Islamic Maps
Islamic Maps

Author: Yossef Rapoport

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851244928

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Spanning the Islamic world, from ninth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Iran, this book tells the story of the key Muslim map-makers and the art of Islamic cartography. Muslims were uniquely placed to explore the edges of the inhabited world and their maps stretched from Isfahan to Palermo, from Istanbul to Cairo and Aden. Over a similar period, Muslim artists developed distinctive styles, often based on geometrical patterns and calligraphy. Map-makers, including al-Khwārazmī and al-Idrīsī, combined novel cartographical techniques with art, science and geographical knowledge. The results could be aesthetically stunning and mathematically sophisticated, politically charged as well as a celebration of human diversity. 'Islamic Maps' examines Islamic visual interpretations of the world in their historical context, through the lives of the map-makers themselves. What was the purpose of their maps, what choices did they make and what was the argument they were trying to convey? Lavishly illustrated with stunning manuscripts, beautiful instruments and Qibla charts, this book shows how maps constructed by Muslim map-makers capture the many dimensions of Islamic civilisation, providing a window into the worldviews of Islamic societies.

Medieval Islamic Maps
Medieval Islamic Maps

Author: Karen C. Pinto

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 022612696X

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The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. This book offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.

Creating the Mediterranean
Creating the Mediterranean

Author: Tarek Kahlaoui

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 9004347380

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In Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination Tarek Kahlaoui treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean. It tracks the history of the Islamic visualization of the sea from when geography was created by the Islamic state’s bureaucrats of the tenth century C.E. located mainly in the central Islamic lands, to the later men of the field, specifically the sea captains from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries C.E. located in the western Islamic lands. A narrative has emerged from this investigation in which the metamorphosis of the identity of the author or mapmaker seemed to be changing with the rest of the elements that constitute the identity of a map: its reader or viewer, its style and structure, and its textual content.

Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds

Author: Hyunhee Park

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1107018684

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This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.

Medieval Islamic Maps
Medieval Islamic Maps

Author: Karen C. Pinto

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 022612701X

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Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century. Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles—iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.

Picturing the Islamicate World
Picturing the Islamicate World

Author: Nadja Danilenko

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9004440097

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In Picturing the Islamicate World, Nadja Danilenko explores the message of the first preserved maps from the Islamicate world. Safeguarded in al-Iṣṭakhrī’s Book of Routes and Realms (10th century C.E.), the world map and twenty regional maps complement the text to a reference book of the territories under Muslim rule. Rather than shaping the Islamicate world according to political or religious concerns, al-Iṣṭakhrī chose a timeless design intended to outlast upheavals. Considering the treatise was transmitted for almost a millennium, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s strategy seems to have paid off. By investigating the Persian and Ottoman translations and all extant manuscripts, Nadja Danilenko unravels the manuscript tradition of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s work, revealing who took an interest in it and why.

Islamic Cairo in Maps
Islamic Cairo in Maps

Author: Yasser M. Ayad

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 9781649031112

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A portable, easy-to-use map guide that locates over 700 hundred Islamic-era monuments in historic Cairo using the most sophisticated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology This portable, easy-to-use map guide helps you locate over seven hundred Islamic-era monuments in Cairo's historic core, stretching from the city's northern walls all the way southward to the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and the Citadel, and beyond to Coptic Cairo, which includes monuments that pre-date Islamic rule. Clearly divided into six digestible main sections, the first five contain clusters of monuments, while the sixth covers structures scattered all around the old Cairene urban fabric. The clear, uncluttered cartographic style makes finding where you want to go a pleasure, and the maps are accompanied by a comprehensive index of monuments that gives their dates where known, their location referenced to their corresponding map pages, and a timeline of key periods and dynasties. Attractively designed in full color and including over twenty photographs of key monuments, this guide is conveniently packed into a slim 104 pages--handy enough to take anywhere and great for planning and remembering excursions. It is not only an ideal companion for the city's visitors and residents but an invaluable resource for historians, writers, and students.

Lost Maps of the Caliphs
Lost Maps of the Caliphs

Author: Yossef Rapoport

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-12-11

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 022655340X

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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.

In God's Path
In God's Path

Author: Robert G. Hoyland

Publisher: Ancient Warfare and Civilizati

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199916365

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In just over a hundred years--from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750--the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far afield as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time. How this collection of Arabian tribes was able to engulf so many empires, states, and armies in such a short period of time is a question that has perplexed historians for centuries. Most recent popular accounts have been based almost solely on the early Muslim sources, which were composed centuries later for the purpose of demonstrating that God had chosen the Arabs as his vehicle for spreading Islam throughout the world. In this ground-breaking new history, distinguished Middle East expert Robert G. Hoyland assimilates not only the rich biographical and geographical information of the early Muslim sources but also the many non-Arabic sources, contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous with the conquests. The story of the conquests traditionally begins with the revelation of Islam to Muhammad. In God's Path, however, begins with a broad picture of the Late Antique world prior to the Prophet's arrival, a world dominated by the two superpowers of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, "the two eyes of the world." In between these empires, in western (Saudi) Arabia, emerged a distinct Arab identity, which helped weld its members into a formidable fighting force. The Arabs are the principal actors in this drama yet, as Hoyland shows, the peoples along the edges of Byzantium and Persia--the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars, and Turks--also played important roles in the remaking of the old world order. The new faith propagated by Muhammad and his successors made it possible for many of the conquered peoples to join the Arabs in creating the first Islamic Empire. Well-paced and accessible, In God's Path presents a pioneering new narrative of one the great transformational periods in all of history.