Late Appearance of Early Arab Cartography. A 19th C. Manuscript Map by Az-Zayyānī: Its Toponymy and Its Vision of the World (original) (raw)

“Ecce! A 9th Century Isidoran T-O map labeled in Arabic”

Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, 2023

Did medieval European maps influence the Islamicate ones or vice versa? Or, were they mutually exclusive? Scholars fall on both sides of the divide and the question of Islamo-Christian cartographic connections remains elusive due to the lack of extant examples. This article focuses on the author of the Arabic notations on a rare ninth-century copy of Isidore’s geographical treatise of Etymologiae, and, in particular, on its T-O map with the aim of revealing that the notations were made by a distinguished Arab geographer of princely stock from caliphal Andalus and not just an unknown anonymous Mozarab - Iberian Christians including Christianized Iberian Jews who lived under Muslim rule in the southern sections of the Iberian peninsula from the early eighth century until the mid-fifteenth century including those who escaped to the Christian kingdoms of Aragon, Asturias, and Castile. I aim to prove that the majority of the Arabic annotations on a late eighth/ early ninth-century Visigothic Latin Isidorean manuscript of Isidore’s Etymologiae, Ms. Vitr. 014/003, housed at Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacionale de Espana (BNE) were made by Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbdallāh al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094), an Andalusi geographer of princely background, whose mid-eleventh century Islamicate geography Kitāb al-masālik wa al-mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms) influenced many a later medieval Islamicate geographical scholars. The most famous was Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 626/1229), an inveterate medieval Islamicate-world traveling scholar of Byzantine stock who relied heavily on al-Bakrī’s geography for his seven volume magnum opus, a geographical dictionary on countries and places called Muʿjam al-Buldān (Dictionary/Collection of Countries, completed 1224-1228) that is considered one of the most comprehensive medieval Arabic geographical dictionaries ever written because it provides mini-encyclopedic entries on thousands of sites in the Islamicate realm of the Middle Ages. If al-Bakrī used Isidore’s Etymologiae for his conclusion, then it could be asserted that Yāqūt and other medieval Islamicate geographers who relied on al-Bakrī’s may have been influenced a little by Isidore. This article aims to provide proof of significant scholarly connections between medieval European and Islamicate carto-geographical traditions centuries earlier than previously presumed. In doing so it adds to the story of transcultural connectivity across the greater Mediterranean that can be examined under the central question informing this latest volume by Albrecht Classen as to whether globalism existed in the pre-modern world.

Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration

Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, 2016

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo17703325.html Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century. Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles—iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.

'Alī al-Sharafīʼs 1551 Atlas: A Construct Full of Riddles

In the last decades, the study of map-making has been moving away from positivist assumptions about representational accuracy and objectivity. The critical cartography movement spearheaded by John B. Harley sought to integrate elements from post-structuralist textual analysis into the study of maps. 1 While these methodologies have remained rather marginal in the study of non-Western map-making, recently authors have made attempts to apply them to the Islamicate archive. 2 However, traditional taxonomies like East and West, Europe and Islam continue to be applied to map-making. Such dichotomies cannot adequately account for what is the most salient feature of the material we are concerned Kapitel 13