When will the world end?

We can find seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic answers to this ques­tion, depend­ing on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If civ­i­liza­tion as we cur­rent­ly know it, cli­mate sci­en­tists’ worst-case sce­nario points toward some­where around 2100 as the begin­ning of the end. (New York mag­a­zine points out that it “prob­a­bly won’t kill all of us”). It’s pos­si­ble, but not inevitable.

If we mean the end of all life on earth, the fore­cast looks quite a bit rosier: we’ve prob­a­bly got about a bil­lion years, writes astro­physi­cist Jil­lian Scud­der, before the sun becomes “hot enough to boil our oceans.” Still not a cheer­ful thought, but per­haps many more crea­tures will take after the tardi­grade by then. That’s not even to men­tion nuclear war or the epi­demics, zom­bie and oth­er­wise, that could take us out.

But of course, for a not incon­sid­er­able num­ber of people—including a few cur­rent­ly occu­py­ing key posi­tions of pow­er in the U.S.—the ques­tion of the world’s end has noth­ing to do with sci­ence at all but with escha­tol­ogy, that branch of the­o­log­i­cal thought con­cerned with the Apoc­a­lypse.

The­o­log­i­cal thinkers have writ­ten about the Apoc­a­lypse for hun­dreds of years, and the world’s end was fre­quent­ly per­ceived as just around the cor­ner for many of the same rea­sons mod­ern sec­u­lar peo­ple feel apoc­a­lyp­tic dread: dis­ease, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, wars, rumors of wars, impe­r­i­al pow­er strug­gles, uncom­fort­ably shift­ing demo­graph­ics….

Take 15th-cen­tu­ry Europe, when “the Apoc­a­lypse weighed heav­i­ly on the minds of the peo­ple,” as Bet­sy Mason and Greg Miller write at the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic blog All Over the Map: “Plagues were ram­pant. The once-great cap­i­tal of the Roman empire, Con­stan­tino­ple, had fall­en to the Turks. Sure­ly, the end was nigh.”

While a niche pub­lish­ing mar­ket in the nascent print era pro­duced “dozens of print­ed works” describ­ing the “com­ing reck­on­ing in gory detail… one long-for­got­ten man­u­script depicts the Apoc­a­lypse in a very dif­fer­ent way—through maps.” As you can see here, these maps con­vey the unfold­ing of worse-to-wors­er sce­nar­ios in a num­ber of visu­al reg­is­ters: tem­po­ral, sym­bol­ic, geo­graph­ic, the­mat­ic, etc.

At the top, the nest­ed tri­an­gles depict the rise of the Antichrist between the years 1570 and 1600. The cen­tral con­cern for this author was the sup­posed glob­al threat of Islam. Thus, the next map, its “T” shape a com­mon Medieval world map device, shows the world before the Apoc­a­lypse, the text around it explain­ing that “Islam is on the rise from 639 to 1514.”

Then, we have a cir­cu­lar map with five swords point­ing at the edges of the known world, illus­trat­ing the author’s con­tention that Islam­ic armies would reach the edges of the earth. The oth­er maps depict the “four horns of the Antichrist,” above, Judge­ment Day, below, (the black eye at the bot­tom is the “black abyss that leads to hell”), and, fur­ther down, a dia­gram describ­ing “the rel­a­tive diam­e­ters of Earth and Hell.”

Made in Lübeck, Ger­many some­time between 1486 and 1488, the man­u­script is writ­ten in Latin, “but it’s not as schol­ar­ly as oth­er con­tem­po­rary man­u­scripts,” write Mason and Miller, “and the pen­man­ship is fair­ly poor.” His­to­ri­an of car­tog­ra­phy Chet Van Duzer explains that “it’s aimed at the cul­tur­al elite, but not the pin­na­cle of the cul­tur­al elite.”

