Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [3]
In fact, I dislike hypsometric maps to this day. They look stodgy and old-fashioned to me, something you might see a matronly 1960s schoolteacher straining to pull down in front of a chalkboard.* But it’s more than that. I have to admit that I still like maps for their order and detail as much as for what they can tell us about the real world. A good map isn’t just a useful representation of a place; it’s also a beautiful system in and of itself.
Maps are older than writing, so of course we have no written account of some Newton’s-apple moment in cartography, some prehistoric hunter-gatherer saying, “Hey, honey, I drew the world’s first map today.” Every so often, the newly discovered “world’s oldest map!” will be announced to great fanfare in scientific journals and even newspaper headlines. But whether the new old map is a cave painting in Spain or a carved mammoth tusk from Ukraine or petroglyphs on a rock by the Snake River in Idaho, these “discoveries” always have one thing in common: a whole bunch of annoyed scholars arguing that no, that’s not a map; it’s a pictogram or a landscape painting or a religious artifact, but it’s not really a map. When a cryptic painting was unearthed from the Neolithic Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük in 1963, its discoverer, James Mellaart, proclaimed the eight-thousand-year-old artifact to be a map of the area. The domino-like boxes drawn at the bottom of the wall represented the village, he claimed, and the pointy, spotted orange shape above them must be the nearby twin-coned volcano of Hasan Dag. Cartographers went nuts, and historians and geologists even combed the painting for clues as to the history of prehistoric eruptions at the site. There’s just one hitch: subsequent researchers have decided that the spotted thingy probably isn’t meant to be a volcano: it’s a stretched leopard skin. That’s not lava spewing forth, just a set of claws. Ergo, the mural was never a map at all. Archaeologists’ embarrassing inability to tell a leopard and a volcano apart turns out to be the same syndrome that had me seeing coastlines in my grandparents’ wood paneling. It’s called “cartacacoethes”: the uncontrollable compulsion to see maps everywhere.
The Çatalhöyük mural. Volcanoes or leopard? You make the call.
Many early protomaps do share some similarities with modern cartography, but it’s a blurry line: their primary significance was probably artistic or spiritual. The essential traits we associate with maps today evolved gradually over millennia. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances don’t appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth” maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.*
But if the historical “discovery” of maps was a slow and gradual process, the way modern mapheads discover maps as children is more like the way cavemen must have discovered fire: as a flash of lightning. You see that first map, and your mind is rewired, probably forever. In my case, the Ur-map was a wooden puzzle of the fifty states I got as a Christmas present when I was three—you know the kind, Florida decorated with palm trees, Washington with apples. On my puzzle, Nebraska, confusingly, wore a picture of a family of pigs. The two peninsulas of Michigan were welded together into a single puzzle piece, so that I believed for years afterward that Michigan was a single land-mass in the lumpy shape of a lady’s handbag.
For other kids, it was the globe in Dad’s study, or the atlas stretched