Mapping of Asia Catalogue PART 1 - Dennis Rider - Indies Gallery

MAPPING OF ASIA - PART 1

INDIES GALLERY

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INDIES GALLERY THE MAPPING OF ASIA - PART 1

WRITTEN BY DENNIS RIDER

The map collection of Sake Rudmer Santema

INDIES GALLERY We are glad to share our Mapping of Asia PART 1 Catalogue 2021.

In PART 1, you will read about the earliest known and recorded history of the mapping of the Asian continent. In PART 2 the story continues and will be published in September 2021.

All the maps shown in these catalogs are genuine antiques and are being sold with a certi cate of authenticity. Each item has a separate catalog with more images and background information which will be sent to you upon request.

Contact us by clicking HERE

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Published by Indies Gallery Singapore & Jakarta, September 2021

CHAPTERS IN PART 1

- PORTAOLAN CHART

- CHINESE CARTOGRAPHY

- TAPROBANA

- ADMIRAL ZHENG HE

- MEDIEVAL MAPPING

- CHINESE MAPPING

- PTOLEMY’S WORLD

- MARCO POLO

- OCEANIAN NAVIGATORS

- WHERE IS JAVA MINOR OR LESSER?

- AUSTRANESIANS

- CLAUDIUS PTOLOMY

- OTHER COUNTRIES

- ANCIENT TRADE

THE MAPPING OF ASIA “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.“

(Poem by Rudyard Kipling)

ANCIENT TRADE In antiquity there was extensive trade between the Roman and Chinese “Sina” empires via the overland Silk Road through Asia and the Marine Silk Road via India and the Indies, to such an extent that Pliny complained about the excessive trade deficit. "There was no year in which India {Indies} does not drain the Roman empire of fifty million sesterces… So do we pay for our luxury and our women.”

Roman trade and wars pushed the frontiers of the known world into the Caucasus, Africa, Arabia and the Silk Road. In 166 CE a Roman envoy arrived in China by sea. Rome had both land and sea maps to Asia, star charts used in conjunction with astrolabes for navigation, and weather and wind histories for the best times for travel.

In 165 CE trade shifted away from India due to being the expected source of the Antonie Plague with Roman ships sailing directly to the Isthmus of Kra (Tamala), a portage across the Isthmus, and then by chartered Asian vessels.

Strabo described the expansion of Asian trade from the Red Sea from a total of 20 ships per

year before Augustus (conquered Egypt 30 BCE) to convoys of 120 ships from a single port.

CLAUDIUS PTOLOMY Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. 90 – 168 CE) had the greatest influence on mapmaking until the age of the great explorations at the end of the 15th century. Ptolemy’s great eight-volume work Geography contains the coordinates of a world map and twenty-six regional maps including twelve Asian maps. It sets down for the first time the duties of the map maker and methods for mapping the world and is the prototype of modern map-making. Ptolemy's work adds the precision of Roman measurements and accounts of their sea voyages and land journeys to the world's geographical knowledge base. His use of legends, map signs, north orientation, projections and latitudes and longitudes are still in use.

Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography was translated into Latin in

1406 and would form the structure of European cartography for over a century. As Dilke1 observes, it is Ptolemy’s work, straddling the European Middle Ages, which provides the strongest link in the chain between the knowledge of mapping in the ancient and early modern worlds.

Ref 1. 1421 The Year China Discovered the World. Gavin Menzies, Bantam Press, London, 2002

WHERE IS JAVA MINOR OR LESSER? The Indies Archipelago or one of its islands was first identified as Java to the outside world in India’s earliest epic, the Ramayana (fifth century BCE) that Sugriva, the chief of Rama’s army, dispatched his men to Yávadvípa (Yava Island), in search of Sita. Ptolemy in the second century CE seems to accept this although not knowing that “dvipa” means island as he refers to Jabadios and Iabadiu (Yávadvípa) Insulae.

The Arabs designated the whole of the nations and tribes, which inhabit the region, by the general term “Jawi” (meaning “far” in many eastern languages).

