keshava. “A previous study in 1984 at these caves by scholars like Dr R Sundara had concluded they were just megalithic burials, but we can now say that they are maps,” he said.

According to Keshava, the pre-historic man obtained a bird’s eye view of an area by climbing a hillock and standing at a vantage point. He would then observe his settlement — houses, pathways, waterbodies, etc. With these images in mind, he would paint them in his cave. “We compared them with the present maps and we were dumbstruck with the findings,” he said

DECIPHERING MAP

Deciphering the exact meaning of the paintings was not easy for the experts. Reaching the site itself was an arduous task as it was surrounded by a hillock overlooking a valley and accessible only through a narrow passage.

Researchers found many similarities with the modern-day maps. The triangular marks used to represent hillocks on these maps are similar to the symbols used by surveyors.

Further, the narrow passage has been compared to the figure of a human being, while the ladder-like symbol indicates a pathway. It took Keshava and his team almost a year to confirm the findings.

The paintings have been depicted on granite and done with red laterite clay. The circular-shaped settlement is 35 metres in radius. “However, due to the exposure to elements, some parts of the paintings have got spoilt,” said an archaeologist.

LOCAL TIP-OFF

The experts say credit for the discovery goes to some shepherds of Anegundi village. “We were camping at Hampi late in 2008 when some youngsters led by Veeresh and his friends told us about these paintings,” said Keshava.

“Later, along with colleagues G S Narasimhan, M V Visveswara, C S Sheshadri and others, we visited the spot and undertook a detailed study around the site for more than three months. Though many rock paintings were reported from Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh. There were no sketches that could be identified as maps of proto-historic settlements.
This is the first such painting,” he said.

The paintings, however, are in danger of being lost forever, unless measures are taken quickly to safeguard them. Areas surrounding rock shelters have become quarrying centres and this could destroy the paintings.

Archaeologists believe the area could be turned into a tourist site as it is close to Hampi, a world heritage centre. It will also ensure the paintings are well preserved.

Water Route Between Oceans in Nicaragua?

This is interesting, and seems feasible.

From newkerala.com
Explorer finds evidence of ancient waterway linking Atlantic to Pacific

London, Feb 13 : An explorer claims to have found evidence of an ancient water route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which existed hundreds of years before the Panama Canal was conceived.

Hailed by some as the eighth wonder of the world, the Panama Canal is a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific.

Now, according to a report in The Times, Colonel John Blashford-Snell, an explorer, has claimed to have found evidence of another, more ancient, water route between the oceans — one that existed hundreds of years before the Panama Canal was conceived.

Several hundred miles to the north-west, in Nicaragua, the route — which involves rivers, a lake and flood plains — was discovered by Blashford-Snell, who was out on an expedition.

"With effort it is navigable. But it is going to need more investigation," said the veteran explorer.

He is now planning another expedition to discover whether it is really possible to take a boat from one coast to the other without touching land.

If so, it will prove something remarkable: that the ancient maps which show a passage between the two oceans — and which have long been dismissed as fanciful — had a greater claim to accuracy than was realised.

A 1774 map by Thomas Kitchin, for example, appears to show a channel that would allow boats to pass between the oceans. [Note: I could not locate a 1774 Kitchin map of Central America online, this one is dated 1777, from Altea Gallery.]

Colonel Blashford-Snell's expedition set out to find evidence that a canal once existed in Nicaragua.

No records of such a canal exist, although there were plans for a Nicaragua canal before the argument for Panama won the day.

Whether Colonel Blashford-Snell found evidence of ancient canals is arguable, but the case for a natural water passage is strong, according to the explorer.

Colonel Blashford-Snell, who spent two weeks in Nicaragua last month with a team of four, said he found places where the head waters of different river systems — one flowing east into the lake, another flowing west into the Pacific — were only a few hundred yards apart.

The seemingly unanswerable question, however, was how to get from one river to the other.

Then, by chance, he met a local fisherman who helped him to unlock the puzzle.

Mariano Hernandez told them he had made the journey from the centre of the isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific down to the lake to go fishing — a journey made possible during the rainy season when the land turns into a lake up to 2m deep.


