June 2018
Vol. VI, No. 6
The Origins of Maps in the Near East
By Bleda S. Düring
We live in a world of which every corner has been mapped, and in which we constantly use maps to navigate our way. Yet this use of maps is relatively recent. Maps originated in the ancient Near East but why aren’t there more?
There is nothing self-evident about maps. They require a reduction of complex landscapes to a flat and simplified synoptic representation drawn at a much reduced scale. Maps are so deeply engrained in western cultures that we take them for granted, and this blinds us from realising that they are in fact complex abstractions with a highly specific cultural genesis.
Maps as we know them today do not originate from navigational needs. Studies of European mapping programmes from the 18th Century onwards demonstrate that creating accurate maps was undertaken by governments seeking to enhance their tax revenues from the countryside. Our present use of maps for navigation is a secondary usage of a technology developed for very different purposes, similar to modern GPS.
How relevant are these considerations of maps as originating in taxation, for older maps? I argue that mapmaking in earlier periods, including Mesopotamia and the Greek world cannot be linked to state control. This explains why early maps are both relatively rare and are often concerned with relatively abstract subjects such as the world as a whole.
The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük has the claim for the world’s oldest map, dating to ca. 6400 BCE. The relevant image features among the sites’ evocative wall paintings. James Mellaart, the excavator, eloquently described the scene as showing a town in the foreground with rectangular houses packed tightly together, as in the excavated settlement, with an erupting double peaked volcano looming behind the town, which he identified with Hassan Dağ.
The Çatalhöyük Map. Redrawn by Joanne Porck.
Curiously, Mellaart’s interpretation has been widely accepted by both archaeologists and cartographers. But the painting is not a map. It shows the supposed town from an oblique perspective, whereas the volcano is shown in profile. Thus, it would resemble the town landscape as seen by a bird. Further, the Hassan Dağ volcano is some 130 kilometers from the site and cannot be seen from it. Various scholars have raised the possibility that we are really looking at two distinct wall painting episodes that have visually become part of a single panel only due to chance factors of preservation. Both the ‘volcano’ and the ‘town’ have strong parallels at the site itself when seen in isolation. In summary, the Çatalhöyük map is problematic when subjected to close scrutiny of its constituent components.
For the earliest true maps we need to turn to Bronze Age Mesopotamia. At the end of the third millennium BC, we have building plans to scale, occurring for example on the lap of Gudea, the ruler of Lagash. The earliest true maps that we know of date to the Late Bronze Age, including the famous Nippur map dating to around 1400 BCE.
The Nippur map. Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht, Explorations in the Bible Lands, (Philadelphia, 1903), p. 518.
Nippur map, hand copy, from S.N. Kramer, The Sumerians, (Chicago, 1963).
Nippur map overlay on modern topographic map of the site. Drawing by Augusta McMahon. (https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/nippur-sacred-city-enlil-0).
Like in the Greek world, the art of mathematics was well developed in Mesopotamia. It seems plausible to link mathematics and mapmaking, given that producing a map without recourse to measured surveying techniques in combination with an understanding of mathematics is impossible. Indeed one can only marvel at the close correspondence between the Nippur map and the plan produced by the archaeological mission to Nippur. The map shows the river, a canal, the city wall and its gate, and various large structures including the main temple, all in accurate proportions.
Despite the detail and accuracy achieved in the Nippur map, mapmaking does not seem to have been of great importance in Mesopotamia. Surveys of the extant evidence of maps do not include more than a dozen examples, a figure which contrasts starkly with the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia (the British Museum alone has some 130.000).
Babylonian ‘map of the world,’ British Museum 92687, Sippar, 6th century (?) BCE. (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=404485001&objectId=362000&partId=1#more-views).
Map of Nippur, ca. 1500 BCE, University Museum B13885 (https://www.penn.museum/collections/object_images.php?irn=98408).
Why were maps not more widely used in Mesopotamia? First, navigating Mesopotamian landscapes would have been a relatively straightforward affair. The landscape was dotted with distinctive cities and towns, and the main rivers and canals would have provided both an easy means of transport and orientation. Thus, maps would have not have been required for navigation. Further, in Mesopotamia mapping as a means of increasing taxation revenues would have made little sense. Whereas in Europe the main resource for income generation was good quality land, the situation was radically different in Mesopotamia. There, the main resource was labour rather than land – which was abundant. Thus, in Mesopotamia land obtained its value from the labour invested in it, for example by creating and maintaining irrigation channels with which it could be farmed. Thus, producing detailed maps of landholdings in the countryside would have been a rather pointless exercise, as there was no clear relationship between land per se and productivity.
The Quay of Assur. Drawn by Walter Andrae.
To sum up, mapmaking in Mesopotamia is probably best understood as akin to the mathematical exercises of which many examples have been found on cuneiform tablets: a pastime towards improving mathematical skills and knowledge rather than something that served practical purposes such as navigation or taxation.
Mathematical tablet, ca. 1800 BCE. (http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m446-03/pl322/322.jpg).
It is remarkable that maps remain relatively rare in Mesopotamia. This fact runs counter to a by now well established idea that mapmaking was linked with states seeking to enhance control and exploitation of their populations. Moreover, maps do not seem to have been used for navigational purposes, or one would again expect more of them to have been found. Thus it would seem that both uses of maps are secondary developments, in which mapmaking for navigation became important at first for navigating the open seas where there are relatively few other ways of orienting oneself, and mapmaking as a tool for control and exploitation developed in particular historical contexts characterised by centralising states depending heavily on agriculture for taxation.
Instead, the few maps found in Mesopotamia, like those of the better investigated case of classical Greece and the Hellenistic world, at first developed as a pastime for the intelligentsia interested in the mathematical problem of how they could establish the dimensions of the world and how those could be best represented in a synoptic image.
Bleda S. Düring is Associate Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology at Leiden University.
For further reading:
Düring, B. S. 2017. Reconsidering the origins of Maps in the Near East. In From the Four Corners of the Earth, edited by D. Kertai and O. Nieuwenhuyse. Münster, Ugarit Verlag, pp. 3-81.
