Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the courses of rivers and roads. Another early Chinese map—again testifying to their advancement in car-
tography—described the military defenses of the kingdom in impressive detail.
The common denominator among these early maps is the prevalent sense that the mapmaker existed
in the center of the universe, an attitude still evident in many people, but particularly those who live in
Manhattan or Paris!
By looking at the maps of the world or the myths they often represented from these cultures, it is ap-
parent that people have always carried an inflated sense of our place in the universe. In almost every soci-
ety, from the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Chinese to the Aztecs and Plains Indians of the
Americas, humans have placed themselves at the center of the world. Beyond that, until fairly recently in
human history, people went a step further and put the earth in the center of the universe, with sun and stars
circling this rather insignificant speck in the vast cosmos.
This tremendous sense of self-importance that led the world of rational people to hold on to the idea
that the earth was the center around which the rest of the universe spun, is a common human foible that has
been labeled the
omphalos syndrome
, from the Greek word for navel. The Greeks placed their omphalos
at the famed Temple of Delphi located on the lower slopes of Mount Parnassus. Here was the temple seat
of the most important oracle in Greece. Considered to be the center of the world, the Delphic oracle was
consulted on all matters of state. Similarly, the word Babylon comes from an ancient word meaning “door
of the gods,” or the spot at which the gods came to earth.
Of course, when you believe that you exist at the center of the world and don't know much about the
rest of the world, the realm of observation and logical speculation blend into the world of mysticism with
results that are at least amusing to the twentieth century. The worldviews of these ancient cultures reflected
their geographic sense as much as it did their philosophies. In fact, the two were closely connected. For the
Egyptians, the Nile dominated their lives and their view of the universe. The Nile and its regular flooding
were life itself. The Egyptian world was divided in two by the Nile, which flowed into a great ocean. The
sky was held up by four supports; sometimes depicted as poles, sometimes mountains. Beliefs about the
sun's daily course took various forms from everyday life: a hawk rising each day, or the sun pushed along
by a giant beetle, just as a beetle rolls its ball of dung. In another version, the sun god Ra drove his chari-
ot—adopted later by the Greeks as Apollo.
The Babylonians, whose lives were also dominated by their two rivers, believed there was an immense
body of water within the earth that gave life to the world. With its emphasis on astronomy, the Babylonian
view of the universe envisioned a great vault of the heavens over the earth. This idea found expression in
Chinese views as well.
Often, as with Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods and usually hidden from view, the center
was a mountain. For the Japanese, it was Mount Fuji. In Hindu and later Buddhist cosmology, influenced
by its proximity to the seemingly unscalable Himalayas, a mythical Mount Meru rose up as the center of
the earth. The home of the gods, this mountain rose eighty-four thousand miles into the heavens.
IMAGINARY PLACES: Was There an Atlantis?
All of these ancient notions of the world point up the dividing line between scientific, rational processes
and the leap into legend, imagination, or faith. Even the Greeks, for all of their incredibly developed no-
tions of the world, fell back on myth, superstition, and legend to explain those things for which there was
no verifiable and rational explanation.
One of the most familiar examples of this from the Greek era is a geographic myth that persisted for
centuries, embroidered upon through history until it became a part of modern consciousness, even contrib-
uting to the success of a rather mindless pop song of the sixties by a singer named Donovan. That legend