--ANI

Ancient Maps: The Ricci Map

On rare map, China is the centre of the world January 12 2010 at 01:17PM (Image: detail of Ricci map showing Florida, Gulf Coast, Central America and Cuba)A rarely seen 400-year-old map that identified Florida as "the Land of Flowers" and put China at the centre of the world went on display on Tuesday at the Library of Congress. The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was the first Westerner to visit what is now Beijing in the late 1500s. Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli. The map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world's highest mountain and longest river. The description of North America is brief with mentions of "humped oxen" or bison, wild horses and a region named "Ka-na-ta." [Canada?] Several South American places are named, including "Wa-ti-ma-la" (Guatemala), "Yu-ho-t'ang" (Yucatan) and "Chih-Li" (Chile). Ricci gave a brief description of the discovery of the Americas. "In olden days, nobody had ever known that there were such places as North and South America or Magellanica. But a hundred years ago, Europeans came sailing in their ships to parts of the sea coast, and so discovered them." The Ricci map gained the nickname the "Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography" because it was so hard to find. This map - one of only two in good condition - was purchased by the James Ford Bell Trust in October for $1 million, making it the second most expensive rare map ever sold. It had been held for years by a private collector in Japan and will eventually be housed at the Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. "I don't want to take away from Ricci's other accomplishments, but we think this is pretty spectacular," said Ford W Bell, co-trustee of the fund started by his grandfather James Ford Bell, founder of General Mills. Bell, who's also president of the American Association of Museums, said the map symbolises the first connection between Eastern and Western thinking and commerce. The Bell Library's focus "is on the development of trade and how that drove civilisation - how that constant desire to find new markets to sell new products led to exchanges of knowledge, science, technology and really drove civilisation," Bell said. "So (the map) fits in beautifully." The map was being shown publicly for the first time in North America. It measures 12 feet by 5 feet (3.6 meters by 1.5 meters), printed on six rolls of rice paper. The Library of Congress rarely exhibits artifacts it does not own because its holdings are so vast, but curators made an exception for the Ricci map. It will be on view in Washington through April alongside another of the world's rarest maps, the Waldseemuller world map, which was the first to name "America." Later, it will be shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum said the Ricci was one of the most important maps ever produced. It's extraordinary, she said, "for us to now be able to look back and see what was going on in China at a time when different parts of the world really knew so little about each other." The library also will create a digital image of the map to be posted online for researchers and students to study later this year. The map also was the first to incorporate both Eastern and Western maps. In a statement, Ti Bin Zhang, first secretary for cultural affairs at the Chinese Embassy, said the map represents "the momentous first meeting of East and West" and was the "catalyst for commerce." No examples of the map are known to exist in China, where Ricci was revered and buried. Only a few original copies are known to exist, held by the Vatican's libraries and collectors in France and Japan. - Sapa-AP See also: Rare map, with China at the Center, Goes on Display

