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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For too long, we have been vaguely aware that the spatial concepts that traveled on the Silk Road inspired ancient and medieval divination, Arabic astronomy, Buddhist paintings and statuary, Armenian miniatures, Chinese maps, and Catalan portolans. This volume contains ten chapters that examine precise instances of exchange between the visual cultures of premodern Asia and Europe. It is the outcome of a conference held at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (Collegium Helveticum) in May 2004.
As symposium organizers, we felt that the meeting was a success but had not ventured far enough in its transdisciplinary discussion of the journey of maps and images on the Silk Road. We therefore proposed to the conference participants a book project that would give them an opportunity to air their views without worrying about being cut off after 20 minutes. What we had in mind was a collection of specialists’ essays more than a curriculum guide. We would like to express our gratitude to our authors for their willingness to answer our many queries and accept our suggestions.
The assistance that many colleagues have given us over the last four years has made possible the publication of a volume on maps and images on the Silk Road. We thank them all with immense pleasure. Lorenz Hurni (Institute of Cartography, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich), Ulrich Rudolph and Johannes Thomann (Oriental Institute, University of Zurich), and Valerie Hansen (History Department, Yale University) helped us with their comments. Corinne Pernet (Institute of History, University of Zurich) and Angi Kaplony, as well as our children, Adélie, Félicien, Mirjam, Esther and Magdalena, patiently discussed with us our slow progress. Redouane Djamouri (School of Higher Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris) provided constant encouragement. Staffan Rosén (Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities), Kim Hodong (Seoul National University), and Johan Elverskog (Southern Methodist University) made critical suggestions on the focus of our manuscript. Talks with Dan Waugh (University of Washington at Seattle)
enriched our conceptual understanding of the Silk Road. We must also express our gratitude to our contributors for their remarkable patience, as well as to the anonymous reviewers who recommended our manuscript for publication.
The Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Cogito Foundation, the Zurcher Hochschulstiftung, the Swiss Academy of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the University of Zurich, and the Collegium Helveticum of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich kindly supported our conference on the journey that maps and images took across Eurasia. Both the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Cogito Foundation later awarded us generous grants to have the book published. We were delighted when we learned that Brill had accepted our volume for its Inner Asian Library. At the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Bj6rn Wittrock and Barbro Klein granted Philippe Forét the time required for the final editing of the book. He had instructive conversations with Igor Torbakov, Askold Ivantchik, Marie-Christine Skuncke, and the other Fellows of the Collegium.
We are very grateful to the copyright holders for letting us publish the many illustrations of our book.
Thanks are especially due to Patricia Radder, who guided us through the challenges of publishing for the international academic market, and to Victoria R. M. Scott, who greatly improved the clarity of our manuscript. We of course assume responsibility for all the mistakes left in the text.
Philippe Forét and Andreas Kaplony Uppsala and Zurich
CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan M. Bloom shares both the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has explored such subjects as the development of the minaret, the history of paper, and art and architecture during the Fatimid period. His many publications include Minaret: Symbol of Islam (1989), Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (2001), and Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt (2007), as well as the three-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture (2009), which he has edited with Sheila Blair.
Sonja Brentjes is senior researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Logic, University of Seville (Spain). Her research has focused on maps, travel accounts, mathematical texts, and the status of the mathematical sciences at the court and in madrasas. She has recently published “Mapmaking in Ottoman Istanbul between 1650 and 1750: A Domain of Painters, Calligraphers, or Cartographers?” (in Imber, Kiyotaki, and Murphey, eds., Frontiers of Ottoman Studies, 2005), “Pietro della Valle’s Latin Geography of Safavid Iran (1624—-1628)” (Journal for Early Modern History, October 2006, with V. Schiiller); “An Exciting New Arabic Version of Euclid’s Elements: MS Mumbai, Mulla Firaz R.1.6” (Revue @histowre des mathématiques, 2007); and “Multilingualism in Early Modern Maps” (in Daelemans, Duvosquel, Halleux, and Juste, eds., Mélanges offert a Hossam Elkhadem, 2007). She was visiting curator in cooperation with Elo Brancaforte of two exhibits at Harvard University: From Rhubarb to Rubies: European Travels to Safavid Iran, 1550-1700, at Houghton Library (2008) and The Lands of the Sophi: Tran in Early Modern European Maps (1550-1700) at Vhe Harvard Map Collection (2008). She is a full member of the International Academy for the History of Science in Paris.
