Cover of Lost Maps of the Caliphs
Lost Maps of the Caliphs Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo
by Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-54088-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-55340-5
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000.

Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast.

As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Yossef Rapoport is a reader in Islamic history at Queen Mary University of London. Emilie Savage-Smith is a fellow of the British Academy and recently retired as professor of the history of Islamic science at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. She continues as Fellow Archivist of St Cross College. They are coeditors of An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, Edited with an Annotated Translation.

REVIEWS

“A remarkable and important book of dazzling scholarship; as well as providing a definitive account of the discovery and significance of The Book of Curiosities to the history of cartography, the authors offer no less than a complete reappraisal of astronomy, astrology, and geography in the first four centuries of Islam. With its focus on eleventh-century Fatimid Cairo, The Lost Maps of the Caliphs reinterprets early Islamic apprehensions of the earth and the heavens, while reorienting our modern understanding of medieval Arabic mapmaking and its part in the transmission of Late Antique cartographic knowledge.”
— Jerry Brotton, Queen Mary University of London, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps.

"This book starts with an exciting account of the discovery of the manuscript of the Book of Curiosities and the growing realization of its importance, a great story in itself. Since then the text has been published with admirable speed. This book is the first scholarly discussion of the maps, their sources, and their place in the history of Arab cartography. At every level it reaffirms the importance of the work. The two authors, Savage-Smith on the heavens and Rapoport on the earth, explain the maps with exemplary scholarship and lucidity. Like the manuscript itself, this companion volume vastly enhances our understanding of the classical Arabic world view in all its rich complexity."
— Hugh N. Kennedy, SOAS, University of London

“There is nothing quite like The Book of Curiosities. It provides a view of the heavens and the known world as these were seen from eleventh-century Egypt, extending from the realm of the fixed stars to Europe, China, India, and East Africa. The author’s cartographic method is tailored to his own aims, the stylized equivalent of the subway maps that now exist for major cities like London and New York.  Lost Maps of the Caliphs is organized along the lines of the original manuscript, and exceptionally well documented, using a dazzling range of sources in an equally dazzling range of languages. The result is totally fascinating, with untold potential to illuminate any treatment of the medieval world on any continent in the Eastern Hemisphere. New trade routes appear. Krakatau is shown in full eruption. The authors’ ability to clarify what we see and read is so great that the unfolding of this marvelous story somehow seems easy and natural—but in fact it is a triumph of careful, imaginative scholarship.”
— Ingrid Rowland, University of Notre Dame

"This astounding 1,000-year-old find transforms how we think about history. . . . As tales of scholarly finds go, this is up there with the best. . . . Lost Maps of the Caliphs is a testament both to the scholarship of its authors and to the spirit of inquiry fostered by the Fatimids. It can teach us several things. That Islamic thought cannot be reduced to more obviously 'religious' texts written by a Sunni standpoint. That history, as a discipline, is hard work, and exciting. Above all, that what we know of the past is still only provisional."
— The Daily Telegraph

"A comprehensive and fascinating appraisal of the [Book of Curiosities], putting it in the context of other Arab and world maps. . . . Savage-Smith and Rapoport have done a splendid job in rescuing this intriguing work, forcing us to reorient our sense of the geographical priorities of differing Islamic dynasties. . . . It asks us to think ourselves into the worldview of an educated man curious about his empire, keen to show off the knowledge he had picked up here and there--both in written form and, when he needed to clarify, in a diagram or map."
— Sameer Rahim, Apollo

"Lost Maps of the Caliphs is a tour-de-force that not only supersedes—complete with corrections, updates and new material—all their previous publications, but also proposes a comprehensive reconsideration of the way the history of astronomy, astrology, geography and cartography has hitherto been written. It is a lesson in how one remarkable manuscript and two talented scholars can change a field. . . . [The] conclusion has paradigm-changing implications for the study of early Islamic maps and their textual environment. We are fortunate indeed that Rapoport and Savage-Smith have undertaken fifteen years of meticulous, collaborative research on the Book of Curiosities. The culmination, Lost Maps of the Caliphs, is an exceptional tribute to an exceptional object of study."
— Imago Mundi