Waldseemuller Map Back in the News

From BBC News Magazine Page last updated at 11:40 GMT, Wednesday, 28 October 2009 The map that changed the world [Annotations on the map graphic: 1) First use of America on map, after explorer Amerigo Vespucci. 2) The Pacific not confirmed until six years after map made. 3) Old World shown as the ancients saw it. 4) New eastern sea route to India. 5) The legendary island of Taprobane. 6) Reference to legendary king Prester John.] Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun. Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas. Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography, they announced to their readers the astonishing news that the world did not just consist of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three parts of the world known since antiquity. A previously unknown fourth part of the world had recently been discovered, they declared, by the Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, and in his honour they had decided to give it a name: America. But that was just the beginning. Waldseemuller and Ringman in fact had written the Introduction to Cosmography merely as a companion volume to their magnum opus: a giant and revolutionary new map of the world. It's known today as the Waldseemuller map of 1507. The Waldseemuller map was - and still is - an astonishing sight to behold. Drawn 15 years after Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic, and measuring a remarkable 8ft wide by 4½ft high, it introduced Europeans to a fundamentally new understanding of the make-up of the earth. The map represented a remarkable number of historical firsts. In addition to giving America its name, it was also the first map to portray the New World as a separate continent - even though Columbus, Vespucci, and other early explorers would all insist until their dying day that they had reached the far-eastern limits of Asia. The map was the first to suggest the existence of what explorer Ferdinand Magellan would later call the Pacific Ocean, a mysterious decision, in that Europeans, according to the standard history of New World discovery, aren't supposed to have learned about the Pacific until several years later. World of four parts The map was one of the first documents to reveal the full extent of Africa's coastline, which had only very recently been circumnavigated by the Portuguese. Perhaps most significant, it was also one of the first maps to lay out a vision of the world using a full 360 degrees of longitude. In short, it was the the mother of all modern maps: the first document to depict the world roughly as we know it today. In the years after 1507, copies of the Waldseemuller map began turning up at universities all over central Europe. There, displayed in classrooms and discussed by geographers and travellers alike, its vision of a four-part world insinuated itself into the popular imagination. Waldseemuller himself would later record that 1,000 copies of the map had been printed, a very substantial number for the day. But the rapid pace of geographical discovery meant that copies of the map were soon discarded in favour of newer, more up-to-date pictures of the world, and by 1570 it had all but vanished from memory. When the map maker Abraham Ortelius that year published a comprehensive list of his cartographical predecessors and their maps, he mentioned Waldseemuller but made no reference to the great 1507 map. Last surviving copy Fortunately, one copy did survive. Sometime between 1515 and 1517, the Nuremburg mathematician Johannes Schoner acquired a reprint of the map, bound it into an oversized folio, and made it part of his reference library. In the years immediately afterward, Schoner studied the map carefully, but as the decades wore on, as newer maps became available, and as his own interests shifted from geography to astronomy, he consulted the folio less and less. By the time he died, in 1545, he probably hadn't opened it in years. The last remaining copy of the Waldseemuller map, beautifully preserved in Schoner's folio, had begun a long slumber - and wouldn't be roused again for some 350 years. As is so often the case with historical treasures, the map was rediscovered by accident. In the summer of 1901, while doing research in the library of Wolfegg Castle, in southern Germany, a Jesuit geography teacher named Joseph Fischer stumbled across the Schoner folio and quickly realized what he had found. Within months his discovery was international news. "LONG SOUGHT MAP DISCOVERED," a New York Times headline announced in March of 1902. "EARLIEST KNOWN RECORD OF THE WORD AMERICA FINALLY BROUGHT TO LIGHT." The map remained in the Wolfegg collection for the next hundred years - until 2003, when the US Library of Congress announced, with great fanfare, that it had acquired the map from the castle's owner for the staggering sum of $10m. It was the highest price the library had ever paid for anything in its vast collection. Proudly, in its press release the library referred to the map as America's "birth certificate". Value for money? Was it worth the price? Some observers grumbled that it was not. But now that the map is on public display at the library, scholars and generalists alike have been looking at it with fresh eyes—and what is coming into focus is a document that is far richer, far stranger, and much more historically valuable than had previously been imagined. The map turns out to be an enormously revealing patchwork of several different kinds of maps: the world as depicted by the ancient Greeks and Romans, as diagrammed by Europe's Christian theologians, and as charted by the sailors who plied the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. There's more. The name America, for example, very probably represents not just a tip of the hat to Amerigo Vespucci but also a multilingual pun that can mean both "born new" and "no-place-land" - a playful coinage that seems to have inspired Sir Thomas More to invent his new world across the ocean, one meaning of which was also "no-place": Utopia. The map itself seems also to have made a powerful impression on none other than Nicholas Copernicus, who began his landmark On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by describing America as he saw it depicted on the map, and who then went on to argue that the existence of a fourth part of the world meant that the traditional model not only of the earth but also the cosmos would have to be rethought. For the only surviving copy of the map that not only gave America its name and introduced the New World to Europe but also helped Copernicus rethink the cosmos, $10m seems a very reasonable price to pay.

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Another article at The Boston Globe: A new world The saga of the 16th-century map that gave America its name and paved the way for a modern view of the cosmos By Michael Washburn Globe Correspondent / November 1, 2009