Point­ing out the obvi­ous, Van Duzer says, “there’s no way to escape it, this work is very anti-Islam­ic,” a wide­spread sen­ti­ment in medieval Europe, when the “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” nar­ra­tive spread its roots deep in cer­tain strains of West­ern think­ing. This par­tic­u­lar text also “includes a sec­tion on astro­log­i­cal med­i­cine and a trea­tise on geog­ra­phy that’s remark­ably ahead of its time.”

Van Duzer and Ilya Dines have stud­ied the rare man­u­script for its insight­ful pas­sages on geog­ra­phy and car­tog­ra­phy and pub­lished their research in a book titled Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy. For all its the­o­log­i­cal alarmism, the man­u­script is sur­pris­ing­ly thought­ful when it comes to ana­lyz­ing its own for­mal prop­er­ties and per­spec­tives.

Mason and Miller note that “the author out­lines an essen­tial­ly mod­ern under­stand­ing of the­mat­ic maps as a means to illus­trate char­ac­ter­is­tics of the peo­ple or polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion of dif­fer­ent regions.” As Van Duzer puts it, “this is one of the most amaz­ing pas­sages, to have some­one from the 15th cen­tu­ry telling you their ideas about what maps can do.” This marks the work, he claims in the intro­duc­tion to Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy, as that “of one of the most orig­i­nal car­tog­ra­phers of the peri­od.”

The Apoc­a­lypse Map now resides at the Hunt­ing­ton Library in Los Ange­les.

via Nat Geo

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dicts the World Will End in 2060

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The age of the “uni­ver­sal his­to­ry” has come and gone. The genre flour­ished in times when it seemed pos­si­ble to assume a van­tage point out­side of time—to see pur­pose and pat­tern in thou­sands of years of human action. “It might be pos­si­ble,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “to have a his­to­ry with a def­i­nite nat­ur­al plan for crea­tures who have no plan of their own.” The view assumed by such a his­to­ry tends to exclude the cir­cum­scribed per­spec­tive of the view­er, or—in Ralph Wal­do Emerson’s famous, and oft-par­o­died, phras­ing, “all mean ego­tism van­ish­es. I become a trans­par­ent eye­ball; I am noth­ing; I see all; the cur­rents of the Uni­ver­sal Being cir­cu­late through me; I am part and par­cel of God.”

Few his­to­ri­ans today assume such a gods-eye-view, for bet­ter or worse, but with­out it, we would nev­er have seen the devel­op­ment of its visu­al ana­logue: the time­line map, an info­graph­ic form espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the 18th to the ear­ly 20th cen­turies, when thinkers from Schiller to Herder to Kant to Hegel to Marx to Weber pro­duced uni­ver­sal accounts of human his­to­ry that, to vary­ing degrees, pur­port­ed to account for vast his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments as the move­ment of imper­son­al forces toward some def­i­nite goal.

From the per­spec­tive of the time­line map, civ­i­liza­tions grow nat­u­ral­ly from each oth­er like branch­es from a tree, or flow one into anoth­er like a river’s trib­u­taries, or pro­duce, as in John B. Sparks “His­tom­ap,” col­or­ful puz­zles in which every piece has its neat­ly-assigned place….

We’ve fea­tured sev­er­al such maps here, like the His­tom­ap and Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle, both from the exten­sive map col­lec­tion of David Rum­sey. In the ver­sion you see here, we have a very unusu­al vari­a­tion on the theme—rather than a his­tor­i­cal time­line map, Edward Quin pro­duced in 1830 An His­tor­i­cal Atlas; In a Series of Maps of the World as Known at Dif­fer­ent Peri­ods.

The ques­tion, “as known by whom?” seems entire­ly rel­e­vant. The per­spec­tive of Quin’s atlas is god­like, gaz­ing down at the world through the clouds, but unlike Emerson’s trans­par­ent view, it does not “see all”—those clouds occlude the vision, restrict­ing it to indi­cate, as the Rum­sey col­lec­tion notes, “the expan­sion of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge over time.” You’ll have to read Quin’s text—avail­able here—to under­stand how he accounts for the chronol­o­gy and per­spec­tive.

