cartography 191
east. Idrı̄sı’s novel contribution to cartography was to divide each “clime” into 10 ̄
sections representing 16 ° in longitudinal width—resulting in 70 regional maps
covering the inhabited world. In Idrı̄sı’s construction, each “clime” covered the same ̄
distance north to south, which reflected a misunderstanding on his part, for when
“climes” are defined by the length of daylight, the latitudinal span of each of the seven
climes is slightly different.
It was an ingenious idea on the part of Idrı̄sı to construct a 70-section map cover̄ -
ing all the known world. There was, however, one serious flaw in his design: Because
each of the 70 segmental maps was accompanied by several pages of text describing
towns and distances between them, and because each sectional map extended over a
full opening (two pages) of a large volume, there was no way that even one sectional
map could be viewed alongside the next segment, much less all 70 of them put
together to form a map of the entire known world. Various scholars have attempted
to reconstruct what the complete 70-section map would have looked like on the basis
of preserved copies (Maqbul Ahmad, 1992), and the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, in Paris, has issued electronically the entire composite map using parts of two
preserved copies, now available at http://classes.bnf.fr/idrisi/ (last accessed
September 23, 2013) as part of online publication of the exhibition “al-Idrisi: la
Méditerranée au xiie siècle”. The resulting composite map, if made to correspond in
size to the preserved copies, would be over 20 feet in length and seven feet in height
(or c. 600 × 210 cm).
Idrısı̄’s approach to mapping is a masterpiece of non-mathematical cartography as ̄
well as a feast for the eyes to behold. Idrı̄sı’s visual strategy was to produce maps ̄
suggesting a realistic coastline (without in fact employing any mathematical coordi-
nates), indicating prominent cities with decorative rosettes and mountains with multi-
colored lozenges, and making every sectional map a richly decorated work of art. The
Mediterranean Sea is defined in terms of surrounding land masses and prominent
islands, with Sicily particularly prominently positioned. Indeed, the target audience for
al-Idrısı̄ ̄’s Entertainment for Someone Who Longs to Travel the World was a court
patron—namely, the Norman king of Sicily, who could view with amazement the lavish
volume and look with longing at the extent of the world he hoped some day to rule.
In the century between the Balkhı School and Idrı̄ ̄sı—that is, in the eleventh ̄
century—an utterly different method of mapping the Mediterranean Sea developed in
Egypt. Neither an historical or theological narrative, nor a representation of the
Mediterranean in terms of its enclosing landmasses, this map was a pictorial record of
ports as they occur in sequence around the rim of the Mediterranean. It occurs in an
anonymous treatise whose title, Kitāb Gharā’ib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-’uyūn, trans-
lates loosely as The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes. It is one
of six maps in this treatise that depict the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean
(Rapoport, 2011; Rapoport, 2012; Savage-Smith, 2010; Kahlaoui, 2008a: 140–160;
Savage-Smith and Rapoport, 2007).Though not giving his name, the author provides
quite a lot of information about himself. From references to various events, it is pos-
sible to place the composition between 1020 and 1050 and the location as Egypt
(Rapoport and Savage-Smith, 2008: 122 n. 4; Rapoport and Savage-Smith, 2014).
The red title across the top of this unusual Mediterranean map (see Figure 12.3),
preserved in a unique copy made around 1200, reads “The Tenth Chapter: The
Western Sea—that is, the Syrian Sea—and its Harbors, Islands and Anchorages,” where