Arabs would

sometimes refer to what we currently call Java as “Jawi proper” as compared to the less important islands or “Jawi lesser”. Marco Polo (c. 1300) when traveling back to Venice via the Java sea, picked up on this naming standard calling Sumatra “Java the less” and

Java proper as “La grande isle de Java.”

MARCO POLO Marco Polo describes Grande Java, which he never visited, as “… greatest Island in the world, and has a compass of more than 3000 miles…” - bigger than Sumatra; as such, many early maps attempt to make Java larger than Sumatra. Later when Sumatra was generally accepted, Marco Polo’s Grand Java and Lesser Java were considered at different times as Sumbawa, Borneo, New Guinea, Australia, Lombok and Bali, which Raffles (English Governor of Java 1811 -1815) says was still used in his own day.

Geographers puzzled about it. The Italian

mapmaker ‘Magni’ (1555 -1617) says Java Minor is almost incognito2. It was the Dutch that finally concluded that the Arab terms referred to commercial importance and not to relative size.

Ref 2. The Book of Marco Polo… Cambridge Library Collection translated by Henry Rule Vol 2 p. 226

CHINESE MAPPING The earliest written reference of a Chinese map, which was used to hide an assassin’s knife, dates to 227 BCE. However, Chinese cartography begins in the fifth century BCE during the Warring States period when cartographers started to make maps of the Earth's surface. The Han dynasty (206 BCE – 9 CE) expanded maps beyond China's borders. During the Tang dynasty, Jia Dan (730 -805) wrote a number of works on geography that described foreign states and trade routes, as well as producing a very large map (9x10 meters) Hainei Huayi Tu that includes China and other known countries

By the 11th century during the Song dynasty (960 -1279)

highly-accurate maps drawn on grids were produced. The Yuan and Ming dynasties (1271–1644) developed traditional cartography skills and produced a variety of maps that focused on greater use of mathematics and accuracy including: national maps showing mountains and cities, land defense maps, coastal defense maps, river maps for flood control, and nautical charts for maritime navigation.

Ref: Wikipedia - Cartography of China

EXCERPT FROM ZHENG HE MAP In 1579, Luo Hongxian published the Guang Yu Tu atlas, which includes more than 40 maps.

The Kangxi Emperor realised that Chinese maps required scientific methods for mapping, so he sponsored a national wide geodesy and mapping programme culminating in the Huang Yu Quan Lan Tu (also

known as the Jesuit Atlas) in 1708.

ADMIRAL ZHENG HE “Zheng He” made a series of voyages 1405 - 1433 to the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and beyond with his treasure fleet of 300 ships and 30,000 troops. His maps are linear strip charts; that is, they do not show the relative position of places but follow his travels viewed from the reader’s orientation with directions based on a Chinese 24 point compass given in the text.

A map of his travels was published in “Wubel Zhi” in 1628 that is 20.5 cm wide by 560 cm long and can be rolled up.

The map includes islands, ports, bays, estuaries, capes, reefs, shoals and landmarks such as pagodas and temples and includes distances or sailing times taking into account winds and currents. Fifty Stellar altitudes and occasional water depths are also included. Three hundred places are named of which about 80% have been positively

identified.

CHINESE CARTOGRAPHY In the Orient, trade had been going on for thousands of years. Chinese cartography was predominantly concerned with lands within the "Middle Kingdom. Medieval Chinese topographic maps are remarkable accurate, with instrumentation and surveying techniques developed before the twelfth century. However, information on foreign lands is only provided in the form of notes. Actual mapping would have proved extremely difficult to accomplish since the Chinese cartographers believed that the earth was flat The concept that China was just one of many nations in the world, albeit a very large one and part of a much larger Asian continent was difficult for them to accept even after the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci had introduced Ptolemaic concepts to Chinese cartographers in the late sixteenth century.