Philippe Forét is a Researcher at the Institute of Cartography of the Swiss Federal Institute of ‘Technology at Zurich (ETHZ) and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham.
With support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, he is researching the environmental history and cartography of the Gobi desert. His articles are mostly on the historical and cultural geography of China. His books are Mapping Chengde (2000), La Haute-Aste telle qu’ils Vont vue (2003, with Svetlana Gorshenina), La vértable histoire d’une montagne plus haute que Himalaya (2004), and New Qing Imperial History (2004, with James Millward, Ruth Dunnell, and Mark Elliott).
Natasha Heller is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Within the intellectual and religious history of China, she has specialized in the interactions of Buddhism and literati culture. Other interests include material culture, religion and the state, and the concepts of law and justice in imperial China.
Andreas Kaplony 1s an assistant professor at the Oriental Institute, University of Zurich. His current research is focused on Arabic papyrus and paper documents and on Arabic-Islamic geography and cartography. He is the author of Aonstantinopel und Damaskus: Gesandtschaften und Vertriige zwischen Kaisern und Ralifen 639-750 (1996) and The Haram of Jerusalem (524-1099) (2002), and the coeditor of Documentary Letters Jrom the Middle East: The Evidence in Greek, Coptic, South Arabian, Pehlevi, and Arabic (Ist-15th ¢ CE) (2008, with Eva Mira Grob), as well as of two interactive web publications, The Arabic Papyrology School (2004, with David Arn and Johannes Thomann) and The Arabic Papyrology Database (2006, with an entire team).
Dickran Kouymjpan is director of the Armenian Studies Program of California State University at Fresno. His recent publications are on the artistic organization of illuminated early Armenian Gospels, inscribed Armenian manuscripts bindings, the iconography of the Armenian versions of the Alexander Romance, the unique ArmenoGreek papyrus, and the destruction of Armenian property during and after the 1915 genocide. Among his major books are Arts of Armenia (1992) and Album of Armenian Paleography (2002, with Michael Stone and Henning Lehmann).
Paul RKunitzsch was professor of Arabic studies at the Institute of Semitic Studies of the Ludwig-Maxilimians-Universitat of Munich. Since his retirement in 1995 he continues work as a “guest” at the Institute for the History of Science of the same university. His research has been mainly centered on the transmission of the sciences from ancient Greece to the Arabs and from them to medieval Europe. His books include Avabische Sternnamen in Europa (1959), Untersuchungen zur Sternnomenklatur der Araber (1961), and Claudius Ptoleméus: Der Sternkatalog des Almagest (1986-1991). He is a full member of the International Academy for the History of Science in Paris, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Cairo Academy of Arabic Language.
Yossef Rapoport is lecturer in the Department of History, Queen Mary University of London. His publications include Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (2005). In 2007 he published, together with Emilie Savage-Smith, an electronic edition and translation of an eleventh-century Arabic cosmography known as the Book of Cunosities (http://cosmos.bodley.ox.ac.uk).
Johannes Thomann teaches and does research at the Oriental Institute, University of Zurich. His main interest lies in chronology and mathematics in the Islamic World. Among his publications are Studien zum “Speculum phystonomie” des Michele Savonarola (1997) and Schattenspur: Sonnenfinsternisse in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Mythos (1999, with Matthias Vogel).
Dorothy C. Wong is an associate professor of East Asian art at the University of Virginia. Specializing in the Buddhist art of medieval China, she addresses art in relation to religion and society. In addition to Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004), she has written articles that range in topic from pilgrims’ maps to devotional arts, deity cults, pure land paintings, gender and ethnicity in Buddhist patronage, and cults of saints in Asian traditions. She has edited a conference volume entitled Horyijt Reconsidered (2008), and is working on a digital project called “Silk Road: The Path of Transmission of Avalokitesvara.”
Nicolas Xufferey 1s professor of Chinese language and civilization in the Chinese Studies Program of the University of Geneva. Most of his research has been on the origins of Confucianism and the history of the Han dynasty. His principal publications are Wang Chong (27— 97?): connaissance, politique et vérité en Chine ancienne (1995) and To the
Origins of Confucianism (2003).
TRANSLITERATIONS AND CONVENTIONS
For the languages of Central and South Asia, our general policy has been to avoid the technical transliterations and systems that English readers would find difficult to pronounce. Instead, we use spellings with which they are already familiar. ‘The transliterations of common Sanskrit terms have been anglicized. For the sources and names in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, we rely on the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1960—); for those in Armenian, on the Revue des Etudes Arméniennes; and for those in Chinese, on the Hanyu pinyin system.