The atlas begins in 2348 B.C. with “the Del­uge,” the myth­i­cal Bib­li­cal flood. Bib­li­cal his­to­ry inex­plic­a­bly gives way to the sec­u­lar. In a descrip­tion of the atlas by Don­ald A. Head rare books, this strange doc­u­ment “intend­ed to car­to­graph­i­cal­ly depict polit­i­cal change from the time of cre­ation to the year 1828,” when it reveals “the enlight­ened world in the midst of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion…. Divid­ed into twen­ty-one peri­ods… the clouds ful­ly dis­ap­pear at the nine­teenth peri­od: ‘A.D. 1783 at the sep­a­ra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, from Eng­land.” In his pref­ace, Quin explains his project in the typ­i­cal terms of uni­ver­sal his­to­ry, as illus­trat­ing “by the changes of colour the empires which suc­ceed each oth­er.”

Quin’s descrip­tion of the unchang­ing per­spec­tive he adopts might remind some mod­ern read­ers of cer­tain com­ic book char­ac­ters as much as of the vision of a god or a trans­par­ent, detached eye: “Like the watch­man on some bea­con-tow­er, he views the hills and peo­pled val­leys around him, always the same in sit­u­a­tion and in form, but every chang­ing aspect of the hours and sea­sons….” View Quin’s com­plete His­tor­i­cal Atlas, scanned in high res­o­lu­tion detail, at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

On our page here, see indi­vid­ual pages from the His­tor­i­cal Atlas. Or, up top, see an ani­mat­ed gif that lets you view all 21 maps in the atlas in chrono­log­i­cal order.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

Ground­break­ing Map from 1858 Col­or­ful­ly Visu­al­izes 6,000 Years of World His­to­ry

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

We start to under­stand his­to­ry by lis­ten­ing to it told to us ver­bal­ly, which lets us visu­al­ize it in our imag­i­na­tion. But how much more might we under­stand his­to­ry if we could see it ren­dered visu­al­ly right before our eyes? That ques­tion seems to have occu­pied the minds of cer­tain of the car­tog­ra­phers of 19th-cen­tu­ry Europe, those who want­ed to take their craft beyond its tra­di­tion­al lim­its in order to do for chronol­o­gy what it had long done for geog­ra­phy. Here we have one of the most glo­ri­ous such attempts in exis­tence, Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle — or at least the half cov­er­ing the civ­i­liza­tions of the East­ern Hemi­sphere — as held in the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

At first glance, all of the infor­ma­tion on the map might appear over­whelm­ing. But zoom in (look­ing at the cen­ter first, ide­al­ly from top to bot­tom) and you’ll soon grasp how Pick has depict­ed the his­to­ry of the world, as a mid-19th-cen­tu­ry French­man would con­ceive of it it, by draw­ing a kind of net­work of rivers and trib­u­taries.

The “sources” of ancient civ­i­liza­tions, like those of the Greeks, the Phoeni­cians, the Egyp­tians, and the Chi­nese, flow down to those of var­i­ous descen­dants — the Gauls, the Nor­we­gians, the Rus­sians, the Turks — and the mighty empires in which they pool, and arrive at the nations of the Danes, the Swedes, the Bel­gians, the Span­ish, the Per­sians, and oth­ers besides. In total the map cov­ers 6,000 years of his­to­ry, mov­ing from 4004 B.C. to 1856.

