>> Robin Dale: Hello, everyone.
I'm Robin Dale, and I'm
the Deputy Librarian
for Library Collections and
Services at the library.
And I want to welcome you all
to the Library of Congress.
What you're going to see today
is a really special program.
The Rare Book and Special
Collections Division
and the Geography and Map
Division have brought together
their combined collection
of extremely rare
and historically important
early printed Atlases based
on the work of ancient Greek
astronomer Claudius Ptolemy.
Each of these rare gems --
some printed in Greek
and containing woodcuts,
others in Latin and featuring
intricate engravings --
come from the very beginning
of printing in the West.
Today they're on
display together
in one place for the first time.
These books are spectacular
works of both the printer's art
and early modern science.
Combined, they represent more
than a century of collecting
at the library across
its many divisions
with the first example
having been acquired in 1867.
I want to thank Mark
Dimunation, Chief of Rare Book
and Special Collections
Division and Paulette Hasier,
Chief of Geography and Map
Division, along with her staff
for putting together
this program.
And I want to thank the members
of the library's Philip Lee
Phillips Map Society and all
of you watching along with
us today whose interest,
generosity, and continuing
support of the Library
of Congress make acquisitions
and programs like
today possible.
I now want to introduce
John Hessler, a specialist
in computational geography
and geographic information
science at the library.
As many of you know, John
has written extensively
on early Greek and Roman
cartography and teaches a course
on these very atlases
at the Rare Book School
at the University of Virginia.
He's going to speak to us this
morning about the mathematics
of Ptolemy, his complex
philosophy of the natural world,
and the birth of Western
cartography in Alexandria,
Egypt about 2,000 years ago.
John.
[ Applause ]
>> John Hessler: Thank
you very much, Robin,
and thank everyone for coming.
I see a lot of faces
here that I've seen
in the Washington Map Society
and the Philip Lee
Phillip Society.
And I want to thank everyone
else, both on the livestream
and everyone here
for participating
in this event today.
Like Robin mentioned,
we are going
to have an extraordinary display
today in the Rosenwald Room.
And before that I'm going to
actually talk a little bit
about Claudius Ptolemy.
And I'm going to talk, as Robin
also said, about the birth
of Western cartography
in Alexandrian Egypt
almost 2,000 years ago.
So the title of my talk, The
Birth of Cartographic Reason,
is a little bit different tact
than we would normally take
in a talk about historic
atlases.
This is not going to be a talk
where I'm going to show image
after image and explain
each of the woodcuts to you.
You're going to see plenty of
those, either on the livestream
after my talk or in person,
in just a little while.
But what I'm really going
to do is really zero
in on why Ptolemy is important.
He's not important just
because of the fact
that he wrote a lot
of, about cartography,
and these are a bunch
of old books.
He really began an idea, an idea
of what cartographic
reason actually is.
What is it to make a map?
What does it mean to make a map?
And what does a map say to us?
It's just not simply
a way-finding tool.
It's not simply a
visualization of territory.
There's a lot packed into this.
And Ptolemy invented some
very important methods.
So we're going to start in
a strange way, actually,
with some modern mapping.
And we're going to talk about
a thread, and I'm going to try
and pull this thread
of cartographic thought
from 2,000 years ago all the
way to the modern map today.
And when we're talking about the
modern map today, we're talking
about something very different
than Ptolemy would
have imagined, maybe.
I hope to convince you
that that's not true.
We're talking about something
that suppresses time
in Ptolemy's time.
In other words, the
map is a static object.
Today, if you do GIS, if you do
any kind of interactive mapping,
what you want to do is
you want to show dynamics.
You want to show the
temporal nature of the world.
And Ptolemy wanted to do the
same thing in his "Geographia,"
and I'm going to show
you why that's true.
So if we look at maps of today,
this map, for instance, here --
which I just used in a
congressional briefing --
is the map of refugees flowing
around the world
over the last decade.
It's a dynamic map.
It's showing something
a little bit different
than just the static
nature of the world.
COVID maps, we've all
been very familiar
with the dynamics of this.
This is a nonequilibrium
process.
This is not a static thing.
We're seeing motion.
We're seeing change.
Ptolemy was also very
interested in change.
Even though he is making
maps in the second century,
he's very interested in the
temporal nature of time,
causality, and space,
and the interaction
between all of those.
And what I'm going to do for
the rest of my talk is try
and actually convince you of
that and also convince you that,
when you go up and you
look at these atlases
and you these maps, I
you want to look at them
in a completely different way
than you might have before.
So cartography basically
is what you are familiar
with as a static map.
It's a piece of paper
with a map on it,
or a digital screen
with a map on it.
It shows a piece of space.
It shows an attribute.
It shows a building.
Shows whether you have broadband
access, but it doesn't change.
It's just a static thing.
It's almost obsolete
when it's made because,
by the time you look at it, the
world has changed around you.
But cartography that
doesn't consider the nature
of transient phenomena
suppresses the temporal.
And in suppressing the temporal
and in suppressing the third
dimension, it abstracts away
from reality, and this is the
root of cartographic reason,
this abstraction out of reality.
To make you believe that you are
comprehending a region of space
when you might not
actually be comprehending
that region of space.
It's a tool to simplify
the world.
