Exhibits containing tag : islamic-maps

Balkhi School of Geographers

Balkhi School of Geographers https://www.perplexity.ai/search/What-are-the-NUIX0SC0TLqCR8BcVWTRNg?s=c https://www.perplexity.ai/search/What-were-the-wDHZqe2sRVqJ.gHkCPGGug?s=c Source: FranPritchettSource: Fran Pritchett Midieval MapsSource: Fran Pritchett Maps pageSource: Fran Pritchett main pageLink: Fran Pritchett Columbia University

Islamic Maps from the Collection of Karen Pinto

Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, of Indian, Russian, French, and 16th century Goan-Portuguese stock, educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Karen Pinto specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other worldly cartographic traditions. She has spent three decades hunting down maps in Oriental manuscript collections around the world. She has a 3000-strong image repository of Islamic maps—many that have never been published before. Her book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration was published by The University of Chicago Press in November 2016 and won a 2017 OAT (Outstanding Academic Title) award from Choice. She has won numerous grants for her work on Islamic maps, including a 2013-14 NEH fellowship. She has published articles on medieval Islamic, medieval European and Ottoman maps and has on-going book projects on “What is 'Islamic' about Islamicate Maps” and “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” Along with her work on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, she is interested in Digital Humanities, Spatial Studies, and in developing 3D spatial modules of places on Islamic Maps. Presently she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (The picture of her with Ottoman Turkish Janissary actors was taken on the grounds of Topkapi Saray Palace where she was conducting research on the maps in the library’s primary manuscript collection.)Copies of her publications are available through: https://independentscholar.academia.edu/KarenPintoSeveral important links to her work are included below:Aramco World Calendar 2020article about calendarPDF of calendarKaren's Interactive360 tour of Sülemaniye mosque complex in IstanbulKaren’s talk on 3 Decades+ work on Islamic maps: How did cartographers imagine the “Muslim” world? What is Islamic about Islamic cartography? Why did the cartographers not strive for mimesis and employ a visual language of stylized forms? What are the Late Antique, Ancient, and Prehistoric roots of Islamic cartography? How does it connect to other cartographical imaginations of the time—Christian, Chinese, Indic and otherwise? Was there a conception of dār al-Islam vs. a dār al-ḥarb in “Muslim Cartography? Who was considered us and who was the other in this cartographical rendition of the world? How can absences, presences, and anomalies be investigated to reveal unknown historiographical nuggets? Recording: https://youtu.be/IxOruMB-rUs*Longer Bio of how Karen came America and started working on Islamic maps in 1990:Growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, I somehow became map crazed. Was it the countless jigsaw puzzles (like Daniel Crouch 😉), many with missing pieces, that I broke and remade again and again during childhood, all too often holed up in a hospital bed? Or perhaps it was the wonderful family field trips into the heart of the Sindh desert? During my Convent of Jesus and Mary (CJM) O’Level school days, I excelled in geography for which my own hand drawn maps were well known among my classmates. My teacher loved them and my friends liked to take a peek at them in order to improve their own. ;-)American educational good fortune first smiled on me when Dartmouth decided to take in their first student from Pakistan :) At the Big D I got down to the ground and did some 'real' mapping and even fell into the Connecticut river while trying to map one of its banks! Off the Green, I merged the interests in geography and history that sustain me today.From there I headed to Columbia ostensibly to study International affairs but I took an accidental elective detour into a spell-binding Bulliet class on medieval Islamic history and was hooked thereafter—like a number of other unsuspecting SIPA grads :) Through the accident of stumbling upon a crumbling copy of Konrad Miller's early 20th century Mappae Arabicae in Baker Library in Spring 1990, while hunting for my MA topic I began a medieval odyssey that made me an expert in the world of medieval Islamicate carto-geography. And so was kindled a quest to see as many medieval Islamicate maps in situ as possible. Now, having collected 3,000 plus images from manuscript libraries around the world, I am deeply immersed in the study of medieval Islamic maps. One book is out ("Medieval Islamic Maps"), three others are on the way ("The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamicate Imagination" (based on my like-named MA essay of 1991), "What is Islamic about 'Islamicate' Maps," and "Islamo-Christian Cartographic Connections." Plus I am working on a digital site MIME (Medieval Islamicate Maps Encyclopedia) to preserve and make the maps available online. Many of the maps are from hard-to-access manuscript libraries in the Middle East and Europe. Starting in 1992 at Topkapi Saray and Sülemaniye libraries in Istanbul, I have devoted 3 decades to examining, dating/redating, and identifying the maps and the manuscripts that house them. I love to travel and am especially fond of finding unknown and lost places and ofc I am always on the lookout for unknown maps—especially those that are not easily identifiable as maps. My special interest is seeing maps where no one saw a map before and explaining how and why that unknown image is a map ;-)In Idaho my favorite “hard-to-figure-out-it’s-a-map” map is "Map Rock" outside Celebration Park :) It is one of the earliest extant maps in the world yet little known in the map world. I will briefly mention it at the outset of my talk. Here’s link to an brief article about it if you want to check it out: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/map-rocksee also from 9/19/24 LOC presentation:https://sims2.digitalmappa.org/36

Mapmaking in Islamicate Societies

.Mapmaking in Islamic SocietiesHundreds of maps survive mostly in manuscripts drawn and colored by unknown people over a millennium in numerous different societies that were ruled mostly by men but also occasionally by women adhering to different Islamic denominations. The manuscripts with maps are often undated and provide rarely information about the place of production. How then can we know when and where or by what kind of person they were made? Colors, styles of script, also called calligraphy, the type of paper and occasionally of card board, traces of instruments or lack of them, content features of the maps, and notes on cover or end pages, at the margins, or on other parts of the manuscript and the langue/s used in the manuscript can help us identifying at least the period, region, culture or disciplinary context of the people who drew the maps – scribes, painters and other craftsmen, scholars, captains, soldiers, court historians and possibly other professionals and amateurs.This exhibit is a brief introduction into some of the main domains where maps were used as illustrations of texts, as carriers of independent information, as educational tools, or as witnesses of cross-cultural contacts and interests.Generally, four classes of maps are recognized:1. maps derived in some way or the other from Ptolemy's Geography2. maps connected somehow with pre-Islamic Iranian political geography3. maps reflecting connections with cartographic developments in European Christian cultures4. narrative maps.This classification is admittedly too narrow to do justice to the many different specimens that survive in many libraries and museums across the globe. It somehow also hides what is in my view the main, unifying feature of almost all maps from Islamic societies that I have seen: the multiplicity of their cultural features. The only class that does not bring together elements from at least two other classes is number 4.In addition to the maps that can be included into one of the four classes there are exceptional specimens which differ from any of the standards represented by them.In this introduction, we show a few examples of each of the four classes and of the exceptions.Based on the work of Sonja Brentjes.Academia.edu