This tech­nique of visu­al­iz­ing his­to­ry has its prece­dents, includ­ing Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeit­en oder bildliche Darstel­lung der Welt­geschichte, pic­tured just above (and lat­er updat­ed by Amer­i­can map­mak­er Joseph Hutchins Colton as The Stream of Time in the 1840s and 1860s.) The David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion notes that, unlike Strass’ map, Pick­’s also has “vignettes of peo­ple, build­ings, his­tor­i­cal scenes and impor­tant places in the his­to­ry of the world” lined up on either side of the main con­tent. It thus illu­mi­nates the abstract and con­tin­u­ous cen­tral ren­der­ing of his­to­ry with rep­re­sen­ta­tive, dis­crete ones, show­ing view­ers every­thing from the Bib­li­cal flood and the Tow­er of Babel to the Great Sphinx of Giza and Agrip­pa’s Pan­theon to Notre Dame and the Arc de Tri­om­phe. It has a cer­tain fran­co­cen­trism, to be sure, but con­sid­er how many in Pick­’s time con­sid­ered France the cen­ter of human­i­ty’s genius. Pro­duc­ing a map as com­pelling as this one could­n’t have dimin­ished that image.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

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

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

From time to time, Amer­i­cans will talk about the mass killing, treaty-break­ing, impov­er­ish­ment, and forced removal or assim­i­la­tion of Native peo­ples in the U.S. as “a shame­ful peri­od in our his­to­ry.” While this may sound like the noble acknowl­edge­ment of a geno­ci­dal crime, it is far too half-heart­ed and disin­gen­u­ous, since these acts are cen­tral to the entire­ty of U.S. his­to­ry, from the first land­ing of Euro­pean ships on North Amer­i­can shores to the recent events at Stand­ing Rock and beyond. An enor­mous body of schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture tes­ti­fies to the facts.

For a thor­ough one-vol­ume sur­vey, see Rox­anne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indige­nous Peo­ples’ His­to­ry of the Unites States, a book that exhaus­tive­ly cites sev­er­al hun­dred years of well-doc­u­ment­ed events, like orders for exter­mi­na­tion and land theft under mil­i­tary lead­ers George Wash­ing­ton, Andrew Jack­son, and Army gen­er­al Thomas S. Jesup. Dun­bar-Ortiz shows how many U.S. mil­i­tary prac­tices and terms (such as the phrase “in coun­try”) came direct­ly from the so-called “Indi­an Wars.”

Take the prac­tice of “scalp hunt­ing,” encour­aged dur­ing the Pequot War and becom­ing rou­tine through­out the peri­od of New Eng­land set­tle­ment in the late 1600’s:

Boun­ties for Indige­nous scalps were hon­ored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indige­nous chil­dren became means of exchange, cur­ren­cy, and this devel­op­ment may even have cre­at­ed a black mar­ket. Scalp hunt­ing was not only a prof­itable pri­va­tized enter­prise but also a means to erad­i­cate or sub­ju­gate the Indige­nous pop­u­la­tion of the Anglo-Amer­i­can Atlantic seaboard. The set­tlers gave a name to the muti­lat­ed and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: red­skins.

The Amer­i­can foot­ball team cur­rent­ly bear­ing that name and rep­re­sent­ing the nation’s cap­i­tal, as Bax­ter Holmes shows at Esquire, pays trib­ute to the extreme bru­tal­i­ty of mur­der­ing Indige­nous peo­ple and using their scalps as cash. “This way of war,” writes Dun­bar-Ortiz, “became the basis for the wars against the Indige­nous across the con­ti­nent into the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.” 

In the GIF above, we see a dra­mat­i­cal­ly tele­scoped visu­al­iza­tion of the “vio­lent seiz­ing of Native Amer­i­cans’ land” after 1776, writes Dylan Matthews at Vox, doc­u­ment­ed by his­to­ri­ans like Dun­bar-Ortiz and Uni­ver­si­ty of Georgia’s Clau­dio Saunt, who, along with Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion, cre­at­ed the graph­ic as a sup­ple­ment for his book West of the Rev­o­lu­tion: An Uncom­mon His­to­ry of 1776. “The project’s source data,” write Saunt and Onion, “is a set of maps pro­duced in 1899 by the Bureau of Amer­i­can Eth­nol­o­gy,” a Smith­son­ian research unit that “pub­lished and col­lect­ed anthro­po­log­i­cal, archae­o­log­i­cal, and lin­guis­tic research… as the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry drew to a close.”