And Ptolemy wanted to simplify
the world in the second century.
He knew this.
And this very concept,
this concept
of suppressing the complexity
and visualizing it is the nature
of Western cartography and
the nature of visualization
in a cartographic sense.
So Ptolemy begins -- we first
hear of Ptolemy, we first know
of Ptolemy in an inscription.
The inscription no
longer exists,
but he had an inscription
put up in the town of Canobus
in the tenth year of the
reign of the Emperor Antonius,
which is 146 to 147 CE,
depending on whose
calendar you think about.
And in this Ptolemy sets out the
basic mathematics of the cosmos.
He basically puts all the
parameters in an inscription
that would allow someone
to determine the motion
of the cosmos in a physical
inscription, not a map,
but a physical inscription.
And this inscription
doesn't survive anymore,
but what does survive is
copies of it that were handed
down through time
in manuscripts.
And this is the first
we hear of Ptolemy,
this inscription in 146.
So what he's doing here is he's
basically sending out the kind
of basics of how
to map the Earth,
how to map the heavens
in an inscription.
This is really the first
kind of document that we have
like this from the Greek world.
Before this there are Roman
documents that survived,
but they're basically
survey documents.
They're basically
about land surveys.
Ptolemy is thinking of
something different.
He's not thinking about
that kind of cartography.
He's thinking about the
world, the whole thing,
not just serving
for practical means.
Now, when you go up and you
see those atlases, you're going
to see lots of numbers in them.
And Ptolemy used a different
kind of numbering system,
a sexagesimal system, which is a
base 60, and he uses a notation.
So when you look at this, and
I'm not going to go into this
in any detail, but just
realize what you're looking
at is a different
way of numbering.
And Ptolemy, even
though we don't know much
about his sources -- and we'll
get to that in just a bit --
obviously, he had lots of
access to Babylonian sources.
He uses the Babylonian numbering
system that's first seen
on cuneiform tablets.
And this is the way he begins
to map out the world with this,
these little tidbits,
these little hints
of parameters of
the stellar world.
Now, Ptolemy wrote
three important books.
One called the "Almagest."
That's the way it's come down
through the Arab translations,
but it's really in Greek
mathematical syntax.
It is something akin to
an astronomy textbook,
perhaps the most important or
the most successful textbook
in science ever written.
It was the solid textbook
for more than 1,500 years
if you wanted to
learn astronomy.
He wrote the "Geographia," which
is really the central portion
of what we're going to do today
and what you're going
to see today.
And he wrote something
called the "Tetrabiblos."
None of these separate from
each other say anything too much
in depth about Ptolemy's
philosophy of nature
and Ptolemy's philosophy
of mapping.
We've got to combine
all of these together,
because these major works
understand a universe
in constant motion.
They understand a universe
where causal things
happen for various reasons.
And we're going to talk
about the interplay
of these three books.
And you're going to see one of
them, as I said, in the display
or after the livestream.
So what does the "Almagest" do?
What does Ptolemy's
astronomy try to do?
Well, what it tries to
do is it tries to capture
in a book the motion
of the universe.
If I take Ptolemy's
information and I animate it,
like you see here,
Ptolemy's system, of course,
he has the Earth in the
center and in motion.
But everything he
did with circles
and geometry allows
you to do this.
He used something
called an epicycle --
which you see appearing
on the screen --
and using these geometric
tools was able
to predict the retrograde
motion of the planets.
So what we see here
is we see an animation
of his system in motion, moving.
It's a book, yes,
but it is about time.
It's about things changing,
constantly changing.
He also wrote the "Geographia."
The "Geographia," of
course, like I said,
is the subject of
today's session.
So what the "Geographia"
is, is a textbook,
a book about how to make a map.
Now, you're going
to see lots of maps.
And people who are in map
societies and tend to think
about maps as just
maps, stand alone.
But we don't even know
if Ptolemy made maps.
I'll get to that in just a bit.
But what he did is wrote a
textbook on how to make a map.
And one of the most
important innovations
of that is something
called the map projection.
So if you think of the
Earth as an orange,
and a map is peeling the
skin off of an orange
and trying to lay it out flat.
Well, you can't do that
without tearing the orange,
without somehow introducing
some kind of error in it.
And what Ptolemy did is figured
out a geometric way to think
about that error,
to understand that.
And that is really the roots of
Western cartography right there.
You've got latitudes and
longitudes and a grid
that you put those on.
And that grid somehow tries
to give you some sense
of the real nature of the Earth.
But, again, it abstracts
from the reality.
There were three
projections in Ptolemy's work.
One -- the first, the
second and the third.
And what we're going
to concentrate
on today is the second.
When you go up and
look at the display
and you see the livestream,
you're going
to see all three
of these displayed.
We've picked pages so you
can see the whole range
of Ptolemy's work.
The "Tetrabiblos," so
this is the third work.
And this is the thing that
draws the other two together.
The "Almagest," a
model of the universe.
So basically a model of
the universe in motion.
The "Geographia," a model.
Again, the word "model."
Ptolemy knew that it
wasn't an exact model.
Ptolemy knew that his "Almagest"
wasn't an exact model.
They were approximations.
They were instruments.
They were tools.
The "Tetrabiblos" is
something different.