The great distances that were depicted on Matteo Ricci’s map of the world, which was compiled at the request of the prefect of Zhaoqing in 1584, were interpreted by the Chinese as attempts to deceive3.

Ref 3. Cordell D.K. Yee, op cit., 1995 pages 106-108

OTHER COUNTRIES Japanese maps ezu (絵図, roughly "picture diagram") were not necessarily geographically accurate depictions of physical landscape but pictorial images, often including spiritual landscape in addition to physical geography4. Likewise Vietnamese cosmography just required the symbols of a mountain or a pond to provide a sense of place5.

Muslims inherited Ptolemy’s Geography and produced modified versions based on their own mathematics, grid system and extensive exploration during the 9th -12th centuries. In the 11th century, Turkic Mahumud al-Kashgari was the first to draw a unique Islamic world map.

In the 14th century, Ibn Battuta recorded his 120,000 km world travels including his trip from Africa to India, Aceh, Malacca, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines and China6. However Arab navigation was based on the stars using astrolabes and pilot’s guides and did not require terrestrial charts.

ref. 4. wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_maps; 5. Carography of Vietman by John k. Whitmore. 5. Suarez, Thomas (2012). Early Mapping of Southeast Asia...

-Tuttle Publishing; 6. Jones, John Winter (1863). The travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Egypt…. Hakluyt Society.

AUSTRANESIANS (INDONESIANS, POLYNESIANS, MICRONESIANS & MAORI) In 1293 CE the Yuan Mongol invaders of Java received a map and census record, suggesting that map-making was already a formal part of Javanese governmental affairs7. Although none have survived, Europeans in the early 16th century recorded Javanese navigation maps with lines “perpendicular and across” that the Portuguese considered the best maps of the time 8,9.

European navigators were surprised to find almost every island inhabited by populations that had no ships, charts, or navigational instruments. In fact, Oceanians had already been traveling between Manila and Mexico for over two centuries. Oceanians were superb navigators spending weeks out of sight of land based on mental images of the spread of islands. Vessels under pressure of the wind and waves, were kept on course by watching the sun, swells, steady-winds, island-influenced currents, cloud formations, birds and other cues during the day and the stars at night.

7. Suarez, Thomas (2012). Early Mapping of Southeast Asia... -Tuttle Publishing; 8. Jones, John Winter (1863). The travels of Ludovico di Varthema in

Egypt…. Hakluyt Society; 9. “Majapahit-era Technolgies” Nusantara Review. 2 Oct 2018. Retrieved 11 June 2020.

OCEANIAN NAVIGATORS The navigator had to know stars throughout the sky so when clouds obscured preferred stars being followed, they could keep their canoe on course using the stars rising or setting in the rear or even with stars on the sides.

Master navigators taught and tested their pupils a conceptual "compass rose" with bearings based on stars and winds by laying out coral fragments to signify the rising and setting points of key stars and constellations.

"Stick charts" were used to teach students and as mnemonic aids to be consulted before a voyage.

ref: Traditional Cartography in tje Pacific Basin page 462 "Carolinian Star Compass" their source S.D.Thomas, "The Last Navigator (New York: Henry Holt, 1987) 81. Ref: Nautical

Geography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania by Ben Finney

MEDIEVAL MAPPING With the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity with its simple, rigid and uncompromising religious faith, the knowledge of antiquity was ignored and lost in the West, which retarded the development of science, including map-making.

Medieval maps “mappa mundi” were based on the Bible with Jerusalem in the center of the world with Asia represented by Persia and India with the only reference to the Far East being the Greek Land of spices “Taprobana” (page 34-35), otherwise only Eden is East of Persia. The Crusades (1096 – 1270) required the development of the science of cartography as they enlarged the known habitable world. The Crusades would spark renewed interest in the riches of the East. Publication of Marco Polo’s (1254 -1324) travels circa 1300 would bring China to life.

Note the Biblical history of the world across the center line of the map from East to West; Heaven > Eden > Babylon > Jerusalem > Greece > Rome

Map on left page: The Hereford Mappa Mundi, dating from c. 1300 / housed in the new library at Hereford Cathedral.