For convenience, dates from Islamic sources are given according to both the Islamic Hidjri calendar (H) and the Common Era (cE).
FOREWORD
Lorenz Hurni
According to the International Cartographic Association, “a map is a symbolized image of geographical reality, representing selected features or characteristics resulting from the creative effort of its author’s execution of choices, and is designed for use when spatial relationships are of primary relevance.” This definition, which emphasizes the role of personal creativity, puts cartography apart from other sciences.
The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road has two great merits: 1t takes us away from the traditional debate on objectivity and subjectivity in the sciences, and it introduces us to entirely different ways of depicting geographically referenced features. Its authors disclose how geographic and cartographic knowledge progressed along the Silk Road. We learn that premodern maps and cartographic images, like the cadastral maps of China, often had rather pragmatic applications. An Islamic map copied in the thirteenth century represented ‘Turkish ethnicity well before the rise in the West of thematic cartography. Buddhist artists designed cosmic maps several centuries before Christians made their religious 'T-O (orbis terrae) maps.
Advanced tools such as orientation grids were developed in Asia long before European mapmakers rediscovered them. Some Catalan charts even contain carefully selected Asian iconography. Despite a gap that lasted several centuries, mapping in Asian and European cultures has served an identical purpose. Map production and design, which of course varied significantly, reflected the techniques and supports then available as well as the specific ways in which each civilization perceived, selected, and displayed geographical information. This new volume proves that spatial and visual information circulated well across premodern Eurasia. Being so mobile, the cartographic body of knowledge of Asia and the Middle East influenced modern mapping to a greater extent than we generally assume. The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road is an important contribution to a better understanding of the rich interaction we see between the early Eastern and Western schools of cartography.
PREFACE WHAT IS A MAP?
Valerie Hansen
Most people today have no trouble answering the question, “What is a map?”: a map is a picture on paper, often a foldable sheet, that shows a destination that you plan to visit. The map may be virtual, and you may view it on a Global Positioning System, but its main purpose is to help you navigate your route. We have no doubts, either, about what can be mapped (every place on earth, the moon, Mars, with other planets and stars soon to come) and what cannot be (heaven, hell, or any version of an afterworld).
The situation was far less clear along the Silk Road—the overland routes crossing Eurasia before 1500—as this fascinating volume shows. The cost and difficulty of travel meant that few people could afford to leave home. Those who could frequently hired guides, so they had no need for maps. The area between the known world and the unknown worlds beyond was fuzzy: maps often showed fierce monsters or mythical beings guarding the edge of the known world. People used maps to learn about places, whether distant lands or imaginary universes, to which they would never travel during their lifetimes.
Yet some people were traveling during this period, and this volume illuminates the types of information that moved across Eurasia, whether originating in the Islamic world or East Asia. Different cartographic conventions prevailed in the Islamic world and East Asia. Starting in the eighth century, if not earlier, the Chinese used woodblocks to make impressions of books (see Jonathan Bloom’s Chapter 4 below). The block carvers did not have to be literate.
They began with any piece of writing or drawing, no matter how complex, and glued it face down on a wooden block, exposing the mirror image of the original. After carving out the mirror image on the face of the printing block, they could print multiple copies. This technique allowed Chinese bookmakers to reproduce earlier images and maps with considerable accuracy. Many of the first maps made in China were made by officials for administrative reasons. The earliest extant maps date to the second century BcE, long before the use of woodblock printing, and were excavated from the tomb of a prince at Mawanedui §-E4, Hunan province (see Nicolas Zufferey’s Chap-
ter 1). They show a small section of territory, presumably a location that the army hoped to defend.
The Chinese made maps for religious purposes, too. Natasha Heller’s Chapter 2 focuses on the map of an important Buddhist pilgrimage center at Mount Wutai 7 GIL) (literally, “Five Terrace Mountain”) in modern Shanxi province. When the Japanese pilgrim Ennin [E|{— (794-864) visited there in 840, he received a map of the site, sure evidence that it was already an established tourist center. Only tourists need maps; local people already know where they are.
