The word "map," I discover to my satisfaction, has its root in the Latin for tablecloth or napkin. This conjures up for me scenes of ancient postprandial enthusiasm: of bones, walnut shells, and the salt cellar being marshaled about the table to represent features of the known world and of the exotic regions beyond. I like to think of the heroic extrapolations from past exploration that occurred over such displays through the ages: that Jerusalem (the salt cellar, I'd say) was of a certainty the center of the world; that the Penobscot River was the Northwest Passage, or the Hudson was; or, failing that, that they, or some other eastern river, surely, led to the yet-to-be-discovered great Western Sea (salt cellar again) and thence to the Pacific.
In a geographical sense, maps have become increasingly accurate, culminating in those based in space photography. But, of course, maps have also become poorer for having lost the spiritual, allegorical, and mythical dimensions they had when the earth was less real than time, the arena in which the great narratives of salvation were being played out. To be sure, even beyond limiting what may be said to be real, accuracy itself still has a large element of presumption. Maps are, and always have been, ways of asserting power and even seizing it. They are a means of defining who exists and who doesn't. Indeed, maps serve so many purposes that their history cannot be summed up; they offer glimpses into other realities that go beyond words.
Countless such glimpses and richly detailed visions shaped by other cultures fill the enthralling pages of "Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations," by Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress (Little, Brown, $60). The book, which includes over 200 maps, most from the Library of Congress's collections, is divided into sections beginning with the ancient Mediterranean world. That starting point has been chosen because it was the remnants of maps from this era and region that provided the base for the first modern atlas, Abraham Ortelius's "Theatrum Orbis Terrarium." Published in 1570, in the heyday of the age of exploration, it was disseminated widely, being printed on movable type, and published not only in Latin, but in divers vulgar tongues. The maps here show the Mediterranean world as visualized by Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Christians, and Muslims. From there it travels around what was the known world for centuries in the West: Asia, Africa, and Europe itself. Then, following the course of Western discovery, the book moves on to the Americas, Oceania, and Antarctica.
It soon becomes clear, however, that region and chronology are arbitrary devices for ordering these bewilderingly diverse documents and artifacts. Practically every map here is stunning in some way, in alien sensibility, multiplicity of elements represented, or inventiveness in depicting space; in exquisiteness or eccentricity of detail; in partisanship or subversion. In fact, most maps insist as much as depict, as in Johann Ruysch's 1507 map, which tries to preserve the Ptolemaic notion of a three-part world yet acknowledge the discovery of America.
Some of the most arresting maps are those in which the visions of two cultures are mingled to rhetorical effect. Such is Antoine du Pinet's map of Europe from 1564. Du Pinet, a French Protestant, has reversed the positions of north and south, thus, as Virga points out, orienting Europe in the Islamic manner and removing the map's focus from "the Mediterranean world, where Catholicism reigned supreme," to the north, where Protestantism was gaining sway.
There are banned maps and secret ones, too. There's a map of a sheep's liver (for divining the future). There are maps that project emotions, among them aggression, peace, and pride of possession. The 1893 map of "The Shoe Capital of the World," Haverhill, for instance, is a beautifully etched monument to industry, order, and prosperity. On the other hand, the map known as the Peutinger Table is an astonishing portrayal of imperial dominion. It is a medieval copy of a fourth-century Roman map that follows Roman roads from Britain to what is now Sri Lanka. It shows towns, settlements, harbors, rivers, depots, religious sites, and other notable details and is, itself, about 20 feet long. It represents, as Virga puts it, "a metaphor for the reach of the Roman Empire."
And, indeed, that particular map has reached through time into Jean-Claude Izzo's "The Lost Sailors" (translated, from the French, by Howard Curtis; Europa Editions, paperback, $14.95). Izzo, best known for the procedurals that make up the "Marseilles Trilogy," was, until his death in 2000, intent on capturing the life of his native Marseilles and preserving it in writing. In this novel, we discover its melancholy Greek hero, Diamantis, poring over "the Peutingeriana" (a modern copy, presumably, as the original medieval copy is in the Austrian National Library, in Vienna). "In ancient times maps were called 'the periods of the earth,' " Diamantis explains. "Between this map and the ones we use for navigation, the earth has really changed a lot. Ports have changed their names, and so have the seas that wash them. Some have disappeared completely. If their story isn't written now it never will be."
Diamantis is one of the last three sailors to remain on the Aldebaran, a freighter that has been stranded on a remote berth in the city's port, unable to leave until the owner's debts have been discharged. What ensues is a tale of the three men's lives and loves, the former shaped and the latter doomed by maritime absence. In fact, Izzo's novel is something of a palimpsest. The travels of the Romans, and of the Greeks before them, have left their traces over which the lives of his characters are now etched. Though the stories unfold in today's world and against a backdrop of one of the world's great port cities - now in decline and festering with crime and racial tension - they nonetheless resonate with the Mediterranean's Homeric narrative.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