The "Tetrabiblos" is where
he draws it all together.
It's an astrological manual.
It's a manual that depends on
exact notions of where the stars
and where the planets are
moving through the zodiac
at the time you're born.
It also is a manual
that tells how states
and countries are
going to develop
when a country is founded,
when a first king is born.
It's all put together.
The motion and the place,
the motion of the universe,
the motion of time and birth
and death on the Earth,
all put together into
a causal document.
So none of these
can be separated
out from Ptolemy's basic
philosophy of science
and philosophy of the universe.
And really what you
are going to be looking
at today is a snapshot
of that philosophy.
Now, how did Ptolemy come up
with this idea of making a map?
Well, he did it with
only a few tools.
He only had a compass,
a straight edge,
a string, and a pencil.
So he maps out a grid.
The first thing you have to do
when you make a map
is you make a grid.
But one of the things
Ptolemy did is he wanted
to somehow preserve ratios.
In other words, he wanted to
preserve the ratios on the Earth
to the ratio on the map.
So what he did is
he used a globe,
and he talks about the globe.
He talks about using a globe,
using a compass in order to look
at how the lines of
latitude change on the globe.
And then he begins
a geometric process.
What you're looking at here
is an animation that we did
for a website called the
Land Beyond the Stars,
which is a combination of
the Library of Congress
and the Galileo Museum that
we did several years ago.
But Ptolemy built this up from
a complex geometric construction
in order to actually
look at how the latitude
and longitude lines, as
many of the latitude lines
that he could preserve
as possible.
And so that's how he began
to build up his graticule.
A complicated process when
you try and do it yourself.
It really is an extremely
complex process
of really understanding
the geometry of the space
that he's working in,
this idea of moving
from a sphere to a flat plane.
Now, the idea that a sphere can
be mapped onto a flat plane,
Ptolemy was the first one
to really think it through,
but he didn't really
understand what he was doing.
He didn't really understand
that it was impossible
to make a map be the
same as a sphere.
So, in other words, when
you talk about making a map,
there is no possibility
of a perfect map.
You always have to
introduce some kind of error.
We can talk about equal-area
maps, which reserve area.
We can talk about conformal
maps, which preserve angle.
We can talk about all of those
things, but it's impossible
to make a perfect map.
But that wasn't proved
until 1827,
that it was actually impossible
to make a perfect map.
So Ptolemy a thousand years, 400
years beforehand understood it,
but didn't have the mathematics
with which to actually prove it.
But it wasn't proven until
Gauss did it in 1827.
So when we're talking
about Ptolemy right now,
I've been concentrating for
the most part on the text,
and we're going to continue
talking about the text,
because you're going to
see the pictures later.
What Ptolemy wants do is he
wants to map the oecumene.
So the, in Greek,
"the whole world."
And wants to give you all of
the knowledge that you need.
So when you're up there and
you're looking at these books,
you're going to see a
book which is trying
to give you every piece
of knowledge that you need
in order to make a world map.
He talks about world
cartography.
He distinguishes it
from regional cartography
and surveying.
He talks about his sources.
What are his sources?
This is a real scholarly
mystery.
Most people think it was
traveler's tales, but it isn't.
Ptolemy tells you
specifically that it's not.
He tells you that it
would be possible perhaps
to make a more accurate map
if he had better
scientific observations,
astronomical observations.
In other words, from the place
you are, looking at the stars,
using the "Almagest,"
using his models,
using things called the handy
tables, which were available
for where the stars are in order
to actually state the position
of a city or a place
on the Earth.
He tells us that's what
he is actually using.
When you look at Ptolemy's
book, what you're going
to see is you're going
to see the majority
of it is those tables.
It is going to be lists of
places, latitudes, longitudes,
errors, places where
rivers come out.
It is mostly, mostly
coordinate lists.
And one of the amazing
things is,
if you take those coordinate
lists and you compare them
with modern coordinates,
you see two things.
One, so if you look at this
graph, the blue and the green
up at the top, those
are latitudes.
Those are modern
latitudes compared
with Ptolemy's latitudes.
Ptolemy is almost perfect when
we're talking about latitude.
When we're talking about
longitude, he's very good also,
but you'll see there's a gap.
There's a gap between the modern
and between the Ptolemaic.
There's a systematic error in
his measurement of longitude.
It's consistent across
the whole space.
No one knows why.
It's a question that
remains open.
So if any of you have,
are in need of a project,
this is probably a
good place to start.
I can send you some references.
It's not a problem.
He also says that
the world changes.
That time happens.
That these maps are not static.
These maps are temporary.
These maps will be superceded
very quickly and that
that is just the
nature of research.
So he understands a lot about
what we do as cartographers.
He really has basically
provided the base of everything
that we think about as far
as cartographic reason goes.
Now, to talk about the
Renaissance and to talk
about the medieval
period is to talk
about the rarity of these books.
Some of the great book hunters
of the Renaissance period,
some of those great men
and women and collectors
who collected manuscripts were
always looking for Ptolemy.
It was extremely rare.
There are letters
and letters about,
I cannot find a single sheet
of Ptolemy, but I want to.
And this relates to
the "Geographia."
The "Almagest" was
all over the place,
but the "Geographia" seems to
have had a lot more rarity.
