In 1138, the Ceutan geographer al-Idrisi got down to map the world. This was no straightforward job. Few maps of any sensible sort then existed, and those who did depicted extra dragons and demons than coastlines and cities. Solely seafarers had charts of any accuracy, however even these had been fragmented and restricted in scope.
Al-Idrisi would absolutely have been conversant in these navigational charts. He had, in any case, travelled broadly by the point he began engaged on his map, embarking on journeys that took him throughout the Mediterranean, alongside the Atlantic Coast, and even to the cities and cities of the British Isles. By the point he arrived in Sicily within the 1130s, he was about as well-travelled as a person of the twelfth century may very well be.
And it was armed with that data, and on the behest of Roger II, King of Sicily, that he began work on his map. The duty took him virtually twenty years, throughout which he sought out the maps of Ptolemy, studied Arab descriptions of commerce routes and roads, despatched envoys to distant ports, and interviewed each traveller he may discover.
The outcome was an enormous atlas of the identified world, collected in a ebook referred to as the Tabula Rogeriana. To fashionable eyes, conversant in our personal view of the world, the entire map can appear a little bit disorientating. Sicily and Italy, the lands of Roger II, seem comically giant. The British Isles are proven as nothing greater than a obscure blob of land. Asia turns into more and more distorted the extra east you look; and even the acquainted instructions are reversed: in Al-Idrisi’s map south is positioned on the prime.
But there aren’t any dragons on this map. And in locations, certainly, he was impressively correct. The lakes of the river Nile are numbered and positioned kind of as later explorers discovered them. In accompanying notes he recorded such far-flung locations because the coast of Greenland, the commerce routes of China, and the Korean peninsula. In a single textual content, he describes a spot that sounds very very similar to the Sargasso Sea, a stretch of the Atlantic mendacity far nearer to the Americas than to Europe.
Eight and a half centuries later, in 1993, a pair of Europeans, Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman, set out on one other audacious map-making enterprise. This time their goal was not the continents, not even these unknown to al-Idrisi. As an alternative they wished to chart out the celebrities, recording the positions, colors, and speeds of thousands and thousands of objects scattered throughout the Milky Approach. The outcome can be a map, an enormous atlas of the galaxy, and one, they hoped, that may banish the dragons from our nonetheless poor understanding of its contours.
Like al-Idrisi, they would wish to go to monumental efforts to provide their grand map. They would wish to rise above the ambiance, ship an instrument to a degree a million miles distant, and beam again sufficient knowledge to fill the best library ever constructed. Sketching out this plan would take them a decade, amassing the information would take one other, and compiling all of it right into a single huge atlas will eat a 3rd. Banishing the dragons, because it was for al-Idrisi, is the work of a lifetime.
After all, in a method, this star map is nothing new. Folks have been mapping the celebrities for millennia. In one of many earliest identified texts, the MUL.APIN of historical Babylon, scribes recorded the positions of seventy vibrant stars, every used for preserving monitor of the passing 12 months. Hipparchus, in 129 BC, tried to map your complete evening sky, and although his work has been misplaced, copies of one other historical star catalogue – the Almagest of Ptolemy – nonetheless survive.
