Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [17]
I understood, too, why myths persist across the centuries. They offer entertainment. They have an action-adventure quotient, they have an aura of wonder and mystery—and, best yet, they offer insights into the glories and fallibilities of the human heart, and how and why we live and die. As the conquest-obsessed, immortality-seeking Macedonian Alexander reaches the far side of his desert, two birds with human faces fly overhead and, in Greek, ask, "Why do you tread this earth looking for the home of the gods? For you are not able to set foot in the Blessed Island of the skies. Why do you struggle to rise to heaven, which is not within your power?"7 These were sensible birds, not about to buy into Alexander's proclamation in 329 B.C. that he was a god. For all his might, chirped the duo, the Macedonian could not transcend his mortality.
Following the mythical footsteps of Alexander led me from the University Research Library to the gates of the Huntington Library in San Marino, near Pasadena, where I was kindly (and capriciously?) accepted as a "Reader," a researcher with formal privileges.
Set in magnificent grounds, the Huntington is a great marble building guarded by solemn Greek gods and housing a major research library of some 2 million books and 6 million manuscripts. Though famed for its holdings on British history and literature, the Huntington proved to have a surprising amount of material on Arabia: rare and wonderful editions of The Arabian Nights, the entire personal library of the great explorer-linguist-historian Sir Richard Burton, and, of special interest, a collection of original editions and manuscripts of the maps of Claudius Ptolemy.
In the late 1400s European printing houses sought to outdo each other bringing out woodcut editions of Ptolemy's atlas of the known world. Bologna, 1477 ... Rome, 1478 ... Ulm, 1482 ... These Cosmographias, as they were called, were impressive. The editions at the Huntington were leather-bound and hand-colored, often in gold. Each turn of their vellum pages gave a whiff of the past, musty and mysterious. Locating "Tabla Sexta Asiae"—Ptolemy's map of Arabia—I saw that hundreds of sites and geographic features were accurately identified.
Yet understanding Ptolemy's Cosmographias was not a simple matter. It took me a while to grasp when and how they were compiled and what exactly they portrayed. To begin with, the Cosmographias were not at all what they first seemed. Though compiled in the 1400s, they were not the product of the Renaissance quest for knowledge and new horizons. Ptolemy was born in Greece and lived in Egypt circa 110–170 A.D. The Renaissance editions were, in substance, reissues of maps produced some thirteen hundred years earlier at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Great Library of Alexandria.
Sometime around 150 A.D., as overseer of the Great Library, Claudius Ptolemy set out to map the known world. For information, he drew on his library's estimated 750,000 manuscripts, among them a number of "Peripluses" (literally, "round trips"), records of coastlines compiled by seafaring Greek traders. In the case of Arabia, these traders also brought back accounts of inland sites gathered, not firsthand but from local tribesmen. These informants measured camel journeys from place to place in "stages," each equaling a day's ride. Calculating that a stage averaged thirty to thirty-five miles, Ptolemy did his best to estimate the whereabouts of inland cities and towns.
To plot this and his other accumulated data, Ptolemy not only envisioned the world as round, but invented and set upon it lines of longitude and latitude. Every site was then given identifying coordinates. In Arabia, for instance, Medina (then called Yathrib, or Lathrippa) was at 71° × 23°, and Saba Regio, the royal city of Sheba, was at 73° × 16°.8 In its original form, Ptolemy's atlas—including his map of Arabia—was a wonder of the world. Nothing so complete, so detailed, so accurate, had been done before. And therefore it was a very