Mostly because, of
course, it was a map.
And as Ptolemy said, it
was probably obsolete.
Now, there's a bunch
much recensions of this,
and we're not going to
go into this at all.
But I want to just tell you
that there's two families
of manuscripts of Ptolemy.
The earliest ones we
have go back really
to the 13th century, that's it.
So we're a thousand years
from Ptolemy's time is the
nearest we can get to him
in an actual manuscript.
There's two parts.
There's one that is from
the Byzantine world and one
from the more European
side of things.
We don't really know -- all
the atlases that you're going
to look at, no one has
every really traced back
from the manuscripts
through recension back
into the actual atlases.
We know they're founded
on these manuscripts.
We know they have a lot
of same things in common,
but all of the books and
all the manuscripts tend
to be fairly unique.
So most of you, as
I said before,
have seen examples
of Ptolemaic maps.
They're not his maps,
and they're not the maps
of his contemporaries.
The earliest surviving
examples of maps in a manuscript
of Ptolemy is 1,100
years after his death.
We are closer in time to
those maps than he was.
So they're quite a
distance from him.
There's a number of
additions, and I'm just going
to show a couple of pictures
here to show you what kind
of happened to the text.
So we've got the manuscripts.
They're kicking around
a little bit.
In 1577 -- or 1477, the first
illustrated edition comes
out of the "Cosmographia".
The "Cosmographia" is the
same as the "Geographia,"
just a different name.
It's translated by Jacopus
Angelus de Scarperia.
It's a terrible translation.
It's an awful translation.
It's a beautiful book.
It contained 26 copper plates.
There is, there's
the first projection.
As you all now know,
that's what it looks like.
Unfortunately, the one
edition you're not going
to see today is the
1477 edition,
because it is the one
edition that we don't have.
So, again -- again, for
the Phillip Society members
and those who want to
support the library,
this would be a really welcome
donation to our collections.
So the next time you're
searching through bookstores,
if you happen to come across it,
we would really appreciate it.
So this translation, this
Latin translation gets a very
bad review.
Regiomontanus, one of
the great astronomers
who used Ptolemy's
tools, writes about it.
What will happen if the first
copy has been rendered obscure
by a careless translator
or transformed
by the first starving
copiest who happens along?
Both of these can be seen in the
work that is today passed off
as Ptolemy's "Geographia"
in which the literal
structure intended
by the Greek author
does not correspond
to the phrases written
by Jacobus Angelus,
who makes the meaning of words
and in which the appearance
of maps do not preserve the
appearance intended by Ptolemy.
So, again, we've
got this distance.
We've got this separation.
We've got the manuscripts
that are far away.
We've got Ptolemy's book
and the text that we know,
but the maps are the things
that people get excited about.
But we have so little to go
on on their actual origins
and what went into them.
We can think of our
own collections here,
Martin Waldseemuller, the author
of the great 1507 world map,
writes a letter to
Johannes Amerbach,
the great Basel bookseller.
And says, I think that you're
aware that we are going
to publish Ptolemy's
"Cosmographia," the
"Geographia."
You're going to actually
see two of those upstairs.
One from Geography and Map
in its original binding.
And one from the
Rosenwald collection that's
beautifully colored.
So Ptolemy's or --
Waldseemuller's making this.
And he says, as the
exemplars do not agree,
I am asking you to oblige me.
In the Library of
the Dominicans,
I want to borrow a
Greek manuscript.
I want to collate this against
something because the exemplars
that I'm using do not agree.
I don't know how
to make a decision
when I'm making this book.
Also what Waldseemuller does
in his Ptolemy is he separates
out the historic Ptolemaic
maps from modern ones.
He recognizes in 1513
that there's history
and there's modern manning,
and he puts in something called
the supplementum, where he puts
in a series of extraordinary
maps of the Americas,
which you're going to also see.
The other thing he does in
the 1513 edition is he begins
to include Greek words.
Here's the first time
that we have Greek coming
into the Latin translation.
So that manuscript, that
Dominican manuscript,
whatever it was, the Greek words
begin to filter in and next
to the Latin manuscripts,
next to the Latin words.
We don't know what
that manuscript was.
No one has ever sat down and
collated the 8,000 place names
in Waldseemuller's 1513 Ptolemy.
So, again, if you
need a project.
This is one of the maps he
includes in his supplementum.
So we can see here
Terra Incognita.
We see Isabella.
We see the coast
of North America
and part of South America.
We see the first time
in a Ptolemaic atlas these
modern maps beginning to appear,
an extremely important thing.
Waldseemuller also, in his
great 1507 map, employs --
now you all know -- a
Ptolemaic second projection,
but he has a problem,
a serious problem.
The world is much
bigger than Ptolemy.
Ptolemy doesn't go 360-degrees,
and he only goes 10
degrees blow the equator.
So Waldseemuller has to modify.
And the way he modifies
is that he tries
to squeeze it and stretch it.
And you can see in
the inset here
that he actually kinks
Ptolemy's little curves.
Ptolemy's curves were perfect.
They're beautiful
geometric figures.
But what Waldseemuller does
to make the world fit is
he squeezes the projection.
He messes with the projection.
And this is something that
cartographers are going
to wrestle with during
this period.