"When one remembers that missionaries like Plano Carpini, and traders like the Venetian Polos, either penetrated by land from Acre to Peking, or circumnavigated southern Asia from Basra to Canton, one realizes that there was, about 1300, a discovery of Asia as new and tremendous as the discovery of America by Columbus two centuries later."

(Ernest Barker in his account of the Crusades in the Encyclopaedia Britannica)

PTOLEMY’S WORLD 18th-century recreation of the map of the ancient world according to Claudius Ptolemy the Alexandrine historian, geographer and founder of modern cartography.

The first edition was published in 1578 with subsequent editions in 1584, 1605, 1618-1619, 1695, 1698, 1704 and 1730. The borders re-engraved with a frieze of allegorical figures representing the four elements: fire (Zeus), air (Hera), water (Neptune) and earth (Gaia). The map includes: the Indian sub-continent tilted east to west, based on Greek geography so that rivers flow from north to south following the curvature of the earth, a massive Taprobana (modern-day Sri Lanka) where the India peninsula should be, and a land-locked Indian Ocean to prevent the water from falling off the earth.

Map on left page: Mercator’s Tabulae geographicae CI. Ptolemaei ad mentera autoris restitutae et emendate per G. Mercatorem in 1730.

TAPROBANA The earliest stories in Europe of the Spice Islands comes via Alexander the Great's admirals “Nearchus” and “Onesicritus”. Nearchus sailed around the southern tip of India, describing the smells of cinnamon that wafted from the fabulous island he passed along the way.

This

unnamed island may have been the “end of the world” that “Alexander the Great” wanted to see when he invaded India in 326 BCE, with a plan to reach the far ocean and The island is first named

Various early authors described

Taprobana by the Greek geographer Megasthenes around

it as having men with a single

290 BCE and is described by Crysippus the Stoic (280 - 202

huge foot (sciapods), that they

BCE) as an island as large as Great Britain. The idea of

used to protect their head from

Taprobana as a utopia, was commonplace among ancient

the sun, great hills of gold

writers, from the first century BCE. However, none of the

refined by ants or people that

references give a certain location of the island, but usually

lived in the shell of large snails

assumed to be Ceylon "Sri Lanka," which is too small or

after eating the meat.

return to Greece by sea.

Sumatra, which is too far.

PORTAOLAN CHART While western cartography was dominated by Church doctrine and mythology, a much more practical type of map known as a “Portolan chart” was evolving in the Mediterranean; this was based on actual observation by mariners rather than on religious beliefs10. The harbour-finding chart was developed as an adjunct to coast pilot books designed to aid mariners in negotiating stretches of coastline and difficult harbour approaches Portolan charts had been used by pilots navigating the coasts of the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic since at least the thirteenth century. According to Joâo de Barros, Vasco de Gama was shown charts of the coast of India at Malindi before he set out for the first time to cross the Arabian Sea in 1498. Barros also notes that certain Moorish charts show the Maldives the land of Java and the coast of Sunda. In 1512 another possible local chart is mentioned by Alfonso de Albuquerque, the Viceroy for Portugal in India, in a letter to the Portuguese king Manuel. He reports that he had seen a large chart belonging to a Javanese pilot on which Brazil, the Indian Ocean, and the Far East were shown.

Ref 10. John Goss, The Mapmaker's Art A History of Cartography. Studio Editions, London 1993, page 40

MAPPING OF ASIA - PART 1

INDIES GALLERY

INDIES GALLERY Thank you for reading the MAPPING OF ASIA - PART 1, and don’t hesitate to send us your questions and comments, were are happy to assist you. PART 2 will be published soon.

A special thanks goes out to Dennis Rider the author of this catalogue, Dr. David E. Parry the author of “The Cartography of The East Indian Islands”, which was a great inspiration for our story.

View all our catalogues by clicking HERE Visit our website by clicking on www.IndiesGallery.com

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