Writing this series of posts about maps and map makers has brought home that people have been making maps or pictures of places for a very long time, but it has also brought home that what people were making and the reasons they were making them has changed dramatically over the centuries. This change in purpose has led academics to wonder whether maps really were as ubiquitous across human history and they suggest that maps as we know them today really only came into existence in the 15th or 16th century.

What do they base this upon?

First of all it’s the paucity of maps that have remained in existence from earlier times. Sure, time would have destroyed many maps, but surely more than the few we have would have survived, just as art and sculpture and manuscripts survived. Secondly, those ‘maps’ that have survived from earliest times, had purposes that were different than maps today. Some represented a way of seeing the world , for example, the T-O maps I wrote about here, were intended to show Jerusalem as the holy centre of the world. Another example are Mesoamerican maps that didn’t focus on spatial mapping, but instead presented ‘community maps’ that represented history and territory, something like a pictorial genealogy. Native American maps present something similar. Other early maps were diagrams of a monasteries and manors, and still others served as religious icons, mandalas, construction drawings, itineraries and so on. Different maps, different purposes, and definitely not the purpose we put maps to, today.

The proponents of the idea that maps as we know them began in the latter half of the second millennium, also point to how the current purpose of maps – namely representing space or relationships, or showing ownership, or pointing out how to get from point A to point B were purposes that had previously been accomplished using means other than maps for as long as there has been history. If people wanted to represent a place, there were paintings and art work. For relationships, there was genealogy. If they wanted to convey ownership, there was text to use, or numbers. And if they wanted to show how to get from point A to point B, well there was word of mouth or text. These had sufficed for centuries. Why did people need these things called maps?

The answer apparently came with the rise of the nation state in the 15th and 16th Century (and possibly as early as the 12th Century in China). As nations expanded, as military ventures demanded, the need for maps became more evident. Rulers such as Henry IV of France were advised that maps could convey an idea of his holdings better than words could. Other rulers such as the Hapsburg emperor Charles V lost vital battles for wont of a map of a strategic area. And this wasn’t just a European experience. In places like Japan there is little evidence of widespread use of national maps until 1591 when suddenly maps were commanded for all geopolitical areas, leading to a national map in the 1630s. And Japan isn’t alone: at the same time that Japanese and European mapmaking blossomed, similar mapmaking flourished in China, Thailand, Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the North American Colonies.

Yes, some of this flourishing may have been due to importation of mapmaking from one culture to another as international trade broadened, but academics suggest that the ease of the adoption of these skills speaks to the existence of similar map-making traditions that had sprung up independently across cultures at the same time. Why?

Map making appears to have proliferated in the new nation-states where it would otherwise be difficult for a central government to ‘know’ the length and breadth of their nation, suggesting maps brought local knowledge from the hinterlands into the center of government, where that knowledge could be used to the service of the central state. So modern maps themselves, just like the lines we draw on them, were an act of control – not just setting boundaries on the landscape, but also establishing boundaries around the people who dwelt there.