Ennin does not record what type of map he received, but it must have differed from the map of Mount Wutai in Cave 61 at Dunhuang Aces, the subject of Heller’s chapter. This wall of Cave 61 is 13 meters long and 3.6 meters tall. It depicts Mount Wutai, a religious site some 1,600 kilometers from Dunhuang. Whereas the bottom register of the paintings portrays the important shrines at the site and cartouches containing verbal descriptions of past miracles, the top of the painting shows the heavenly beings who bring the miracles. Viewers living far from the mountain, Heller suggests, did not need to know where to stay because they would never visit the site. Instead, the painting offered them a “personal experience of the holy,” which they could obtain by listening to a monk or lay Buddhist explain the map on the cave wall. Viewers could imagine themselves in the place of the many figures who witness the miracles of Majfijusri, the bodhisattva believed to preside over the mountain site.
Dorothy Wong’s Chapter 3 discusses Buddhist maps of the cosmos. Buddhists in different schools conceived of the cosmos differently: some envisioned a single-world system whereas others described a triple-world system. A sixth-century stone relief from Chengdu, Sichuan (fig. 3.7) portrayed the coexistence of human and other worlds in the same way that the artist of Cave 61 at Dunhuang did: with the human register at the bottom and the pure land above. ‘The designers made a fascinating innovation: they used single-point perspective to guide the viewer’s eye to the Amitabha Buddha. Here, too, we can imagine a lay audience looking at the stone tablet as a preacher describes the different beings of the cosmos.
Chinese mapmakers working in later centuries made other innovations. One of the most unusual was the use of a grid. A map entitled Yiyi tu #3304 (Map of the Tracks of Yu) dates to the twelfth century (see Chapter 4). As Bloom notes, the grid allows viewers to judge the relative distances between two places. Grids played a very different role in Islamic cartography. Islamic geographers followed the lead of Ptolemy (second century cE) and made charts giving a vertical and horizontal coordinate for every place on earth (and for every star in heaven). As Bloom points out, “In effect, he [Ptolemy] was the first to digitize images.” Islamic cartographers adopted Ptolemy’s innovation because it allowed even unskilled copyists to transmit information accurately. Accordingly, many Islamic geographic treatises put all the crucial information in the text and treated accompanying maps as nonessential illustrations.
In some cases, though, Islamic maps survive that present new information not in the accompanying text. Andreas Kaplony’s Chapter 7 analyzes al-Kashghari’s grammar of ‘Turkic languages and a map, no longer extant, that survives only in a thirteenth-century copy by Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. On the basis of an imaginative reading of the text, Kaplony suggests that the mysterious yellow dots on the map represent the different Turkic tribes. A similar problem occurred in the copying of star charts, Paul Kunitzsch explains in Chapter 9. Whereas one fourteenth-century map showed the Andromeda Nebula as a comprehensible group of dots, later copies reproduced the dots in meaningless groups. Only when the German astronomer Peter Apian located the original text, and had it translated, was he able to restore the dots’ meaning. Kunitzsch’s chapter is particularly valuable for its elegant and concise description of how an astrolabe works.
Islamic cartographers, always wary of the distortions that could result from copying, made extensive use of color and shape. Copyists, they hoped, could reproduce a standard geometric shape more easily than an accurate geographic contour. This tendency to employ stock shapes may account for the stylized maps in the Book of Cunosities (originally drawn in the eleventh century and copied in the twelfth or thirteenth century), the subject of Yossef Rapoport’s Chapter 8. The maps in this manuscript show the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean as perfect ovals. The place names around the edge are distributed not by their actual geographic location but, instead, as if someone simply copied a list of points on an itinerary along the edges of the oval.
The Book of Curwsities contains exactly the kind of error that Islamic cartographers dreaded: the copyist has mistakenly transposed elements from the original map, now lost, so that China is directly connected to the Arabian Peninsula (with India missing), and Africa and India form one landmass. Another error is particularly intriguing: the cartographer included a scale marker at the top of his world map but then portrayed the world as a set of shapes whose dimensions have no relationship to the graticule scale. He seems to have copied the graticule scale with “little idea of what it meant or how it was to be used,” as Bloom puts it in Chapter 4.
These transfers of one motif or image from one cultural context to another, where an image could take on an entirely different meaning, are among the most fascinating moments in this volume. ‘The first use of a grid in the Islamic world that Bloom has found is in the thirteenth century, when architects used graph paper to build the Ilkhanid palace at Takht-i Sulayman in northwestern Iran. Before that, they simply built buildings on the spot, without any plans. But where did they get the idea of a grid? From China, according to Bloom. It seems, then, that a Persian must have seen some kind of erid used in China. The Chinese employed grids to make maps (like the Map of the Tracks of Yu), to practice calligraphy, and for architectural drawings (as in the twelfth-century architectural manual entitled Yingzao fashi =iti}KTh). Unlike the Chinese, the Persians used a grid keyed to a single unit (the gaz, or cubit) to plan how many bricks were required for a given edifice. Although the Persian who borrowed the first grid could not read the accompanying Chinese text, he “was inspired by it to produce something quite new and different,” Bloom suggests, “even if the original intended meaning was completely lost in translation.”