"The 'Caliphs' of the title notwithstanding, what this book delivers is more fascinating still, namely a deep dive into the interests and preoccupations of an ordinary educated Egyptian of the first half of the 11th century. . . . Essential reading for any medievalist and a must for university book shelves."
— Medieval Archaeology

"Reads like an academic thriller. . . . It is essential reading for anyone interested in premodern global maritime communications, the history of cartography, astronomy, and other sciences, and the Islamic (especially Ismaili) worldview. The authors are to be commended for their extraordinary work on this extraordinary manuscript."
— Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

"If one were searching for a reading that might spark the interest of students to study early Middle East historiography and histories of cartography, I can think of none better than this book’s first chapter."
— Kyle T. Evered, Historical Geography

"Until a few years ago, little to nothing was known about the Book of Curiosities, but the authors of Lost Maps of the Caliphs undertake to fill that gap with this detailed account of its history and the story behind how it came to be made. . . . The medieval maps that were included were both fascinating and unusual, perhaps especially so because they bear only a slight resemblance to modern maps. This book is worth a look for the maps alone, and scholars of medieval history, geography, or cartography may well wish to purchase it."
— Cartographic Perspectives

"This book is required reading. . . . A well-researched and provocative analysis of what is obviously an important text."
— Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture

"[An] outstanding study... Rapoport and Savage-Smith successfully reintroduce the Book of Curiosities to the history of Medieval cartographic knowledge and bring the Fatimid caliphate to the forefront of Islamic studies."
— Journal of World History

"Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith offer us remarkable political and intellectual contextualization for a work of a Medieval Arab geography."
— Medieval Encounters (Translated from French)

"The work of Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith will prove to be a major contribution for our understanding of the ideology and communication strategies developed very early on by the Fatimids."
— Bulletin critique des Annales islamologiques (Translated from French)

"This erudite and well-grounded study changes pre-existing categories of medieval Islamic science and its interaction with other traditions."
 
