My Exhibits
Karen Pinto Exhibits
Medieval Islamic Maps
Collector: Karen Pinto (@mapsgal)
My Exhibits
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
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Harmony Masks Conflict: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic Imagination - Karen Pinto
Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder."When I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1991, my professor, the late but incredibly great Olivia Remie Constable (1961-2014), suggested that I write a seminar paper on the medieval Muslim geographers. That sent me to the dark recessed of the Islamic history and geography collection on the 11th floor of the Butler Library. There I, literally, tripped over Konrad Miller’s late 1920’s extensive 6 volume: Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt und Länderkarten des 9–13. Jahrunderts. (6 vols. Stuttgart, 1926–1931) black and white reprints of hundreds of medieval Islamic maps hidden in Oriental manuscripts hitherto little known in the western history of cartography world.Miller’s dusty, crumbling black-and-white reprints of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean, formed the basis of my first major work on the subject: “Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” my MA Essay at Columbia U that went on to win SSRC’s 1992 Ibn Khaldun Prize. That experience led, in turn, to a life-long obsession and hunt for maps scattered in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript libraries worldwide that resulted in her first book on Islamic maps of the world in “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Introduction” (Chicago, 2016) and a collection of some three thousand images of maps, many not reprinted.
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Islamo-Christian Cartographic Frontiers: Views from Medieval Islamic Maps of the Mediterranean
Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder."When I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1991, my professor, the late but incredibly great Olivia Remie Constable (1961-2014), suggested that I write a seminar paper on the medieval Muslim geographers. That sent me to the dark recessed of the Islamic history and geography collection on the 11th floor of the Butler Library. There I, literally, tripped over Konrad Miller’s late 1920’s extensive 6 volume: Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt und Länderkarten des 9–13. Jahrunderts. (6 vols. Stuttgart, 1926–1931) black and white reprints of hundreds of medieval Islamic maps hidden in Oriental manuscripts hitherto little known in the western history of cartography world.Miller’s dusty, crumbling black-and-white reprints of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean, formed the basis of my first major work on the subject: “Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” my MA Essay at Columbia U that went on to win SSRC’s 1992 Ibn Khaldun Prize. That experience led, in turn, to a life-long obsession and hunt for maps scattered in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript libraries worldwide that resulted in her first book on Islamic maps of the world in “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Introduction” (Chicago, 2016) and a collection of some three thousand images of maps, many not reprinted.
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Passion & Conflict: Islamicate Maps of the Maghrib / ‘the West’ (Iberian Peninsula and North Africa)
KMMS Maghrib MapsFor more information on these 8th-15th century KMMS maps of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula check out this detailed article on the subject by Karen Pinto, “Interpretation, Intention, and Impact: Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian Cartographic Translation”: https://www.academia.edu/37439184/Interpretation_Intention_and_Impact_Andalusi_Arab_and_Norman_Sicilian_Examples_of_Islamo_Christian_Cartographic_Translation Note that the bulk of the medieval Islamic cartographic tradition is characterized by emblematic images of striking geometric form that symbolize – in Atlas-like fashion – particular parts of the Islamic world to the familiar viewer. They comprise a major carto-geographic manuscript tradition known by the universal title of Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) that was copied with major and minor variations throughout the Islamic world for eight centuries. It was a stylized amimetic vision restricted to the literati and, specifically, to the readers, collectors, commissioners, writers and copyists of the particular geographic texts within which these maps are encased. The plethora of extant copies dating from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries produced all over the Islamic world – including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Anatolia, and even India – testifies to the long-lasting and widespread popularity of a particular medieval Islamic cartographic vision. Each manuscript typically contains twenty-one iconic maps starting with an image of the world, then the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean, the Maghrib (North Africa and Andalusia), Egypt, Syria, the Mediterranean, upper and lower Iraq, as well as twelve maps devoted to the Iranian provinces, beginning with Khuzistan and ending in Khurasan, including maps of Sind and Transoxiana.If you want to see more examples check out Pixeum exhibition 412 which contains “Islamic Maps from the Collection of Karen Pinto”: https://pixeum.org/exhibits/412/islamic-maps-from-the-collection-of-karen-pintoIf you have chance do check out my book on “Medieval Islamic Maps” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo17703325.html
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