Video: How ancient cartographers defended their copyright: Easter eggs on ancient maps
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Cartography is one of the most venerable sciences, its age is counted in thousands of years. Since ancient times, people have tried to recreate the outlines of the earth's surface. The earliest cartographic works were found in the North Caucasus and Egypt. Ancient cartographers had their own secrets. Why are ancient maps so unique and what surprises do they surprise modern cartographers?
The history of this incredibly fascinating science is studied from the preserved ancient maps, drawings, sketches and descriptions for these works. The development of cartography is closely related to the development of such fields of knowledge as geography, astronomy and geodesy. Geographical discoveries and research, geodetic measurements and astronomical determination of the position of earth coordinates, provide materials for the compilation of maps. The accuracy of the compiled cartographic materials directly depends on the level of development of these sciences.
Cartography emerged as a result of the need to satisfy simple practical human needs. This is trade, and the development of agriculture, and industry, military affairs, and many other spheres of human interests. The first cartographic works date back to the most ancient times. The earliest appeared several millennia BC in prehistoric eastern slave states. The entire Ancient East has been explored and recreated by the geographers of China. Ancient people were able to draw up such accurate maps, which were not even in the Middle Ages. How they did it without modern tools is a mystery.
Of course, the waging of wars had a huge impact on the development of cartography. The Greeks were especially successful in this. Starting with Alexander the Great and his conquests, which gave a powerful impetus to the development of trade and lively relations with other powers. Navigation developed, colonization intensified. All this immensely enriched the geographic horizons of the Greeks. Science never stood still. Cartographers, people are very learned, inventive, they are not at all alien to a sense of humor. Very specific and professional. For centuries these people have included small, deliberate flaws in their cards. For example, a fake street, a fantastic city, a funny little picture. Something invisible to anyone other than the author. It was a kind of trap for illegal copying - a kind of curious way to protect copyright.
Such patterns have recently been found on official maps of Switzerland. There is a barely visible spider, there is a fish, a naked woman lying, disguised as a stream, a marmot hidden by the hills. The drawings are cleverly hidden among the contour lines that depict the remote mountainous regions of Switzerland. The remoteness from settlements allows them to remain unnoticed for decades.
Creating maps is hard, painstaking work. Many of these illustrations have served to bring to life the everyday monotony of a cartographer's life. Many of the drawings on the maps date back to the mid-20th century and were discovered less than ten years ago. You can imagine a boring, slow working day, when a tired cartographer decided to entertain himself by adding a funny illustration to his work. Of course, when such drawings or other flaws are found, the map is edited. The official maps are updated and all the fun stuff is removed. Already more than half of the known illustrations have disappeared in this way. "Creativity has no place on these maps," explained a spokesman for Swisstopo, Switzerland's national mapping agency.
The Swiss are by no means the only ones who dabbled with their cards. The British were caught in this too. Among the random winding lines that form the cliffs along the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, inscriptions in the form of names have been found. Truly, the interesting and mysterious science of cartography holds many secrets, as does its masters. Read about other unexpected facts of ancient times and the then ways of keeping documentation in our article.
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