— Francia Recensio

TABLE OF CONTENTS

- Yossef Rapoport, Emilie Savage-Smith
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0001
[Bodleian;Fatimid;macrocosm;microcosm]
The introduction describes briefly the general format and contents of the manuscript, as well as its title. The name of the author remains unknown. After its acquisition in 2002 by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, several much later and mostly unillustrated copies of the treatise were located, and these were employed in the subsequent critical edition and analytic translation of the treatise that was published in 2014. This publication focused upon deciphering the text; it did not include the analysis of the treatise as a whole, either within the context of Fatimid Egyptian society or within the traditions of medieval cartography and astrology. The Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides that wider and contextualized perspective on the eleventh-century Egyptian views of the macrocosm and microcosm that are fundamental to understanding the structure and composition of the Book of Curiosities. A brief history of the Fatimids in North Africa and Egypt is supplied as general background. (pages 1 - 6)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Yossef Rapoport, Emilie Savage-Smith
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0002
[Heritage Lottery Fund;Idrisi;Idrisi World Map;Bodleian Library;National Art Collections Fund]
The opening chapter presents a somewhat personal account of the ‘discovery’ of the manuscript in 2000 and its subsequent purchase by the Bodleian Library in 2002, made possible by the support of the (UK) Heritage Lottery Fund and other generous donors, including the (UK) National Art Collections Fund. Details of the manuscript’s paper, inks, and pigments are provided, and evidence for dating the copy (Egypt, around 1200) as well as the composition of the treatise itself (also Egypt, between 1020 and 1050). The chapter concludes with a ‘debate’ between the two authors (Y. Rapoport and E. Savage-Smith) as to whether or not the circular world map in our copy of the Book of Curiosities is evidence that the famous ‘Idrisi World Map’ in fact was not by Idrisi but preceded him by some hundred years. (pages 7 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Yossef Rapoport, Emilie Savage-Smith
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0003
[Kannauj;Buddha;Sindhind;Ptolemy;Hermes Trismegistus;lunar mansions;Hermetic tradition;meteors;comets]
The anonymous author of the Book of Curiosities provides an account of the origins of astronomy and astronomical tables, placing it in the Indian city of Kannauj. This tale merges the biography of Gautama Buddha with the origins of the Indian manual of astronomy known as the Sindhind. The author then records, and illustrates, four different ways of mapping portions of the sky, including schemes inherited from classical Greek astronomers such as Ptolemy that involved the forty-eight classical constellations of the sky, many of which are familiar to readers today. They include also mapping schemes derived from a Late-Antique tradition attributed to the legendary Egyptian-Greek sage known as Hermes Trismegistus, another reflecting pre-Islamic Bedouin customs, and yet another system (known as ‘lunar mansions’) ultimately derived from Central Asia or India. The author devotes illustrated chapters to comets and meteors (‘stars with tails’), again using different sources for his information, some ascribed to Ptolemy, others taken from the Hermetic tradition. Stars, planets and comets were all seen as indicative of future events on Earth. The final chapter of the first part of the Book of Curiosities is on winds, lightning, thunder, and earthquakes, and what they might portend. (pages 29 - 74)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0004
[World map;Ptolemy;al-Khwarazmi;Mathematical geography;Abbasid Empire]
This chapter is focused on the the rectangular world map, the most enigmatic of all the images in the Book of Curiosities. This world map is unusual in its rectangular, rather than circular, shape. It also has a calibrated scale visible near the top of the map, making it the oldest surviving world map carrying a scale from any cartographical tradition. This chapter argues that the rectangular shape, the scale bar and other designs on the edges of this map all point to a tradition of mathematical geography that had its roots in Antiquity. The world map here contains vestiges of a Late Antique prototype map attributed to Ptolemy, which was also known to the ninth-century Abbasid mathematician al-Khwarazmi. The interior of the world map, however, is dominated by a later, more consciously Islamic, abstract and non-mathematical cartographic tradition, commonly known as the “Balkhi School” of cartography that flourished in the tenth century. The combination of these two cartographic traditions in the world map here reflects the hybridity of the intellectual culture in which it was formed, indebted to Antiquity and to Islam in equal measures.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0005
[Nile;Ptolemy;al-Khwarazmi;mathematical geography;Idrisi;Copts]