The same kind of process underlies the transformation of horoscopes from circular shapes to squares, argues Johannes Thomann in Chapter 5. People in the Islamic World saw square Chinese horoscopes and adapted the format for their own use. Similarly, in 1286, when artists made the headpiece of an Armenian lectionary, they included a very Chinese-looking dragon and phoenix. In Chapter 6, Dickran Kouymjian suggests that this was an informed borrowing:
just as the artists of the Liao dynasty (ca. 907—1125) used the dragon and the phoenix to depict the emperor and the empress, so the Armenians used the same symbols to represent the king and queen of Armenia.
No one who attended the original conference in Zurich from which this volume has emerged can forget Sonja Brentjes’s images of horses’ tails from the Catalan Atlas. ‘The distinctive tails have no hair at the top; the first hairs appear some distance from the horse’s rear. In Chapter 10, Brentjes uses the clues in the horses’ coloring— light blue, pink, white, or black, all spotted—to show that the maker of the Catalan Atlas borrowed imagery from late Ikhanid painting. This is the rare and exciting example of a distinct image moving across the Silk Road from Iran to Spain: we can see the image both in its original [lkhanid context and in its later Catalan version. This is as close to a smoking gun as anyone working with evidence from before 1500 has any right to expect!
Frankly, this volume should make readers nostalgic for the maps of the past. Despite all the challenges these maps pose, they are much richer than the standardized maps that we consult today when we go on a road trip. Whatever their country of origin, modern maps all look the same: north at the top, distances to scale, highways wider than roads—any of us could continue this list. The papers in this volume analyze far richer maps from earlier times, maps that prompt us to reconsider the boundaries defining maps themselves.
INTRODUCTION
Philippe Forét and Andreas Kaplony
Silk Road Studies
In our global village, the theme of the Silk Road is gathering greater interest than before for several reasons. It encompasses many concepts that cultural studies have made fashionable, such as communication, representation, and syncretism. It also evokes images of the oasis cities, humble caravanserais, and mighty imperial capitals where religious images and scientific information circulated in the ancient and medieval periods, before Europe considered itself the pivot of human history. The geographical area that separates the capital cities of ancient China from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean harbors is, of course, large.
Much research has been done since the 1963 publication of Edward Schafer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand. Scholars have published monographs on longdistance trade and travel, and museum curators have issued gorgeous exhibition catalogues that depict lost places in the heart of Asia. The present volume approaches the subject from a new angle, by looking at the journey of maps and images along the Silk Road to see how old ideas traveled and adapted themselves to new surroundings.
Our Approach
Visual knowledge was the focus of the conference on the transmission of maps and images along the Silk Road we held in Zurich in May 2004. We had the impression that maps and other images were an especially promising point of entry to study the iconic vocabulary of the Greek, Indian, and Chinese scientific traditions, as well as that of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian ritual artifacts. This topic allowed us to explore the Silk Road’s uniquely long communication network and investigate the diffusion of concepts and objects related to visual knowledge.
We decided to consider the transmission of knowledge both between neighboring civilizations and between generations within the same culture. To do so, we relied on the regional patterns of the Silk Road. The structure of this volume therefore mirrors the spatial division of the Silk Road network in three major areas—the Buddhist Road, the Mongol Road, and the Mediterranean Road. We also take into account the Jslamic World where the Mongol and Mediterranean Roads met.
The Buddhist Road connected India to China through the Pamir passes and the oases of the T'aklamakan and Gobi deserts. Buddhist monks and scholars took it to spread their teachings from the second to the eleventh centuries. Until the fifteenth century, the Mongol Road that superseded the Buddhist Road was maintained by Mongol states for their couriers and troops, as well as for the artists, scholars, and merchants they summoned to their separate courts.’ The Mongol and the Mediterranean Roads met in the Jslamic World, an area that functioned then, as it does today, both as a specific cultural region and as a center for worldwide interactions. ‘The Mediterranean Road connected the Islamic and Christian Worlds together.
The Buddhist Road
To determine when exactly the Buddhist Road opened, Mcolas Kufferey discusses the impact of India and Central Asia on the art of Han China (206 Bce—220 ce). As information from and on the “Western Regions” entered China, reliable descriptions in Chinese sources continued to coexist with myths and legends on these places.
