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Cartography Quotes

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Cartography Quotes

“People always ask me, they say, “Jarod, what do you do with your money?” Well, I base my financial decisions on the annual migratory patterns of Bigfoot, because maps are the new charts, as taught by the esteemed Ponce de Leon School of Youth, Wealth, and Duck Farming. Next time you’re in St. Augustine, Fl, or here in The Ozarks, you should stop on by and learn to become your own cartographer.”

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Book:Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast
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“I partly base my financial decisions on the annual migratory patterns of Bigfoot, because maps are the new charts, as taught by the esteemed Ponce de Leon School of Beauty, Youth, Wealth, and Duck Farming, but what do you say to a man who wants to be his own cartographer?”

WealthMoneyYouthInvestingAbsurdDucksSurrealDuckBigfootCartography
Book:Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.
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“From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing! I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations. Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them. And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.”

GodTruthHumilityDivineTheologyMapsPhilosphyCartographyLimtations
Author:Jamie Arpin-Ricci
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“I like to ensure that I have music and art all around me. My personal favorite is old maps. What I love about old maps is that they are both beautiful and imperfect. These imperfections represent that some of the most talented in history were still very wrong (early cartography was very difficult). As the majority of my work is analysis and advisory, I find it a valuable reminder that my knowledge is limited. No matter how much data or insight I have, I can never fully “map out” any business. Yet, despite the incompleteness of these early cartographers, so much was learned of the world. So much done and accomplished. Therefore, these maps, or art pieces, serve as something to inspire both humility and achievement. This simple environmental factor helps my productivity and the overall quality of my work. Again, it’s like adding positive dice to my hand that are rolled each day.”

ArtInspirationHumilityProductivityImperfectionWork EnvironmentCartographyEvan ThomsenOld Maps
Book:Don’t Chase The Dream Job, Build It: The unconventional guide to inventing your career and getting any job you want
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“The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any of the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, may well have been more advanced than the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of culture before the 18th Century of the Christian Era. It was in the 18th Century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th Century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th Century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.”

ScienceHumanityCivilizationEvidenceAncientMapsIce AgeDeep Human HistoryAncient CivilizationsCartography
Book:Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age
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“The most important evidence for the age of the maps [...] is to be found in those showing the Antarctic, especially in the maps of Mercator, Piri Re'is, and Oronteus Finaeus. All of these maps appear to show the continent at a time when there was a temperate climate there. Some geological evidence, in the form of three sedimentary cores from the bottom of the Ross Sea, has been presented to suggest that such a warm period may indeed have existed there down to about 6,000 years ago.”

EvidenceMapsGeologyDeep Human HistoryAncient CivilizationsCartographyDeep HistoryPiri Re Is
Book:Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age
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“We do not know whether [Hipparchus] drew maps--perhaps he did--but the truth is that in his day he could not possibly have applied his projections to the globe because the necessary data, in the form of correct findings of latitudes and longitudes of a very large number of places over the known areas of the earth, were not available. This was the weakness of all Greek cartographic science. In Greek times mathematics was in advance of mechanical instrumentation: There was no instrument for easily and correctly determining the longitude of places. However, the Piri Re'is and the other maps we went on to study, seemed to suggest that such an instrument or instruments had once existed, and had been used by people who knew very closely the correct size of the earth. Moreover, it looks as if this people had visited most of the earth. They seem to have been quite well acquainted with the Americas, and to have mapped the coasts of Antarctica.”

ScienceHistoryMapsDeep Human HistoryAncient CivilizationsCartographyGreeksAncient Maps
Book:Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age
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“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658”

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Author:Jorge Luis Borges
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“Every history is a map: it leaves out some features of reality, and singles out others which are thought to display its essential structure. When a historical map is drawn, as ours is, from specific groups outward, it has a special character. The process of mapping becomes the surveyor's process of triangulation, and the reference points are important less in themselves than as marks for triangulation-that is, as points from which to take a bearing. This is the principle which has guided us whenever we have had to make a choice between men; which of them, we have asked, best expresses the essence of his time.”

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Author:Bronowski Jacob
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“If we impose on a map of the earth a 'world grid' with Giza (not Greenwich) as its prime meridian, then hidden relationships become immediately apparent between sites that previously seemed to be on a random, unrelated longitudes. On such a grid, as we've just seen, Tiruvannamalai stands on longitude 48 degrees east, Angkor stands on longitude 72 degrees east and Sao Pa stands out like a sore thumb on longitude 90 degrees east -- all numbers that are significant in ancient myths, significant in astronomy (through the study of precession), and closely interrelated through the base-3 system. So the 'outrageous hypothesis' which is being proposed here is that the world was mapped repeatedly over a long period at the end of the Ice Age -- to the standards of accuracy that would not again be achieved until the end of the eighteenth century. It is proposed that the same people who made the maps also established their grid materially, on the ground, by consecrating a physical network of sites around the world on longitudes that were significant to them. And it is proposed that this happened a very long time ago, before history began, but that later cultures put new monuments on top of the ancient sites which they continued to venerate as sacred, perhaps also inheriting some of the knowledge and religious ideas of the original navigators and builders.”