This chapter examines the evolving representation of the Nile, a dominant feature of all Islamic world maps. The map of the Nile in the Book of Curiosities bear close resemblance to the map of the Nile by al-Khwarazmi, included in the oldest extant set of Islamic maps. This map furnishes further proof that our author was using a prototype associated with a Late Antique map maintaining elements of mathematical geography. The depictions of the Nile in the Book of Curiosities also introduce two revolutionary ideas about the origins of the Nile. One is the visual representation of a western tributary of the Nile that originates in sand dunes in West Africa. The second novel feature is a mountain near the Equator. The mountain’s melting snow is said to be the source of the Nile floods, an explanation that is as close as medieval scholars ever got to the true reason for the Nile’s annual cycle. Through extensive re-working by the North African geographer Idrisi a century later, these two novel elements would become a permanent feature of later cartographic representations of the Nile.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0006
[Mediterranean;navigation;Cyprus;Aegean;Portolan charts]
This chapter examines the cartographical representation of Mediterranean maritime spaces in the Book of Curiosities. In the Book of Curiosities, the Mediterranean is shown as a perfect oval, dense with hundreds of harbors and islands, but unrecognizably abstract. Other perfectly abstract maps present the island of Cyprus as a rectangle, and the Aegean Sea as a series of elongated finger-like arches. Paradoxically, this absolute abstraction is accompanied by unprecedented wealth of material on quality and size of anchorages and harbors, sailing distances, water sources and wind directions. Taken together, these texts and diagrams are of major interest for the history of Mediterranean navigation and maritime charts. The intentional abstraction of the maritime maps is directly tied to their origin in navigation records, and the straight lines reflect coast-hugging mariners’ view of the Mediterranean shores. The abstraction of the maritime maps of Book of Curiosities stands in stark contrast to the late medieval portolan charts. Thus, the Mediterranean maps of the Book of Curiosities lends support to those, like Ramon J. Pujades, who argue that the portolan charts were a radical break with cartographical tradition, whether European or Islamic.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0007
[Mediterranean;Sicily;Mahdia;Tinnis;city plans;ports;Madaba;Fatimid Empire;fortifications]
This chapter discusses the representation of urban spaces and political power in the maps of the island of Sicily, the port cities of Mahdia in modern Tunisia and Tinnis in the Nile Delta. The three maps depict Mediterranean ports under Fatimid control, and share the same visual language. The visual representations of these cities focus exclusively on the walls and gates of the cities, the defences of the ports and the fortified palatial complexes, at the expense of all other urban institutions. The aim in all three maps is to convey the impregnability of the fortifications. Although these maps are appended to textual descriptions, they stand independent of them, and add or omit data in order to achieve their desired visual effect. Together, they form the earliest set of city plans to have survived from medieval Islam. In comparison with the vivid images of urban agglomerations in late antique mosaic maps of Madaba, the city maps of the Book of Curiosities show instead empty spaces, with an emphasis on the military and political at the expense of the civic and the religious.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0008
[Mediterranean;Byzantium;Fatimid Empire;navigation;North Africa;Braudel;Aegean;Cyprus;Maritime space]
This chapter considers the contribution of the Book of Curiosities to our conceptualisation of the medieval Mediterranean as a shared maritime space. The Book of Curiosities is a rare example of a medieval Islamic treatise that has the Mediterranean maritime space as its centre of attention and as a subject of detailed familiarity. From a Fatimid perspective, the Mediterranean effectively encompassed only the eastern half, bounded in the west by an imaginary line drawn between Mahdia and Sicily. The western half, including the coasts of Western Europe and North Africa, belonged to a different maritime sphere, even if acknowledged to be part of the same great sea. On the other hand, the Mediterranean of the Book of Curiosities is as Byzantine as it is Muslim. The Byzantine southern coasts of Anatolia, the coasts of the Aegean and many of its islands, as well as Cyprus, are described with as much detail as the Egyptian or Syro-Palestinian coasts under Fatimid control. There is also evidence of shared maritime technology and Greek navigation terminology. While religious divisions would lead us to expect a north-south divide, the Book of Curiosities presents an east-west rift, with an integrated Greek and Arabic eastern Mediterranean.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0009
[Indian Ocean;Sind;Kannauj;India;Tibet;Silk Road;China;Global history;Fatimid Empire;Indus]