Another Ptolemaic atlas here,
this one you are
also going to see.
This is from 1514,
done by Johann Werner.
No maps, nothing at all.
But what is in here is the
extension, is how mathematicians
and cartographers are beginning
to think about extending
that second Ptolemaic
projection.
On the left here you
see a perfect example
of the construction of
Ptolemy's second that you saw
in the little inset and
in the little interactive.
On the right you see a few pages
later, where he has figured
out how to extend this
projection by moving the pole
down into the view and
into the mapping frame.
And it is an amazing,
amazing book, which,
like I said, you will see.
So to conclude, when you see
a Ptolemaic map, when you look
at it, when you try to
understand it, think about it
in a little different way.
Ptolemy wrote those
three books --
the "Almagest," the
"Geographia,"
and the "Tetrabiblos"
-- because he was trying
to understand his world.
He was trying to understand the
complicated nature of his world.
Trying to understand
how the stars move,
how the Earth changes, how
those stars affect what happens
on the planet.
Now, of course, we can talk
about and discuss and argue
with his idea of
what causality meant.
Obviously, we have an astrologer
who's thinking that a lot
of what's going on
here is, you know,
because of the way things
just happened to happen,
where you were born,
where the alignment
of the stars were
at that moment.
But what he was doing is
trying to understand his world.
Trying to come to terms with
the complexity and trying
to abstract from it in a way
that people could understand it.
We do the same thing today.
The people who are doing GIS,
the people who are
advising Congress,
the people who are making maps
showing Ukrainian refugee flows
today are doing the same thing.
We're taking these
complicated, nonequilibrium,
hard-to-understand processes,
abstracting away some
of the material and bringing it
down to help us understand
the way the world operates.
I want to thank you
all for coming,
and I'd be happy
to take questions.
[ Applause ]
It couldn't have been that good
that there's no questions, okay.
You know, there's
got to be something.
Even if it's, you know,
you need a project.
I mean -- Tom.
>> You mentioned
the 1477 edition.
Where are there copies
of that now?
And do you think there
are any more copies
out there and available?
>> John Hessler:
It's a good question.
Okay, so the 1477 edition,
there was one auctioned
off a decade ago maybe.
The library attempted
to buy that edition.
We had raised somewhere in
the range of $2.5 million.
It was sold at Christie's,
and it went for $6.9 million
to a private collector.
That was the only one that
had ever come up at auction.
I've never even seen a
single sheet of the 1477
in a dealer's catalog or at
a fair or anything like that.
So I don't think there
are too many out there.
As for how many there
are, there's,
I think, 11 that are known.
So it's one of the
rarest of them all.
Part of that reason is,
of course, the 1475,
which is the first
printing of Ptolemy --
you'll see that upstairs too
-- doesn't have any maps in it.
It's just a handbook, but
the 1477 is the first one
that has maps, you know, quickly
followed by the 1482 Ulm,
which you will see,
which is what you see
on the screen here,
the 1482 Ulm.
So, yeah, it's an open question.
I don't think we'll
see one any time soon.
>> Hi, you had mentioned
the, that "geography"
and "cosmography" could
be used interchangeably
>> John Hessler: Yeah.
>> Do you know why that
distinction started?
And why some are referred to as
a geography versus cosmography?
>> John Hessler:
That's a good question.
But the reason really
is, the "Geographia,"
the actual the name of it in
Latin and in Greek really is
"geographic method," okay.
And it became cosmographia
because Ptolemy makes
such a big stink in it about,
he's showing the world,
he's showing what's known.
And it's just kind of the
translation between the two kind
of was used interchangeably.
Also you'll see -- and
you'll see this upstairs
in a little while --
a lot of times both
of these volumes
are bound together.
You've got both the
"Geographia" and the "Almagest"
and comes together into
a, the "Cosmographia."
You'll find that a lot
of contemporaries --
with the maps that you're
going to see in these atlases
like Waldseemuller, for instance
-- used the word "cosmographia."
And there's a couple of
distinctions that he's trying
to make there which
really have to do with kind
of disciplinary boundaries,
trying to force geography
into the astronomy realm
as opposed to the sort
of mixed science, give it
a little bit more credence,
but it's a complicated question.
Yes, oh, go ahead.
>> Early you quoted critiques
of an early Latin translation.
My question is, what was
the point of reference?
What was the origin
against which this Latin was
so heavily criticized?
>> John Hessler: Well,
it's a couple of things.
The, where this was
translated Jacobus was,
didn't know Greek very well.
We're talking about a period
in the West in the early 1400s,
late 1300s where, in places
like Italy and Venice and things
like that, Greek is just
beginning to be taught.
We're thinking in terms of like
Erasmus and those guys have not
yet really gotten going.
So he's sort of an amateur Greek
translator to a certain extent.
And so also in the
narrative portions of the text
where there's no problem, where
he's just talking about, okay,
this, I'm going to
make a world map blah,
blah, blah, it's great.
But where it gets problematic
is the technical details.
So it's obviously this problem
between lacking certain
technical prowess
and lacking the depth
of the Greek so.
>> The Greek, or the Greek
original was available --
>> John Hessler: Right.
>> -- to others besides --
>> John Hessler: Yes.
>> The translators.
