Map Quest
By FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO
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CARTOGRAPHIA

Mapping Civilizations.

By Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress.

Illustrated. 266 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $60.

Maps make us incoherent. They replace speech and transcend description. They leave us awestruck and dumbstruck because they seem shamingly concise and often stunningly beautiful. The difference between maps and other data-conveying graphics is that maps exist to represent spatial relationships — direction, sequence and distance. And space is hard to describe in words.

So when we behold maps, we tend to pause before reading them, sitting back to enjoy a thrilling moment of stupefaction. That is why books of historic maps are so fascinating. But intellectual rewards also await. For understanding other times and other cultures than our own, maps are insuperable source material. They literally display for us the world as others have seen it.

The oldest surviving attempt to depict the world was painted, perhaps about 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, on a cave wall at Jaora in India. Around an empty central disk, complex patterns — key shapes, zigzags, lozenges, diamonds and paddlelike forms — are arrayed in broadly vertical bands, like the skins of scaly beasts laid out to dry. In central Asia and China, petroglyphs dating back to the third millennium B.C. contain cosmographical symbols. Almost all human communities represent divine order in cosmic diagrams. The Dogon of West Africa depict the universe as an antlike creature, whose placentalike head represents heaven and whose legs symbolize earth. Taoists have their wave-split circle.

Maps as devices for finding and recording routes are probably just as ancient. Some early examples tracked mystical journeys. In the rock art of Africa, lines and dots show the routes shamans took in trances, leading captive creatures to the camp or traveling to the spirit world. It is a safe bet that journey-makers originally recorded terrestrial routes in their heads, with the help of rituals and gestures. Caroline Island navigators in the 18th and 19th centuries knew star maps and chanted verse mnemonics: they called it “breadfruit-picking.” Traces of poetic sailing directions survive in ancient literature — certainly in Avienus, perhaps in Homer. Alternatively, route-finders could mark the record of their discoveries directly on the landscape with signs, like Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth. The Incas, for instance, relied on patterns formed by mountaintop shrines and on lines laid along ridges where armies and pilgrims passed. Maps have also long served as a means of topographical record. Neolithic town plans survive. Maps of hunting grounds or sacred sites can be found in some of the world’s most traditional cultures. To this day, the initiation rites of the Luba of the Congo require candidates to learn the whereabouts of governing centers, shrines and rivers with maps scratched on a wall.

Because they conjure up so vividly the worlds people have inhabited and imagined, maps have inspired great history books, including some wonderful accounts of cartography. Historians of the subject have become more ambitious, broadening definitions, stretching the very concept of a map, comprehending a growing range of pictorial and diagrammatic artifacts. A neolithic cosmogram is a map, depicting juxtaposed order and chaos. A diagram of where brain functions reside is a map. In a sense, a printout of the genetic code is a map. A photograph can be a map if it serves to locate what it snaps. Historians of cartography now encompass the vast social and cultural context and meaning of maps as well as the minutiae of mapmakers’ information-gathering and data-recording techniques. What was once an antiquarian pastime has advanced to the scholarly cutting edge. Now, when we unfold an old map or turn over a stone engraved with one, we can feel that we are digging deep into the archaeology of knowledge.

Yet none of the charm has fled. Technology makes the fascination of maps more accessible than ever. Everyone with modest means or library access can pore over color reproductions in sharp and glorious versions, and renew the childish pleasure of stumbling on one’s first atlas, to marvel at how a map can miniaturize the universe. No ship in a bottle or flask of rare essence or vial full of some arcane extract can match the feat of compression or evocative power of a map. To use maps only to illustrate text or enhance understanding is a kind of sacrilege. They can do so much more to tease pleasure and test minds. A book of old maps can stimulate the imagination like a poem, leading us to Chimborazo or Cotopaxi in a golden daze, or hurling us into worlds where hippogriffs lurk.