HeritageAncestorsDeep Human HistoryCartographyLost CivilizationsMonumentsIce Age CivilizationsLost Knowledge
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.”

MapsCartography
Book:Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
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“Even if we admit that running-survey and compass techniques were somehow being used on ships to produce sea-charts as early as the thirteenth century (which most historians of science would rule out) we still come against the unexplained enigma of the miraculous and fully formed de novo appearance of the Carta Pisane. As we've seen, not a single chart pre-dates it that demonstrates in any way the gradual build-up of coastal profiles across the whole extent of the Mediterranean that must have occurred before a likeness as perfect as this could have been resolved. It is possible, of course, through the vicissitudes of history, that all the evidence for the prior evolution of portolans before the Carta Pisane has simply been lost. If that were the case, however -- in other words if the Carta Pisane is a snapshot of a certain moment in the development of an evolving genre of maps, and if we accept that all earlier 'snap-shots' have been lost, wouldn't we nevertheless expect that such an 'evolving genre' would have continued to evolve after the date of the earliest surviving example? Whether we set the date of the Pisane between 1270 and 1290 [...] or a little later -- between 1295 and 1300 -- as other scholars have argued, we've seen that there was no significant evolution afterwards. Now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the enigmatic Pisane is an unsigned chart and scholars have no idea who the cartographer might have been.”

EnigmaCartographyLost CivilizationsPortolan Charts
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“If the normal portolano is indeed derived from the lost atlas of Marinus of Tyre, then it follows that other high-quality maps of regions much further afield than the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and indeed a world map, might also have been preserved by the Arabs -- for we know from Ptolemy's testimony that other Marinus maps, including a world map, did once exist. It will therefore do no harm to keep an open mind to the possibility that the portolan world maps that began to appear during the century after the Carta Pisane, might also have been influenced by earlier 'Tyrian sea-fish' maps of Phoenician origin. Christopher Columbus, whose passionate belief in lands across the Atlantic lead to his 'discovery' of the New World, seems to hint at a Phoenician connection when he describes one of the inspirations for his journey: 'Aristotle in his book On Marvellous Things reports a story that some Carthaginian merchants sailed over the Ocean Sea to a very fertile island ... this island some Portuguese showed me on their charts under the name Antilia.' Antilia first appears on a portolan chart of 1424. It is a mysterious presence there, a riddle.”

HeritageCartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age CivilizationsPortolano Charts
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Though [Marco] Polo himself states frankly that he has never visited Japan -- and thus that what he has to say about it is second-hand and perhaps inaccurate -- the notion of the mysterious island kingdom of Cipango that he planted in European consciousness at the end of the thirteenth century was later one of several powerful influences that spurred Christopher Columbus forward in his crossings of the Atlantic at the end of the fifteenth century. This was so because Columbus -- underestimating the circumference of the earth and knowing nothing of the existence of the Americas or of the Pacific Ocean -- believed that he could reach Cipango, and thence the Chinese mainland beyond, by sailing directly westwards across the Atlantic from Europe. Columbus is also likely to have calculated that Cipango would be reached after only a relatively short journey towards the west -- for he had read Marco Polo, who describes Cipango, erroneously, as lying 'far out to sea' fully 1500 miles to the east of the Chinese mainland (the true distance is nowhere much more than 500 miles).”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“1. Ceylon was believed by Marco Polo to have been one-third larger in the past than it had become by his day -- with extensive lands to the north of the present island said to have been 'submerged under the sea'. In the process its circumference was reduced in size from 3600 units of measurement to 2400 units of measurement, i.e. by one-third. 2. Maps were in use amongst mariners in the Indian Ocean when Marco Polo was there -- either mappamundi or mariners' charts depending on the translation -- which continued to show the one-third larger, antediluvian Ceylon. On the first of the two points above -- the one-third reduction in the size of Sri Lanka by flooding -- we cannot deny, having studied the inundation history of south India and Sri Lanka in earlier chapters, that the tradition which Marco Polo here preserves and passes down to us is essentially correct when set within the time-frame of the end of the last Ice Age. Since approximately 7700-6900 years ago, when the last remnants of its landbridge to south India were inundated, Glenn Milne's maps suggest that there have been no significant changes in Ceylon's size. Prior to 7700 years ago the picture is very different, and as we go back through 8900 years ago, 10,600 years ago, 12,400 years ago, and 13,500 years ago, we note a progressive enlargement of Sri Lanka, exclusively in the north around the landbridge to south India, resulting from the lowered sea-level of those epochs. At its greatest extent the enlargement is of the order of one-third.”

CartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age Civilizations
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 -- are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography -- as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy -- then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us. If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even the maps of Marinus of Tyre, said to have been superior to those of Ptolemy) is intriguingly enhanced by the first of Alfonso de Albuquerque's two letters. It introduces a 'piece of a map' that Albuquerque has acquired in his travels in the Indian Ocean and that he is sending to King Manuel. The fragment, he explains, is not the original but was 'traced' by Francisco Rodrigues from: 'a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove islands [effectively a world map, therefore], the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [an unidentified people, thought by some to be the Japanese, or the inhabitants of Taiwan and the Ryukyu archipelago] with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write.”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The light-shaded Porcupine Bank can easily be seen directly west of Ireland, in exactly the same place, and roughly the same size, as the legendary Hy-Brasil on the portolan charts. The entire bank lies between 40 and 200 metres beneath the surface, and most of it (probably more than 600 square kilometres) would have been exposed at the Last Glacial Maximum, 21,000 years ago.”

CartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age CivilizationsDelugesSea Level RisesPortolan Charts
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions -- at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Colombus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri's note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil: 'Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Colombus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, 'Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places.' They said, 'Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness.”

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Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and was known to Columbus. Indeed, as one commentator has observed, if his chart had been based on the Behaim scenario, 'Columbus could not even have known of the whereabouts of the New World, much less discover it.' Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when he was going to get there: 'Now and then Pinzón and Columbus consult and deliberate -- mutually discuss their route. The map or chart passes not infrequently from the one captain to the other; the observations and calculations as to their position are daily recorded, their conduct and course for the night duly agreed upon. On the eve of their due arrival Columbus issues the order to stay the course of the armada, to shorten sail, because he knew that he was close to the New World and was afraid of going ashore during the obscurity of the night ... How does he know the place and the hour? 'His Genius' says the Columbus legend in explanation. But the Map? The critics will ask, what did it contain? Whose was it? What did that map contain that was so frequently passed from Columbus to Pinzón during the voyage?' I've presented my case that what the map may have contained was an accurate but ancient, and indeed antediluvian, representation of the coast and islands of Central America, notably the north-south-oriented Great Bahama Bank island, which Columbus -- no less ignorant than any of his contemporaries about the existence of the Americas -- took to be an accurate map of part of the coast of China and the islands of Japan.”

DiscoveryExplorationGeographyCartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age CivilizationsLost Knowledge
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“It is Professor Fuson's view that Chinese charts of Taiwan and Japan were the source of the 1424 portrayal of Antilia and Satanaze. He makes a very persuasive case that such charts are likely to have originated from the seven spectacular voyages of discovery made by the famous Ming admiral Cheng Ho between 1405 and 1433. [...] Much suggests, however, that Robert Fuson is correct to deduce that the charts of Taiwan and Japan that somehow found their way into the hands of Zuane Pizzagano in Venice in 1424 must have originated from the voyages of Cheng Ho. Yet there is a problem. [...] Antilia and Satanaze on the 1424 chart don't show Taiwan and Japan as they looked in the time of Cheng Ho, but rather as they looked approximately 12,500 years ago during the meltdown of the Ice Age. Is it possible that Cheng Ho, too, like Columbus, was guided in his voyages by ancient maps and charts, come down from another time and populated by the ghosts of a drowned world?”

DiscoveryExplorationGeographyCartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age CivilizationsLost Knowledge
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“I worked in the background for most of my career as a scientist, but I have absolutely no resentments. I thought I was lucky to have a job that was so interesting. Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles—that was something important. You could only do that once. You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet.”

ScienceFeminismGeologyScience And ChangeCartographyOceanography
Author:Marie Tharp
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“I think our maps contributed to a revolution in geological thinking, which is some ways compares to the Copernican revolution. Scientists and the general public got their first relatively realistic image of a vast part of the planet that they could never see. The maps received wide coverage and were widely circulated. They brought the theory of continental drift within the realm of rational speculation. You could see the worldwide mid-ocean ridge and you could see that it coincided with earthquakes. The borders of the plates took shape, leading rapidly to the more comprehensive theory of plate tectonics.”

ScienceGeologyScience And ChangeCartographyOceanography
Author:Marie Tharp
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“Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.”

RevolutionAnarchismAnarchistInsurrectionCartographyHakim BeyPeter Lamborn WilsonHeterotopiaTemporary Autonomous Zones
Book:TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
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“A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.”

MapsCartographyGeograpy
Book:The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
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“Maps? There are no maps. I go by dark ways, unclean ways. If such a map existed, it would be beyond price. Nameless cults would battle in the low places of the earth for such a price. Dreamers would starve themselves in endless visions seeking its location. Such a map would have to be drawn on the skin of a black he-goat, in virgin's blood, with a brush made of dragon's eyelashes. The cartographer would go mad, and it would profane the hands that touched it.”

MapsCartography
Book:Digger, Volume Four
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“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

IfsMenBelieveBookCharacterBodyDiesNamesI BelieveWishRichRelationshipTreeBuildingLoversTasteMen And WomenRiversI Believe InLabelsMapsTribesCavesRichnessRich ManContainingCartography
Author:Michael Ondaatje
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