Map Reveals Pre-Columbian History of Ancient Mexicans

From the Latin American Tribune Caracas, August 25, 2009 Ancient Map Offers Key to Mesoamerican History By Francisco MiravalDENVER – A map painted by Mexican Indians in the mid-16th century has become a key document for understanding the migration of Mesoamerican peoples from their land of origin in what is now the U.S. Southwest, according to a scholar at Harvard University Divinity School. “Five years of research and writing (2002-2007) by 15 scholars of Mesoamerican history show that this document, the Map of Cuauhtinchan 2, with more than 700 pictures in color, is something like a Mesoamerican Iliad and Odyssey,” Dr. David Carrasco told Efe in a telephone interview. “The map tells sacred stories and speaks of pilgrimages, wars, medicine, plants, marriages, rituals and heroes of the Cuauhtinchan community, which means Place of the Eagle’s Nest (in the present-day Mexican state of Puebla),” he said. The map, known as MC2, was painted on amate paper made from tree bark probably around 1540, just two decades after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.Through images and pictographs, the map recounts the ancestral history of the Mesoamerican people of Chicomoztoc, meaning Place of the Seven Caves, followed by their migration to the sacred city of Cholula and the foundation of Cuauhtinchan, probably in 1174. The document was apparently meant to resolve a dispute between the indigenous peoples and the conquistadors as to land ownership in Cuauhtinchan and surrounding areas, following the evangelizing process that began in 1527 and was intensified in 1530 with the building of the town’s first convent, which seems to have entailed the dismantling of the Indian temple. “The history begins in a sacred city under attack and continues with the people of Aztlan coming to the city’s rescue. In compensation they are granted divine authority to travel long distances until they find their own city in the land promised them. Their travels are guided by priests, warriors and divinities,” Carrasco said. That sacred city and the original land of Aztlan would have been in what is today the Southwestern United States. MC2 remained in Cuauhtinchan until 1933, the year it was sent to a regional museum and later came into the possession of an architect.In 2001, philanthropist Espinosa Yglesias acquired the map and shortly afterwards contacted Harvard’s Center of Latin American Studies to ask who could analyze the map. Harvard chose Carrasco. The result of five years of interdisciplinary studies was the publication of the 479-page book “Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Map of Cuauhtinchan No. 2.” Rest of article.

Is This a 10,000 Year Old Map in Stone?

From Newscientist.com Found: A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain 05 August 2009 by Charles Choi and Catherine Brahic Magazine issue 2720. MODERN humans have got it easy. Anyone with a computer can look up just about any location and within seconds bring up a map complete with step-by-step directions from A to B. The internet and centuries of map-making mean getting to, say, the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain is child's play. "But imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, returning to an area they had not been to for a long time. How do you find a particular cave, especially if the vegetation has changed and its entrance may be masked?" asks independent archaeologist Paul Bahn. The answer may be that hunter-gatherers had their own maps. A team of archaeologists have matched etchings made 14,000 years ago on a polished chunk of sandstone in northern Spain to the landscape in which it was found. They claim to have the earliest known map of a region in western Europe - a prehistoric hunting map. The rock, roughly hand-sized and 14,000 years old, bears a mess of overlapping etchings. It was found in a cave in Navarre on the southern side of the Pyrenees and it took Pilar Utrilla of the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and colleagues the better part of 10 years to disentangle the lines and make sense of them (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.005). Rest of article. Examples of old maps from the article: The oldest map found in Europe, discovered in Pavlov in the Czech Republic, is about 25,000 years old. It depicts a mountain, river, valleys and routes around the region. A schematic 6200-year-old drawing of Çatalhöyük in Turkey may be the oldest known city map. The oldest known map of the world dates to 600 BC. It is inscribed on a clay tablet discovered in the city of Sippar in southern Iraq, is centred around Babylon and shows the world as a circle surrounded by "bitter water": the salty sea. The oldest complete star atlas, measuring 2 metres across, was discovered in China in 1907. It dates from the 7th century AD and marks the position of 1339 stars, including clearly recognisable groups such as Orion and the big dipper.

Vinland Map Back in the News

I love old maps, I find them - and their stories - absolutely fascinating! The Vinland Map is one of the most controversial. Is it real? Is it a fabulous fake? Article at Reuters Vinland Map of America no forgery, expert says Fri Jul 17, 2009 5:09pm EDT By John Acher COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday. Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America -- a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find. Doubts about the map lingered even after the use of carbon dating as a way of establishing the age of an object. "All the tests that we have done over the past five years -- on the materials and other aspects -- do not show any signs of forgery," Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, told Reuters. He presented his team's findings at an international cartographers' conference in the Danish capital Friday. The map shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island "Vinilanda Insula," the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, now linked by scholars to Newfoundland where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000. Larsen said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States. He said wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound. He said claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink. American scholars have carbon dated the map to about 1440, about 50 years before Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492. Scholars believe it was produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland. The Vinland Map is not a "Viking map" and does not alter the historical understanding of who first sailed to North America. But if it is genuine, it shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus's voyage. It was bought from a Swiss dealer by an American after the British Museum turned it down in 1957. It was subsequently bought for Yale University by a wealthy Yale alumnus, Paul Mellon, and published with fanfare in 1965. The lack of a provenance has caused much of the controversy. Where the map came from and how it came into the hands of the Swiss dealer after World War Two remain a mystery. (Editing by Tim Pearce)

