Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. Let's consider the map a representation of the world and miniature so that one can position themselves in time and space and consider where they're going and where they've been. They bring meaning out of what can
otherwise seem confusing and make the vast fathomable. So how long have we been making maps? Well? According to you see Santa Barbara geographer Keith C. Clark in a two thousand thirteen paper for the Cartographical Journal, we often consider maps and writing to go hand in hand, meaning that we might reasonably date matt making back five thousand years.
But Clark goes much further, argue that maps may have predated writing by at least ten thousand years and could have evolved with humanity itself, tied to the spatial thinking and reasoning that aided us in the great human expansion. While many maps have obviously been lost to time, various ancient maps are sometimes presented as the possible oldest surviving maps.
A carved mammoth tusk found in what is now the Czech Republic, dated to twenty five thousand b c e. Presents a possible map, complete with mountains, rivers, and what seemed to be routes for human travelers. Various examples spring from Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well, ancient cultures that certainly exhibited planning and cartological expertise and a knowledge of their
place in a wider world. But interestingly enough, some of the earliest examples of maps are not maps of the Earth's surface, but of the stars, such as the dots representing stars and the prehistoric Lascale cave paintings. According to a two thousand eighteen University of Edinburgh study published in the Athens Journal of History, such artifacts suggests that our ancestors were able to keep time via the position of
the stars as far back as forty thousand years ago. Still, other ancient examples of maps confirmed to neither Earth nor sky, but to altogether imagined realms. Consider the casket texts from ancient Egypt. Is Geraldine Pinch discusses in her book Egyptian Mythology. These date from the Middle Kingdom, which lasted from twenty fifty to seventeen ten BC. These texts consisted of incantations
recorded on casket's tomb walls and funerary artifacts. These spells were believed to be vital to the deceased on their perilous journey into the Egyptian after life, a realm of continued threats and conflict, and some texts even feature maps.
The Book of Two Ways from the Middle Kingdom Necropolis of Dear Albertia presents a map of the underworld, outlining two safe paths for the deceased soul to take, one by land and one by water, along with the spells one would need to overcome the monstrous guardians that dwell there. Pinch points out that we might consider such maps the result of quote government funded research into the hereafter unquote, but we also might think of them as visual guides
for shamatic spirit journeys. We might well think back to the role of terrestrial maps and consider their cosmological function in the Book of Two Ways, a means of bringing order to chaos, assuring us not only where we are, but we're we're headed. Maps of otherworldly realms would factor into various religions to follow as well as literary works ranging from Dante's Divine Comedy to the fantasy geographies of JR. Tolkien.
Just gazing at these maps, we are transported to the world's They chart two into additional editions of the artifact each week, hosted by either Joe or myself. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.