Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith Pinar Emiralioğlu Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo. By yossef rapoport and emilie savage-smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. iii + 349 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-54088-7. $55.00 (hardcover). In this outstanding study on an illustrated copy of the Book of Curiosities from eleventh-century Cairo, Rapoport and Savage-Smith open a window into the global vision, cartographic, and geographic knowledge as well as political and economic aspirations of the Muslim world. With an intricately weaved analysis, the authors come to the conclusion that the Book of Curiosities was composed most probably by a military man, who consulted Greek as well as Persian, Indian, and Coptic geographical and cartographical knowledge. In doing so, he composed one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking and showcased the integral role that the Mediterranean Sea played for political and economic ambitions of the Islamic civilization which had its roots in the desert. Lost Maps of the Caliphs is organized thematically assessing the contents of the Book of Curiosities in ten chapters. Chapter One by Emilie Savage-Smith eloquently narrates the discovery of the treatise, which is illustrated with unique maps and diagrams, and its journey from the Christie's auction house in London to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In Chapter Two titled "Macrocosm to Microcosm," Savage-Smith analyzes the book one of the manuscript that deals with the sky and its influence on the Earth. She contextualizes this volume within the eleventh-century Fatimid Egypt's political and religious ideologies and knowledge on "folk astronomy" and astrology. Savage-Smith shows that the author of the Book of Curiosities combined Hermetic, Coptic, Greek, and Bedouin nontechnical literature and lore in demonstrating what happens in the Heavens impact what happens on the Earth. The audience for this work was mainly nonscholars and the author accomplished to present his nonscholarly but educated audience "the ever-present influence of the macrocosm upon the microcosm" in an easily accessible and graphic manner (p. 70). In Chapters Three through Ten, Yossef Rapoport discusses a select number of maps and diagrams embellishing the second volume of the Book of Curiosities, titled "On the Earth." Chapter Three focuses on the rectangular world map, which is the earliest surviving example of a world map displaying a calibrated scale bar. Rapoport argues that this particular map combined the Helenistic tradition of mathematical geography and cartographic tradition of the tenth century Balkhi [End Page 550] School, which focused on the abstract schematic itinerary (pp. 78, 96). While the first tradition determined the framework, the second influenced the interior of the map. In Chapter Four, Rapoport draws our attention to the map of the Nile, which appears to be a variant of al-Khwarazmi's map of the Nile. Here, Rapoport traces how new information acquired by Muslim travelers and geographers was incorporated into an overall Ptolemaic framework of mathematical geography. In fact, the incorporation and adaptation of new knowledge into the Hellenistic and other pre-Islamic traditions of map making is one of the recurrent themes of Rapoport and Savage-Smith's argument connecting different maps and diagrams together. In Chapters Five, Six, and Seven, Rapoport evaluates the maps and diagrams of the Mediterranean, the islands of Cyprus and Sicily, and the cities of Mahdia and Tunis. In these chapters, Rapoport reaches to three conclusions that are fundamental to our understanding of the Fatimid rule in Egypt and its geographical and imperial vision of the Mediterranean. First, Rapoport demonstrates that these precompass depictions of the Mediterranean and various locations around the Mediterranean focused exclusively on anchorages, harbors, and bays and ignored the inland topography (pp. 137, 142, 152). This leads the author to conclude that these precompass maps and diagrams were the earliest depictions of the Mediterranean drawn from the perspective of seamen and naval commanders. As such, these depictions of the Mediterranean served as visual representations of "Fatimid power in the Mediterranean from the perspective of a loyal Fatimid court official" (p. 155). Second, focusing exclusively on the defenses of...