FYI: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press has made avail­able online — at no cost –five vol­umes of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy. Or what Edward Roth­stein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en.” He con­tin­ues:

Peo­ple come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their per­cep­tions of how its ele­ments are con­nect­ed and of how they should move among them. This is pre­cise­ly what the series is attempt­ing by sit­u­at­ing the map at the heart of cul­tur­al life and reveal­ing its rela­tion­ship to soci­ety, sci­ence, and reli­gion…. It is try­ing to define a new set of rela­tion­ships between maps and the phys­i­cal world that involve more than geo­met­ric cor­re­spon­dence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.

If you head over to this page, you will see links (in the left mar­gin) to five vol­umes avail­able in a free PDF for­mat. The image above, appear­ing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. Cre­at­ed by Oronce Fine, the first chair of math­e­mat­ics in the Col­lège Roy­al (aka the Col­lège de France), the map fea­tures the world drawn in the shape of a heart. A pret­ty beau­ti­ful design. Below you can find links to the indi­vid­ual vol­umes avail­able online.

Vol­ume 1

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy: Car­tog­ra­phy in Pre­his­toric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediter­ranean

Vol­ume 2: Book 1

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al Islam­ic and South Asian Soci­eties

Vol­ume 2: Book 2

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al East and South­east Asian Soci­eties

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Tra­di­tion­al African, Amer­i­can, Arc­tic, Aus­tralian, and Pacif­ic Soci­eties

Vol­ume 3: 

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Renais­sance: Part 1

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Renais­sance, Part 2 

Vol­ume 4:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment

Vol­ume 5:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry, Forth­com­ing

Vol­ume 6:

Car­tog­ra­phy in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry

If you buy any of the print­ed ver­sions on Ama­zon, each edi­tion will cost you $400-$500. As beau­ti­ful as the book prob­a­bly is, you’ll like­ly appre­ci­ate this free dig­i­tal offer­ing.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceu­ta. If you’ve nev­er heard of it, or can’t quite recall its loca­tion, you can eas­i­ly find out by search­ing for it on your map appli­ca­tion of choice. Back in the twelfth cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, you might have had to con­sult an image of the known world engraved on a 300-pound, six-and-a-half-foot wide sil­ver disk — but then, if you had access to that disk, you’d know full well where Ceu­ta was in the first place. For it belonged to King Roger II of Sici­ly, who’d com­mis­sioned it from the geo­g­ra­ph­er, trav­el­er, and schol­ar Abū Abdal­lāh Muham­mad ibn Muham­mad ibn Abdal­lāh ibn Idrīs al-sharif al-Idrīsī — more suc­cinct­ly known as Muham­mad al-Idrisi — per­haps Ceu­ta’s most accom­plished son.

“Al-Idrisi stud­ied in Cor­do­ba and trav­eled wide­ly as a young man, vis­it­ing Asia Minor, Hun­gary, the French Atlantic coast, and even as far north as York, Eng­land,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs. In 1138, Roger II “invit­ed al-Idrisi to his court at Paler­mo, pos­si­bly to explore whether he could install the Mus­lim noble­man as a pup­pet ruler in the bits of North Africa under his domin­ion, or in Spain, which he hoped to con­quer.” The project that result­ed from this meet­ing, fif­teen years of work lat­er, was “a new and accu­rate map of the world.” In addi­tion to knowl­edge gained on his own exten­sive trav­els, Al-Isidiri con­sult­ed ancient sources like Ptolemy’s Geog­ra­phy and “inter­viewed ship’s crews and oth­er sea­soned trav­el­ers, but retained only those sto­ries on which all were in agree­ment,” leav­ing out the myth­i­cal tribes and fan­tas­ti­cal crea­tures.

In addi­tion to the grand disk, Al-Idrisi cre­at­ed an atlas con­sist­ing of 70 detailed, anno­tat­ed maps called Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq āl-āfāq. That Ara­bic title has been var­i­ous­ly trans­lat­ed — “the book of pleas­ant jour­neys into far­away lands,” “the excur­sion of the one who yearns to pen­e­trate the hori­zons,” “the excur­sion of one who is eager to tra­verse the regions of the world” — but in Latin, the book was sim­ply called the Tab­u­la Roge­ri­ana. Alas, writes Jacobs, “the orig­i­nal Latin ver­sion of the atlas (and the sil­ver disk) were destroyed in 1160 in the chaos of a coup against William the Wicked, Roger’s unpop­u­lar son and suc­ces­sor.” Still, Al-Idrisi did man­age to bring the Ara­bic ver­sion back with him to North Africa, where it became an influ­en­tial exam­ple of sci­en­tif­ic car­tog­ra­phy for the Islam­ic world.

A glance at the Library of Con­gress’ Ger­man fac­sim­i­le from 1928 at the top of the post reveals that Al-Idrisi’s world map looks quite unlike the ones we know today. He put south, not north, at the top, the bet­ter for Islam­ic con­verts to ori­ent them­selves toward Mec­ca. “His Europe is sketchy, his Asia amor­phous, and his Africa man­ages to be both par­tial and over­sized,” Jacobs notes, but nev­er­the­less, he got a lot right, includ­ing such lit­tle-known regions as the king­dom of Sil­la (locat­ed in mod­ern-day Korea) and cal­cu­lat­ing — approx­i­mate­ly, but still impres­sive­ly — the cir­cum­fer­ence of the entire Earth. We might con­sid­er pay­ing trib­ute to Al-Idrisi’s achieve­ments by mak­ing a trip to his home­town (a Span­ish-held city, for the record, at the very tip of Africa north-east of Moroc­co), which seems like a pleas­ant place to spend a few weeks — and a promis­ing start­ing point from which to pen­e­trate a few hori­zons of our own.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.