The Hereford Mappa Mundi

Not to be confused with the Axis Mundi, but just as there are many axis mundi (what's the Latin plural for mundi???), there are also several Mappa Mundi - which is fascinating in and of itself. A Google search under "Mappa Mundi" and then clicking on "Images" reveals an amazing richness of the medieval maps.

I'm probably not explaining this too well, but as I understand it, the operating principal behind the Axis Mundi is to fix a center point out of which all other things flow outward. I recall reading that the May Pole represented the Axis Mundi (the pole through the center of the Earth, forming the center of the universe).

From Hereford Web Pages

The Mappa Mundi is unique in Britain's heritage - an outstanding treasure of the medieval age which reveals how 13th century scholars interpreted the world in spiritual and geographical terms. The map is undated but bears the name of "Richard de Haldingham e de Lafford", whom some historians have identified as Richard de Bello, Prebendary of Lafford in the diocese of Lincoln during the late 13th century. Together with evidence interpreted from the content of the map, a date of around AD 1290 is considered reliable.

Construction
The Mappa Mundi was drawn on a sheet of vellum 64 x 54 inches, supported by an oak frame, with the actual map contained within a circle 52 inches in diameter. Most of the writing was with black ink, with red and gold leaf used for emphasis, and blue or green for rivers and seas . The Red Sea however, was depicted in red. Mountain ranges were indicated by scalloped designs and towns by walls and towers.

Maps like the Mappa Mundi were produced in considerable numbers throughout the medieval period in "studios" dedicated to that purpose. A number of monks would have worked under a master such as Richard of Haldingham, making numerous copies of this and other manuscripts used by the Church for tuition.

Derivation
The map projection followed a convention derived from Roman times in which all parts of the known world were represented in relation to Rome. As was appropriate to the time, the Mappa Mundi world was similarly circular, but with Jerusalem at the centre. The map was based on the writings of Orosius, a scholar of the fifth century AD and a pupil of Saint Augustine, who wrote a great work to confute the pagans. The seventh book of the Ormesta, as it was known, contained a description of the world and the Mappa Mundi was intended to illustrate this "summa", or compendium of knowledge. This is indicated by the title in the right hand corner, "Descriptio Orosii de Ornesta [Ormesta] Mundi Sicut Ostenditur", which translated means Orosius' History of the World. This in turn relied on earlier writings, including the Bible and those of the Roman historian Pliny.

Content
Superimposed on the geographical elements can be seen drawings and descriptions illustrating man's history and the marvels of the natural world. The map contains descriptions of many of the imagined inhabitants of distant lands, such as the Phanesii who are represented as having huge ears in which they wrapped themselves against the cold. In other respects, the map is quite accurate. It shows the source of the River Oxus, an important landmark since classical times, situated correctly near Samarkand. However, it is shown flowing into the Caspian rather than the Aral Sea.. India is described lavishly as having "5000 cities", providing images of a land of fabulous wealth and diversity. Here, a multitude of mythological races, beasts and amazing phenomena jostle for space and we are indebted to the cartographer for finding enough room for his drawing of the Sciapod, an extraordinary being who sheltered himself from the heat of the sun with his single enormous foot. Hereford appears in the map alongside the River Wye, its location marked by a drawing of the Cathedral.

At the top of the map is depicted Christ in Majesty sitting at the Day of Judgement. To His Right and Left angels summon the blessed and turn away the unrepentant. At His Feet the Blessed Virgin intercedes for those who have shown devotion to her. Among the chosen is shown a king wearing a crown and a bishop with his mitre. Behind them come supplicants on their knees in prayer.

Purpose
To the modern mind much of the content seems so wildly fanciful that it is difficult to believe that the same people who created the vast stone cathedrals, abbeys and castles of the medieval period, should have been persuaded so easily by the map's incredible claims. We may be wrong in imagining that the users of such maps were so impressionable. The map's limited value as a geographical tool was more than compensated for by its worth as a means of instructing the largely illiterate laity. Above all the confusion, doubt and bewildering complexity of the world as shown in the map was the dependable figure of Christ. Here was shown something worth believing in, the remedy for doubt and despair, and the path to salvation.