This is the kind of pleasure that awaits perusers of a new collection of reproductions of maps from the Library of Congress. Clear design, a manageable format, efficient printing and a diverse, dazzling selection of material make “Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations” a good Christmas stocking-buster or a greedy holiday indulgence. The maps are well chosen for study, ornament and delight. Most Western and Asian mapmaking cultures are represented, though the chapters on Africa and the Americas are disappointingly weak on maps of indigenous peoples. Coverage of the Islamic world is patchy, and the selections from medieval Christendom seem capricious. The organization is irrational, with chronological, cultural and geographical categories inexplicably muddled — but the point of the book is more dazzle than illumination. Treasures appear, like the 12th-century Chinese printing stone engraved with maps of China and the world. There are curios and curiosities, like an early-17th-century French map of the soul, or a map engraved on a powder horn showing the approach to New York during the Seven Years’ War. And there are some delightfully jokey items from popular culture, including Saul Steinberg’s cunning and convincing view of the world from Ninth Avenue.

The afterword by James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, makes explicit a further, entirely honorable agenda. The book is part of the shop window the library opens onto the world, to show citizens the glories of their national collection and invite their appreciation — and maybe solicit their gifts — in return. The cause is worthy. The Library of Congress is the biggest and probably the world’s best resource for research and learning. It enhances American life and attests, incontrovertibly, to American civilization. It will go on being a cynosure for scholars the world over long after the United States has subsided as a superpower and abandoned global hegemony.

Yet it seems odd to choose maps as a means of galvanizing public awareness. The library’s collection is not particularly strong in this field. Many European libraries have far more spectacular holdings of manuscript maps and early and rare cartographic imprints in just about every category. Some of the most intriguing pictures in “Cartographia” are of the library’s reproductions of originals held elsewhere. Some of the earliest maps in the book belong to other collections, like the University of Pennsylvania’s Sumerian field plan, the engraved image of the Babylonian world from the British Museum and the Etruscan divinatory bronze model of a sheep’s liver, inscribed with a depiction of the world, from the Museo Civico, Piacenza.

The text, moreover, does the images less than justice. And one of the oddest things about the book is that readers cannot be sure who wrote it. The title page says nothing about authorship. The cover includes an attribution to “Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress,” but Virga is a commercially successful picture editor and popular writer with no pretensions to scholarship. Unencouragingly, he tells us in a signed note that he didn’t “get” maps for a long time. Did library curators contribute draft text, which an editorial hand then ham-fistedly homogenized? Perhaps in consequence, wayward judgments, annoying stylistic tics and repellent prejudices seem to have been pea-shootered into what is otherwise a generally informative and often insightful commentary.

On a single page, for instance, we are told, first, that an Edwardian map of Afghanistan is an example of “Map as Managed Real Estate” — whereas Afghanistan was outside the British Empire and the clear purpose of mapping it was defensive — and, second, that a Yuan-dynasty grid-based map is “Map as Genius of China.” The book is scattered with similarly meaningless characterizations. Bafflingly, one map is said to be “the forerunner of later Arabic astrolabes,” with which it has no overlapping functions, and which had existed for centuries by the time it was made. Almost every map in the book suffers from the tiresome habit of reducing it to “Map as” This, That or the Other, always inappropriately and portentously capitalized. In almost all cases, the characterization is misleading or wrong.

The oddest intrusion is of ill-informed denunciations of Catholicism. “The fall of Greece and the ascension of destructive, philistine Rome and the power-driven Roman Catholic Church were a disaster for Western civilization,” we are told. Ignorance or prejudice of the same kind recurs at intervals, culminating in the assertion that “propagandizing Roman and Catholic historians had transformed the great Celts ... into barbarous Irish animals.” It is surprising to find such a warped agenda disfiguring a work endorsed by a major public institution in the United States, where respect for the sensibilities of minorities is so intensely developed. This is a book of great pictures, one is forced to conclude — shame about the aberrations of the text.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto teaches at Tufts University. His recent books include “The World: A History” and “Amerigo.”