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Darrera modificació: 2020-08-01
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Rapoport, Yossef - Savage-Smith, Emilie, Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo, Chicago - Oxford, The University of Chicago Press - Bodleian Library, 2018, 368 pp.
- Resum
- About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000. Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast.
Conté:
* Introduction
* Chapter 1: A Discovery
* Chapter 2: Macrocosm to Microcosm: Reading the Skies and Stars in Fatimid Egypt
* Chapter 3: The Rectangular World Map
* Chapter 4: The Nile, the Mountain of the Moon, and the White Sand Dunes
* Chapter 5: The View from the Sea: Navigation and Representation of Maritime Space
* Chapter 6: Ports, Gates, Palaces: Drawing Fatimid Power on the Island-City Maps
* Chapter 7: The Fatimid Mediterranean
* Chapter 8: A Musk Road to China
* Chapter 9: Down the African Coast, from Aden to the Island of the Crocodile
* Chapter 10: The Book of Curiosities and the Islamic Geographical Tradition
* Conclusion: Maps, Seas, and the Ismaʿili Mission
* Appendix: A Technical Discourse on Star Lore and Astrology
- Matèries
- Geografia i viatges
Astronomia i astrologia
Àrab
Fonts
- Notes
- Informació de l'editor
 .
Informació de l'editor .
Recensions:
* Elizabeth Lambourn, a Medieval Archaeology, 63 (2019), 477 .
- URL
- https://books.google.es/books?id=cdF5DwAAQBAJ&lpg=P ...
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