An enlarged image (in black and white) can be found here.

12th Century Copy of Roman Map Displayed

Hola darlings, and happy Sunday!

I survived the first winter storm that hit the area yesterday about 11:30 a.m. I had things to do yesterday and was out and about, hoping to make it home before the first blast of winter hit - which was forecast for 1:00 p.m. Didn't make it, unfortunately. I got pelted with icy little beads of snow blowing out of the southeast (!) and the half mile walk home from the bus stop was pretty miserable. But once I was home, I was settled in for the nonce. The storm got increasingly worse as the day wore on, and I felt only pity for anyone caught outside in it.

Of course there were the usual fender-benders and spin-offs because idiots in their cars insist on driving at "dry pavement" speeds. One person was killed in a vehicle accident, and two jets skidded off runways - one in Milwaukee and one in Madison. Fortunately, no one was injured in those incidents. Lots of flights were cancelled and travellers were stranded. There is a window of opportunity for them to leave MKE and MAD this morning before the weather turns frigid and everything freezes rock hard, if the places they are going to are still open; the storm has headed east, promising to wreck havoc all the way to the Atlantic.

There is a lot of icy, water-filled snow outside now, and I dread the thought of shovelling out. I shovelled off the front porch in the dark this morning before skating my way down the driveway to fetch the Sunday newspaper. Half a shovel-full of slush weighs about a ton. After I make this post, I'll be headed to the store to stock up on more mixed nuts for the squirrels; they were banging on the doors and windows this morning demanding something more than peanuts and sunflower seeds - spoiled little brats! They have me so well trained, I will risk life and limb on the ice-crusted snow to go get them some more vittles!

(Map above: Visitors walk on a carpet depicting the "Tabula Peutingeriana" as they look at original fragments of the ancient roadmap of the Roman Empire dating back to the late 12th or early 13th century in the national library in Vienna November 26, 2007.
REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader)

I am fascinated by ancient maps and eagerly read any news that comes out about anything related to the topic. I always wonder if there might not be some obscure hint on one of the ancient maps that might steer us in the direction of finding the origins of chess. Unfortunately, when images of such maps are published in the press, they are too small to study. Perhaps someday I wil be able to study full-size facsimiles. Here is a feature article about a copy of an ancient Roman map - a beautiful map, by the way:

From Reuters UK
Twelfth-century copy of Roman map displayed
Mon Nov 26, 2007 4:07pm GMT

By Karin Strohecker
VIENNA (Reuters) - An 800-year-old map, the sole surviving copy of a chart used by the Roman Empire's courier service, was put on show for just one day on Monday after being accorded "Memory of the World" status by UNESCO.

The parchment scroll, nearly 7 metres (yards) long, could only be displayed briefly because too much light would damage it, before it was returned to storage at Austria's National Library, where it has been since 1738.

Named Tabula Peutingeriana after the German antiquarian who owned it in the 16th century, the map shows roads linking some 4,000 settlements as well as mountains, rivers and forests from Spain in the west to China in the east.

From north to south, the map covers the British Isles to north Africa. But because the scroll is just over 30 cms (12 inches) high, the north-south axis is greatly compressed, depicting the Mediterranean Sea as a small stretch of blue squeezed between today's Croatia and Italy.

"It's a bit like when you look at a map of the Vienna underground system -- it's not accurate but it gives you a good idea of how to get around," Andreas Fingernagel of the National Library told journalists at the showing.

The document, preserved in 11 segments, was written on parchment at the end of the 12th century as a medieval facsimile imitating the book scroll used in Roman antiquity.

The original would have been used by Roman administrators and couriers, telling them the choice of roads, how long it would take to go somewhere and, through a series of icons, how comfortable their next rest stop would be.

The copy was probably made in southern Germany at the end of the 12th century, said Fingernagel.

The missing original -- none are known to have survived -- probably dated from the first half of the 5th century, and so far only half of the 4,000 settlements have been identified, said Fingernagel.

Globally, 158 documents have UNESCO Memory of the World status, which aims to preserve and disseminate valuable archive treasures and library collections. UNESCO also grants World Heritage status to historic architecture.
(Editing by Tim Pearce)