Blue areas show Indige­nous home­lands, red areas show reser­va­tions. The “time-lapse func­tion,” note the map’s cre­ators, “is the most visu­al­ly impres­sive aspect of this inter­ac­tive,” but you can access a “deep lev­el of detail” at the map’s site, such as the names of the hun­dreds of dis­pos­sessed and dis­placed nations and links to the his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion of their land “ces­sion.”

Many of the bound­aries are vague, write Saunt and Onion, “a broad approach that left a lot of room for cre­ative imple­men­ta­tion.” As Saunt puts it, “greater legal­i­ty and more pre­ci­sion would have made it impos­si­ble to seize so much land in so short a time,” just over 100 years shown here, from the 1776 found­ing to 1887, dur­ing which over 1.5 bil­lion acres were seized and occu­pied by fron­tier set­tlers and the U.S. army in what Saunt calls in the map’s title the “Inva­sion of Amer­i­ca.”

View the full map, search­able by place and Indige­nous nation, here. You can also select a sep­a­rate lay­er that shows cur­rent reser­va­tions. See above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

New Inter­ac­tive Map Visu­al­izes the Chill­ing His­to­ry of Lynch­ing in the U.S. (1835–1964)

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

We’ve all seen that famous New York­er cov­er sat­i­riz­ing a New York­er’s dis­tort­ed, self-cen­tered view of the world: Man­hat­tan occu­pies a good half of the image, rel­e­gat­ing the rest of Amer­i­ca (and indeed the world) to the sta­tus of out­er-out­er bor­oughs. What Saul Stein­berg did with a draw­ing in 1976, pio­neer­ing Roman geo­g­ra­ph­er Pom­po­nius Mela had done, in a much less comedic but much more accu­rate way, with text nine­teen cen­turies before. Writ­ing from his per­spec­tive under the reign of the Emper­or Gaius, Claudius, or both, Mela cre­at­ed noth­ing less than a world­view, which tells us now how the ancient Romans con­ceived of the world around them, its char­ac­ter­is­tics and its rela­tion­ship to the ter­ri­to­ry of the might­i­est empire going.

“Pom­po­nius Mela is a puz­zle, and so is his one known work, The Chorog­ra­phy,” writes Frank E. Romer in Pom­po­nius Mela’s Descrip­tion of the World. In that series of three books, which seems not to have con­tained any maps itself, Mela divides the Earth into two rough “hemi­spheres” and five zones, two of them cold, one of them hot, and two in between.

Pulling togeth­er what in his day con­sti­tut­ed a wealth of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge from a vari­ety of pre­vi­ous sources, he paint­ed a word-pic­ture of the world more accu­rate, on the whole, than any writ­ten down before. Schol­ars since have also praised Mela’s clear, acces­si­ble prose style — clear and acces­si­ble, in any case, for a first-cen­tu­ry text com­posed in Latin.

Var­i­ous maps, includ­ing the 1898 repro­duc­tion pic­tured at the top of the post (see it in a larg­er for­mat here), have attempt­ed to visu­al­ize Mela’s world­view and make it leg­i­ble at a glance. You can see more ver­sions at Cartographic-images.net, and the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion shows the world accord­ing to Mela placed along­side the world accord­ing to Ptole­my and the world accord­ing to Diony­sius Periegetes. Though Mela showed greater insight into the inte­gra­tion of the var­i­ous parts of the world known to the ancient Romans than did his pre­de­ces­sors, he also, of course, had his blind spots and rough areas, includ­ing the assump­tion that human beings could only live in the two most tem­per­ate of the cli­mat­ic zones he defined. Even so, the maps derived from his work pro­vide an infor­ma­tive glimpse of how, exact­ly, Romans saw their place in the world — or rather how, exact­ly, they saw their place in the cen­ter of it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

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

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.