By Ali Hassani

Is this map upside down? Only if you are looking with Western eyes––Islamic maps traditionally place the south at the top. This particular map was extracted from a sixteenth- century Ottoman manuscript of Persian polymath al-Qazwini’s The Marvels of Creation, which was originally written in Arabic in the thirteenth century and copied with extensive variations for centuries thereafter. Print culture did not emerge in the Ottoman Empire until the nineteenth century, so the many surviving versions of this hugely popular book were copied and illustrated by hand.

Al-Qazwini’s Marvels, a celebration of God’s creations both on earth and in the heavens, is replete with hundreds of illustrations of various animals, plants and geographic oddities, all included with the aim of inspiring wonder and awe in pious readers. While al-Qazwini’s original copy has been found and digitized, most scribes were unable to consult it, which led to a game of scribal telephone using second, third, and twentieth degree-removed versions. This circumstance resulted in a remarkable variety of copies of al-Qazwini’s Marvels adapted to match contemporary needs, desires, and anxieties, not least in the manuscript from which this map was extracted. The present map bears almost no resemblance to al-Qazwini’s original version.

The angular, geometrically oriented shapes distinguish this particular map among the larger corpus to which it belongs. However, they do not entirely account for the remarkable way its creator viewed the world. This sixteenth-century map would lead one to think that court scholars of the Ottoman Empire believed that Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and Anatolia combine to make up around a third of the earth’s habitable surface area, and that the Nile was the source of all rivers. We know from more accurate maps produced by the Ottomans that this was far from a universal view, which might mean that this map’s inaccuracies merely reflect how the cartographer imagined al-Qazwini understood the world in his own time.

Let’s take a quick tour of the world as this anonymous Ottoman scribe qua cartographer imagined al-Qazwini to have seen it. The crescent-shaped body of water at the center of the map is unidentified but might be the Persian Gulf, next to which sit Mecca and Yemen, and then the three square bodies of water, which originate in the Nile, are unnamed but appear to be formed by the Red Sea, which then feeds into “the river of India,” and “the river of China” and ends up in the three square seas. The large body of water at the bottom of the map is the Mediterranean, and squished into the corner below it is most of Europe. “The land of the Franks and the Slavs” is apparently one small territory hugging the northeast coast of the Mediterranean at the very end of the earth, right next to the multi-colored mountains circling the world’s border. The mythological mountain of Qaf, according to Arab and Persian tradition, represents the limit of the habitable earth.

The scribe intersperses religious landmarks and mythology within a vision of the world that privileges the territories of the Ottoman Empire––insofar as they take up the greater majority of the map’s space. The mysterious Gog and Magog are apparently tucked all the way at the end of Siberia by an unidentified gilded mountain range, right below the “river of China,” and Mecca is at the very center of the world.

The map is remarkably neat, clear, and detailed. Other maps in manuscripts of al- Qazwini’s Marvels are more populated by stylized text, but here the calligraphic flourishes are relegated to the corners. The emphasis on geometric form within the map reads as a taming of the material world’s vastness that would have appealed to its original viewers. At the time of the map’s production, the Ottoman Empire possessed the world’s strongest navy. It possessed, in other words and as this map attests, the capacity to turn distant wonders into objects of study and destinations.

A student research post from the Fall 2024 graduate seminar The Mind of the Book (HSAR 620). More information and link to other research posts.