Natasha Heller analyzes a tenth-century mural map in Dunhuang, one of the gates to China, that depicts the peaks and terraces of distant Mount Wutai. A sacred mountain to Buddhist and Taoist pilgrims, Wutai is located between the believers’ temporal world and the buddhas’ pure lands. ‘The temples depicted on the mural map at Dunhuang are associated with the rituals, etiquette, and emotions of pilgrimage.
On a more theoretical level, Dorothy C. Wong presents Buddhist cosmology as it developed from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries. Representations of an initial single-world/single-buddha system evolved into varied multiple-world/multiple-buddha systems. Chinese artists combined their traditional perspective with the Buddhist principles of frontality, centrality, and symmetry when they represented pure lands in a convergent multiple-point perspective. ‘Their more abstract diagrams prefigured esoteric mandalas.
The Mongol Road
Jonathan Bloom writes on fifteenth-century Islamic Central Asia, when eridded maps and plans suddenly appeared. He explains how Greek and Muslim traditions were replaced by Chinese maps and plans that imitated models going back to the eleventh century. Although writing on paper spread immediately from China westward, four more centuries were needed for the diffusion of drawings made on paper.
In his comprehensive survey of horoscope diagrams in premodern Middle East and Europe, Johannes Thomann reveals a similar rupture between the Greek and Arabic traditions. Ancient astrological diagrams were circular, but square diagrams appeared only in the eleventh century. In the twelfth century, the standard diagram in both the Middle East and Europe was square and had rhomboid divisions. This layout had become common two centuries earlier in the horoscopes and divinatory texts of Central Asia and China.
Dickran Kouymjian describes an interesting episode in Armenian art. During the thirteenth century, East Asian motifs became prominent in Cilicia, a state allied to the Crusaders and a vassal of the Mongol empire. Armenian artists symbolized Christ with a lion and the royal couple with a dragon and a phoenix, a practice that mirrored how power and authority were depicted in China. Soon after this, an Armenian work on world conquest, the Alexander Romance, displayed miniatures similar to the East Asian iconography that the Mongol conquerors had sponsored.
The Islamic World
Two chapters on Islamic culture investigate what images state about internal diffusion in a single cultural area. Andreas Kaplony considers an eleventh-century Arabic map that is the oldest one of the Silk Road (outside China) and the first that applied geography to linguistics. Since the copy preserved is only one step removed from the original, we can see how copying altered the transmission of text and illustrations in diverging directions.
Yossef Rapoport examines an Arabic world atlas from the eleventh century that the Bodleian Library has recently acquired. Aesthetic reasons rather than topography may explain why the world map is a rectangle, the Indian Ocean has such a peculiar shape, and the regional maps represent rivers instead of the overland routes to Central Asia and India.
The Mediterranean Road
How knowledge has traveled between Muslim and European countries is well documented. Academics have focused either on the engagement with ancient Greek science in the medieval Middle East and Europe or on the diffusion of Western concepts and modern science to the Middle East. Paul Kunitzsch surveys the tools available in premodern times to Arabic-Islamic astronomers. They produced three-dimensional celestial globes to represent the sky and developed the astrolabe, a sophisticated instrument for portraying the sky in two dimensions. In their treatises they studied the theories of plane mapping but also made drawings of constellations and cosmic events. European influence resulted in the plane celestial maps of the seventeenth century.
Finally, Sonja Brentjes analyzes the Asian elements found in two Catalan portolan charts of the fourteenth century. Spotted horses and Islamic rulers were depicted according to Iranian and Central Asian models. The Catalan artists drew three rivers in West Asia (one of them imaginary) in ways similar to the Arabic-Islamic school of geography, but their maps differ markedly from the physical topography of the region. Her detailed inspection proves that texts only partially transmitted iconographic information.
We expect this work to be a useful complement to the monographs that have studied the history of cartography or iconography within a single cultural tradition. We have selected those papers from our conference that combine independent perspectives. We have avoided focusing on one period, topic, or region because we believe that a variety of approaches and methodologies best encourages the conceptual development of a common theme.
This volume addresses important questions about the Silk Road as an intellectual enterprise. Students in Asian studies may not object to being reminded that the borders between the subcontinents of Eurasia remained porous for at least fifteen centuries. With its consideration of Islamic and Buddhist cultures, The Journey of Maps and Images on the Sik Road will contribute, we trust, to today’s discussion of our visual environment.
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