>> John Hessler: Now,
that's a complicated issue,
because the earliest Greek
manu scripts that's come
down to us are from the 13th,
late 13th, early 14th century.
So we don't really have very
much before that to go on.
We don't have any
original Ptolemaic texts.
We don't even have one that goes
directly back to the original.
So there's a couple missing
things in the recension.
So we've only got
these two groups.
So getting back to what Ptolemy
had is also a difficult thing,
because we're also talking
about a iterative process.
We don't know what kind
of latitude-longitude
tables Ptolemy had.
We don't know what kind
of place names he had.
Obviously, as time goes
on, more places get added.
So we have no idea.
So we have a lot of distance.
The one thing we do have and
the one thing we do know is
that we have the text
because we have references
to the text in many,
many places.
So the text is kind of
the thing that we have.
But you'll see upstairs,
you'll see there's a lot
of different interpretations
of the maps.
A lot of -- you'll
look at title pages,
and there'll be differences.
So, but it's an interesting
question.
The history of the
translation, the transmission
of Ptolemy is really a
fascinating one and could be a,
you know, a graduate
seminar on its own.
Or either one, whoever's first.
>> I was just going
to say thank you
for your excellent presentation,
because you made me think
about something with
the astrology in that,
in modern times with science,
we're pretty likely to look back
on that concept and
sort of make fun of it
as being unsophisticated.
But as a student of quantum
physics, I really see overlays
with Lorenz' butterfly effect
and just think it would be
fascinating to go back and sort
of apply some of
those principles,
because maybe Ptolemy was really
way ahead of his time in that.
>> John Hessler:
What's interesting,
since you're a quantum
physicist, I will tell you that,
if you begin to model the
"Almagest," if you begin
to model the planetary motion,
so the video that I showed
that shows the retrograde
motion there of Mercury,
that's actually based
on Kolmogorov's quasi-periodic
function.
So I didn't use Ptolemy,
because they model exactly.
They also model certain aspects
of the Fourier transform,
this constant periodic motion.
But it's a quasi-periodic
motion.
So there's a lot of sort
of -- it's not randomness.
It's obviously deterministic,
but when you put a lot
of circles together and spin
them around, you get a lot
of different weird
periodic effects.
And Ptolemy obviously knew it
because he was a master of it.
There also seems
to be some hints
that certain Babylonian
astronomers,
certain earlier texts
may have been playing
around with the same thing.
But there's a lot of that kind
of thing that's you can
do with the "Almagest."
The "Almagest" is
still fairly unexplored
from a deep mathematical
standpoint.
There's a lot more going
on there in the geometry
that one can talk about.
I mean, one could model
some of it using sort
of algebraic geometry
at this point,
things like the Borsuk-Ulam
theorem.
Now I'm going off on a tangent.
So, anyway.
>> Inspired me to
go looking more.
>> So my question is really
generally on the life of Ptolemy
and was -- why Ptolemy?
Was there a spark that
started him on this path?
And what kept it going?
And was there this
super group around him
that continued to feed it?
>> John Hessler: That is
a phenomenal question.
And the reason that's a
phenomenal question is,
why only Ptolemy?
Maybe not why.
Why do we only have Ptolemy?
Why do we only have
these Ptolemaic texts
and not other major texts?
And before Ptolemy -- Ptolemy
in his "Almagest" and in the
"Geographia" hints
at Hipparchus,
hints at other sources,
hints at other people.
But his book was so well done,
so perfect that it was the one
that was reproduced time
and time and time again.
So we don't really
know what came before.
There's, of course, the gap.
We have Ptolemy who wrote
this book, we believe,
in about, you know, CE 150.
And then we have some
14th century manu scripts.
What happened in
between, we don't know.
There's mentions.
There's use of his geography,
but we've got nothing
to go on really.
So he was in Alexandria, Egypt.
We know that was an intellectual
center, an amazing place.
He, obviously, had a
certain amount of money,
the canopic conscription
that I started with as sort
of the birth of Western
cartography proper, you know,
was put up by him on a stele.
So there's obviously
something going on there,
but we just have
so little to go on.
>> Hi, how do you think
about cartographer,
mapmakers than against
from Ptolemy, no?
For example, from [inaudible]
is again to Ptolemy.
>> John Hessler: Right.
>> For example, the north,
both in the south, no?
And invert the Earth, no?
>> John Hessler: Right.
>> And he didn't use
latitude and longitude.
And it's interesting
because it's Italian --
>> John Hessler: Right.
>> -- cartographer or mapmaker.
And how do you think about --
>> John Hessler: It's
a fantastic question.
Why were they going outside
of the Ptolemaic form?
What was the hope?
What was the advantage?
And when you look at some of
those, and there's a number
of people who will do that,
who will not use latitude
and longitude, and
I don't really know.
It seems to be, you
know, are they hoping
that the method is
going to be better?
Are they hoping that
the method is going
to be somehow more convenient?
This idea of latitude and
longitude is a problematic one,
obviously, I mean,
at this period.
I mean, no one can measure
really longitude, you know,
on a ship or anything like that.
You can measure it by
looking at the stars.
But is there a better
way to compile this?
And this points to a paradox
in the Ptolemaic atlas itself,
which is Ptolemy tells
you how to make a map
with latitude and longitude.