The maps of the Book of Curiosities demonstrate the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean, and of the tenth-century Isma?ili emirates in Sind, to the global ambitions of the Fatimid empire. The maps also contribute to the history of global communications at the turn of the previous millennium, as they highlight a route to China that passed through northern India and Tibet. This chapter examines three separate maps of East and Central Asia: a map of the Indian Ocean, a map of the River Oxus, and a map of the Indus, which also shows localities along the Ganges. This third map of the Indian river systems uniquely depicts an overland itinerary from Muslim Sind, then under Fatimid control, through northern India and then probably through Tibet, to China. Other routes, either the sea route to China through the Straits of Malacca, or the Central Asian Silk Road, are not depicted in such detail, suggesting that by the time the Book of Curiosities was composed the Tibetan route eclipsed its more famous alternatives.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0010
[Indian Ocean;Yemen;East Africa;Swahili coast;global history;Fatimid empire;Isma'ili missionary network;Aden;Zanzibar]
The map of the Indian Ocean in the Book of Curiosities shows the Gulf of Aden as a gateway to the ports and islands of the East Africa, known today as the Swahili coast. Fatimid commercial relations with East Africa are rarely documented, and recent scholarship has doubted any Fatimid impact on the region during its formative period of Islamization. But the detailed depiction of East Africa in the Book of Curiosities points to an unexpected level of familiarity, based on information gathered from navigation along the coasts of the Horn of Africa. We have here what may be the first recorded references in Arabic to the islands of Zanzibar (al-Unguja), Mafia, and several localities and capes along the coasts of modern Somalia. The treatise allows us to visualize the Indian Ocean from a Fatimid viewpoint, with the Isma'ili anchors of Sind and the Yemen as the two crucial nodes for further political, religious and economic penetration. This Indian Ocean, unlike the Mediterranean, was not a militarised space, and Fatimid ambitions there relate to the propagation of the Isma'ili missionary network. Visually, the Indian Ocean also lacks the perfect symmetry of the Mediterranean and is shown here in disparate segments.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0011
[geography;maritime spaces;cartography;mirabilia;al-Qazwini]
This chapter sets the geographical sections of the Book of Curiosities in the context of the rich geographical literature of the Islamic world, and argues that it offered radically novel approaches to the organization and presentation of geographical material. First, the organisation of the treatise follows the logic of water, not land-based units. It provides maps for three great seas (Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and the Caspian), and cartographic and textual descriptions of major islands, peninsulas, lakes and rivers. A second distinctive feature is the author’s unprecedented confidence in the power of maps to convey geographical information. Maps are no longer there mainly to explicate the geographical data conveyed in prose, but become the centre of attention, and are often independent of any textual material. Finally, the last six chapters of the Book of Curiosities consist of an encyclopaedic catalogue of natural wonders or mirabilia, chapters that demonstrate an innovative approach to classifying and engaging with the exotic and the extraordinary. This approach anticipates the more famous mirabilia work of al-Qazwini (d. 1283).
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0012
[Fatimid;Isma'ili missionary network;cartography;Brethren of Purity;Coptic;Persian]
The conclusion concentrates upon the relationship of the Book of Curiosities to the wider Fatimid Egyptian intellectual milieu in which the author operated and the Isma?ili missionary network of which he may have been a member. Rather than a scholar, it is argued that the author was primarily a mapmaker, for maps are at the center of the Book of Curiosities. Our anonymous author even offers us his unique reflections on the craft of cartography. It is, nonetheless, a profoundly Fatimid treatise. Some comparisons are drawn with the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. The author of the Book of Curiosities did not limit himself to Greek authorities, but also employed Persian, Indian and Coptic traditions and was keen to display his command of multiple languages.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226553405.003.0013
[zodiacal signs;Ibn Ridwan;horoscope;domiciles;triplicities;decans;planetary exaltations]
The astrological significances of the zodiacal signs form the focus of the Appendix. Because the topic involves terminology unfamiliar to the modern reader and employs many technical details developed in the Greek system of horoscopic astrology, it has been placed at the end of this volume. While the Book of Curiosities does not have horoscopes within it, it assumes that its readers will be familiar with the terminology and features of horoscopes. An example of a horoscope is presented, taken from the autobiography of a Cairene physician and astrologer, Ibn Ridwan, a contemporary of our author. The author of the Book of Curiosities refers to numerous ways of aligning attributes (and hence predictions) with the twelve zodiacal signs. They could be aligned with parts of the human body, or with geographical localities. They could be classified by brilliance or gender and fortunate/unfortunate. They could be divided into two groups, or into three groups, or into four groups, each with a specific character or association. The ‘domiciles’ of planets in zodiacal signs was particularly important, as were ‘triplicities’ and ‘decans’, and the ‘exaltation’ and ‘fall’ of a planet.

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