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Authors: Michael Blanding
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world. His most expensive purchase to date was a map of North and South America he bought for $135,000 from the Old Print Shop in New York. “I love the history of it. When I see a map, I like to try and guess when it was made, and whether it was a French map or an English map or a Spanish map—because they all drew the borderlines to their advantage.” His neighbors in the farming business, he chuckled, draw their boundaries the same way.
Perhaps the appeal of collecting is seeing the familiar outlines of human nature writ large, and your own little corner of the world participating on the global stage. Arriving at the fair, I vowed to buy my first antique map, and I found it in a map of Boston Harbor that appeared in an English magazine in 1775—three months before the start of the Revolutionary War. By then, it was already clear something major was about to go down in Boston, and the magazine printed the map as a guide for Londoners wanting to follow the action.
I recall similar maps in the newspapers during my own lifetime, remembering how names like Kuwait, Sarajevo, and Fallujah took on sudden geographical significance when conflicts broke out there. I looked for my own hometown of Brookline on the map and found the Muddy River, which still flows a few dozen yards from my house, thinking with a new sense of immediacy about the historic events that took place down the street. The map was listed for $500, which the dealer marked downto $425 with barely a haggle. I left with the map rolled into a cardboard tube, promising to send a check.
—
MAP COLLECTING IS a recent hobby, emerging only in the past few hundred years. For centuries before that, maps—no matter how beautifully rendered—were tools to settle property disputes or get from point A to point B. That’s why, incredibly, we have only a handful ofmaps from all of ancient civilization. The Babylonians left behind barely enough to count on two hands. The oldest, etched into a clay tablet around 2300 BC, seems to show the estate of a man named Azala as it stood during the reign of Sargon the Great. The first “world” map dates from around 500 BC—glued together from cracked tablets, it looks like a first grader’s art project, lines and circles representing the Euphrates River and several neighboring city-states, along with a bridge to the heavenly realm.
The rest of the ancient world fares little better. From Egypt, we have a few maps drawn on scraps of papyrus showing flood stages of the Nile and some Nubian gold mines. From Greece, not a single original map survives. From Rome, only one map of any substance exists, and that is a copy of a copy of a copy made in the eleventh or twelfth century by a South German monk. Called the Peutinger Table, it’s a twenty-two-foot-long scroll showing all the roads leading to Rome, mapped out in the style of a AAA strip map, down to the mileages between towns recorded in Roman numerals.
It was the Greeks who put cartography on the map—or rather it was the Hellenized inhabitants ofAlexandria, the Egyptian capital that had inherited Greek culture at a time when Rome was still a dirty backwater on the Tiber. Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, it had already become the richest city in the world seventy years later—a city of wide avenues and enormous stone temples sprawling around a harbor bustling with sailors from all over the Mediterranean. With them came scholars who gathered around the Royal Library of Alexandria, then the largest library in the world. Pharaoh Ptolemy III decreed that every traveler entering the city be searched and any manuscripts on his person confiscated and transcribed. A new copy was gifted to its owner, while the original was added to the library’s collection. As a result, the libraryamassed the greatest body of knowledge in the ancient world—the equivalent of a hundred thousand books.
At its head was Eratosthenes, a polymath equally adept at philosophy, astronomy, and
Perhaps the appeal of collecting is seeing the familiar outlines of human nature writ large, and your own little corner of the world participating on the global stage. Arriving at the fair, I vowed to buy my first antique map, and I found it in a map of Boston Harbor that appeared in an English magazine in 1775—three months before the start of the Revolutionary War. By then, it was already clear something major was about to go down in Boston, and the magazine printed the map as a guide for Londoners wanting to follow the action.
I recall similar maps in the newspapers during my own lifetime, remembering how names like Kuwait, Sarajevo, and Fallujah took on sudden geographical significance when conflicts broke out there. I looked for my own hometown of Brookline on the map and found the Muddy River, which still flows a few dozen yards from my house, thinking with a new sense of immediacy about the historic events that took place down the street. The map was listed for $500, which the dealer marked downto $425 with barely a haggle. I left with the map rolled into a cardboard tube, promising to send a check.
—
MAP COLLECTING IS a recent hobby, emerging only in the past few hundred years. For centuries before that, maps—no matter how beautifully rendered—were tools to settle property disputes or get from point A to point B. That’s why, incredibly, we have only a handful ofmaps from all of ancient civilization. The Babylonians left behind barely enough to count on two hands. The oldest, etched into a clay tablet around 2300 BC, seems to show the estate of a man named Azala as it stood during the reign of Sargon the Great. The first “world” map dates from around 500 BC—glued together from cracked tablets, it looks like a first grader’s art project, lines and circles representing the Euphrates River and several neighboring city-states, along with a bridge to the heavenly realm.
The rest of the ancient world fares little better. From Egypt, we have a few maps drawn on scraps of papyrus showing flood stages of the Nile and some Nubian gold mines. From Greece, not a single original map survives. From Rome, only one map of any substance exists, and that is a copy of a copy of a copy made in the eleventh or twelfth century by a South German monk. Called the Peutinger Table, it’s a twenty-two-foot-long scroll showing all the roads leading to Rome, mapped out in the style of a AAA strip map, down to the mileages between towns recorded in Roman numerals.
It was the Greeks who put cartography on the map—or rather it was the Hellenized inhabitants ofAlexandria, the Egyptian capital that had inherited Greek culture at a time when Rome was still a dirty backwater on the Tiber. Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, it had already become the richest city in the world seventy years later—a city of wide avenues and enormous stone temples sprawling around a harbor bustling with sailors from all over the Mediterranean. With them came scholars who gathered around the Royal Library of Alexandria, then the largest library in the world. Pharaoh Ptolemy III decreed that every traveler entering the city be searched and any manuscripts on his person confiscated and transcribed. A new copy was gifted to its owner, while the original was added to the library’s collection. As a result, the libraryamassed the greatest body of knowledge in the ancient world—the equivalent of a hundred thousand books.
At its head was Eratosthenes, a polymath equally adept at philosophy, astronomy, and
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