He tells you you're going to
draw a grid, and you're going
to put these points on it.
But he doesn't tell you how
he's getting all these latitude
and longitudes.
He does say that he needs
astronomy as the source,
that's the best way to do it.
He talks about Hipparchus
going to cities
and measuring the
latitude and longitude
and providing him
only with a couple.
But how does that
all come together?
And for those of you who
are interested in this sort
of period, one of the big open
questions that we always have
in the history of
cartography of this period is,
what are the lines of
transmission of this knowledge?
How does it get around?
I mean, you know, Dick Flitter
[assumed spelling] is sitting
over here, who's spent his life
studying, you know, the movement
of portolan charts around.
I mean, how does
that stuff move?
Who moves it?
Who decides what's true?
What is a true longitude?
And what is a not true
longitude at this period?
What is the basis of that?
How does that logic and that
epistemology like squeeze itself
into the visual image?
It's a huge, huge question.
>> You mention that
"almagest" is an Arabic word.
Did the -- is there
any information
in the Arabic tradition
of Ptolemy?
>> John Hessler: Yes, tons.
I mean, most of the
astronomical parts
of this are certainly mixed
with the Arabic tradition.
The Arabic tradition saved
many Ptolemaic manuscripts.
There are many copies of the
"Almagest" that were done
in Arabic, even to the point
where we have probably more
brief surveys of it in Arabic
than we do from this period
in Greek in manuscript form.
So really what we --
when we talk about sort
of Arabic science at
this period, I mean,
it really is this co-mingling.
And really we are -- before
this it was the Arabic
and Islamic tradition that
saved most of this material.
So there's no question
about that.
And when we look at Ptolemy's
sources, he's also, you know,
really pulling from
Middle Eastern sources,
from not only Arabic sources,
but older Babylonian sources,
all kinds of things
that he's pulling from.
So it is a real document
of a moment.
And, of course, it comes
from Alexandria, Egypt.
It's not coming from -- which
at the time is a Roman province,
but it's still a Greek
speaking province so.
>> John, I'm wonder
if you can --
I'm changing the thread of
questioning here a little bit.
Can you say a little bit
about how the library
built this collection?
And how many of these different
editions did Philip Lee
Phillips acquire?
>> John Hessler:
That's a good question.
Well, obviously, you're
bringing up Philip Lee Phillips,
the namesake of the
Philip Lee Phillip Society.
Philip Lee Philips in the
interwar period did a lot
of traveling over to Europe,
made collections of many,
many of these atlases,
which were then made
into a bibliography and
basically published.
The collecting history,
as far as I can tell,
begins with the first one,
which is the 1513
Waldseemuller Ptolemy.
There's no records in
the library of any reason
or how it was acquired.
The only way you know it's 1867
is, like all good libraries,
on the front page the
library stamped it,
Library of Congress of 1867.
So there it is.
It's acquired.
So it didn't go into MARS,
but it was acquired in 1867.
And then it seems
there is a real kind
of slow, gradual accumulation.
But Philip Lee Phillips
probably is the most,
the substantial collector of
the vast majority of these.
>> I didn't want to ask
[inaudible] question
until the other ones
were exhausted.
So for those of us in the room
who do advise both Congress
and the executive branch and
we try to take information
from our federal
activity and visualize it,
especially on maps,
because it's so much --
the power of information
on maps is overwhelming,
what helpful hints do you have?
What are your go-to
thoughts on how
to convey data in a visual form?
Or convey this type of --
>> John Hessler: That's
such a huge question.
You know, when one is
creating a map, I really think
for certain -- right now
we've gone past, I think,
the static map as
a useful entity.
In other words, a map with a
single layer that just shows,
all right, here's a bunch of
houses and here is, you know,
they have broadband service.
I think we've gone past that.
We've obviously gone past the
use of a map for way finding.
With, you know, whatever
particular program you use
to find your way
around the world,
you don't ever pull
out a real map.
You're, it's just a data
point being projected onto a,
you know, onto a, you
know, a map on your screen.
So you're not using
it for way finding.
So when we're talking about
using them for information,
when we're using them to try
and convince people, my way,
when I do it, when
I'm making a map,
simplicity to me
is the best option.
What I'm trying to say
really is that I think about,
when a person wants to, when
I want the person to get
out of it, what is the
pedagogical outcome?
What is the one thing,
when they look
at this map, I want them to see?
So when we looked at, and
I showed that Ukrainian --
or the refugee map
from around the world,
I've suppressed almost
completely any geographic names
or anything.
All you do is see the
shadows of the continents
and the countries, but you
see this explosion of people.
And I think it's
like anything else,
what is it you want to say?
Say it simply and
try not to confuse it
with too many bells
and whistles.
Try and keep it to
what it is you want
to convey to the person.
So that one, the
colors start out orange,
and then they go deep red
as they cross their
country's border.
So I'm basically trying
to show like, okay,
something really bad's
happening, it's orange.
They've crossed the border.
This is really bad now.
And then -- so, you
know, I think simplicity
and somehow coming to
terms with dynamics.
You know, I really forced
this thread with Ptolemy.
You know, the maps that
he made are not dynamic,
but they're in pursuit of
some sort of causal structure.
I will just end this question
by quoting William Warntz,
who was the first,
one of the first heads
of the Harvard computer
graphics laboratory,
really the hotbed
of where GIS began.
He said, sometimes,
when a geographic event
is too complicated
and you can't describe it
mathematically or by modeling,
sometimes a map is the
solution to the problem,
that is the solution
to the understanding.
And I think, if you
think about it that way,
sometimes the map
isn't, sometimes it is.
That's the way I always think
about it, kind of in his terms.
Okay, well, if that's it,
I'm going to just say
a couple of words.
I'm going to introduce
Mark Dimunation.
And I'm going to just
tell a little story.
When I was an undergraduate, I
took a class in medieval logic.
And that was with the great
classicist Jonathan Barnes.
And Jonathan Barnes
influenced me in so many ways
about how important
it was to look
at these older medieval
texts, to look at these books
in certain ways and
to do a deep reading.
I had never met anyone like
Jonathan Barnes before.
He was extremely dynamic.
He could tell a story about a
book like no one else could.
That was until I
came to the library
and I met Mark Dimunation.
Mark embodies everything
that you would want
in a rare book librarian,
that humanist tone,
the love of the arts.
To hear him talk about
the "Giant Mainz Bible,"
to hear him talk about
one of Jefferson's books
or to hear him talk about
one of the art book,
modern art printers
that he so loves is
to have a world open to you.
And I just want to
introduce Mark Dimunation.
[ Applause ]
>> Mark Dimunation: Well,
that was astounding.
Thank you very much.
I think he did that just
so it would make me
stumble over my talk.
First of all, welcome.
We're very glad you're here.
I thought we had won John over
to our side of the fence --
that is, book printing --
because he was closing with
comments by William Morris,
a famous 19th century
arts and crafts printer.
It turns out that's not
the same William Morris,
so you're forgiven.
But, anyway, one of the
things I think we've picked
up in the questioning
in particular is
that these atlases are
suggestive of many,
many phenomenon and
not just cartographic,
but also transmission of
text, transmission of ideas,
the material culture
of the these atlases.
And that's one of the
ideas behind the gathering
that we have here today.
When Ptolemy published, not only
his maps, but also his methods
and his projections or his ideas
towards developing a system
of projections, he was
opening up a conversation,
not only with the
cartographers that preceded him,
but those of the millennia
that followed in terms
of understanding and shaping
our understanding of the world.
Today we have this opportunity,
a really extraordinary
opportunity.
This is why we all hang around
at the Library of Congress,
is for these moments where we're
going to have a large gathering
of atlases that you're going to
have an opportunity to look at.
And they represent the
transmission of Ptolemy
over time and space,
considerable period
of time and space.
And we do this, of course,
because it does help us
understand the conceptualization
of the world and a sense
of location that these maps
and volumes give us over time.
But the Ptolemaic
atlases represent much,
much more than cartographic
specificity.
There's a truism in rare
book curatorial circles
that you can teach the history
of printing with a single run
of Bibles from the
Guttenberg to the New Oxford.
You don't need anything
else in order to talk
about how illustration and
printing changes over time.
And one could probably suggest
that one could do equally
so with a sequential
run of Dante.
I would argue you can
do the same, again,
with a run of Ptolemaic atlases,
at least that's what we're going
to find out in just
a few minutes.
So we do this today
because we can find
in these various editions the
history of printing, how the art
and craft of printing and
illustration changes over time.
We have the opportunity
to gain insight
from individual copies unique
in their former ownership,
where annotations
and corrections help us
understand reception and change
and how these ideas
moved across Europe.
And we do this because the
notion of the sense of place
in the world -- whether that
be philosophical or spiritual
or scientific -- was made
possible by these Atlases.
And, well, as we like to say
here at the Library of Congress,
we do this because we can.
The staff of Geography and
Map Division and Rare Book
and Special Collections Division
have pulled together a display
of 33 editions of the
Ptolemaic atlas culled
from our collections.
We could have done
more, many more.
So we invite you to visit this
extraordinary opportunity.
It's on display in the
Lessing J. Rosenwald Room,
which is LJ 205.
You're in LJ, that's
the Jefferson building,
in the back of the building.
It's located across the hall
from the Rare Book Reading Room
on the second level of
the back of the building.
There will be staff here that
will guide you to this location.
It's an interesting
comment to make to a group
of map people; isn't it?
We hope to control, if we
can, the flow within the room
to about 20 people
at a time for --
this is the period we live in.
So if we can, we'd like
to keep it at that.
We do have these books
out on open display.
That's so they're much
easier for you to look at
and to appreciate close-up.
And as we're book people, we
understand the urge to reach out
and touch, but don't do that.
We'll be happy to show
you anything you'd
like to see from the materials.
Staff will be there to help and
answer questions, if we can.
The display is the
conclusion of this event.
So after you've visited
the exhibit,
you're free to roam the city
as only a map lover would do.
For those of you at home,
who are viewing at home,
we have made available a video
presentation of the exhibition
so that you too can
participate in it.
So thank you very much.
If you'll follow the guidance
of the people in the back
of the room, we invite
to you come join us
in the Lessing J. Rosenwald
Room in the Rare Book Division
to see an extraordinary
display of Ptolemaic atlases.
[ Applause ]
[ Music ]