Korangal and Marja

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This map shows a region our military calls “The Valley of Death.” The marker roughly indicates the location of the Korangal Outpost which we are now abandoning. Google shrugs when I ask it to find Korangal, but using the New York Times map inset today, I've centered the map on Sarkani, which approximately marks the location of the outpost. Jalalabad lies to the southwest, Peshawar to the southeast of this area.


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This map shows the location of Marjah in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, the “site” of a major offensive launched in February against a center supposedly 80,000 people strong. This is the terrain map of the place. I search in vain for signs of a city worthy even of a little dot.

An accompanying story on this subject appears on LaMarotte here. I was incensed, and on Ghulf Genes I prefer to maintain a higher level of decorum, if that’s the word to use. At the same time, WordPress, which is LaMarotte’s platform, does not permit me to embed a map.

The Scale's the Thing

The strange thing to your left is the photo of something like a map; it is called the Rand McNally Histomap of World History, by John B. Sparks. It purports to show the relative importance of nations and empires 1950 B.C. to 2000 A.D. This object hung on the back of the door, the door into my office—when I still had an office outside the home—and on the rare occasions when I closed that door, the large pink blob in the center of this histomap reminded me of the Glory That Was Rome. — Did so, indeed, until, on one occasion, I looked at the graphic seriously and discovered that the image did not have a horizontal scale.

I dug out the rolled up copy again this morning. I had been reading Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet, a philosophical work) in which our poet urges us (Chapter 4, Book 4) to accept the concept of an imperial ruler because Rome’s preeminence had led to God’s own approval of the Latin people as the exemplars of mankind.

That claim then reminded me of my retired map; I found it on a shelf. But over all these years I had forgotten about the missing scale at the bottom of this curious object. Indeed, if you accept John Sparks’ imaginative scaling, Rome does seem, during this vast expanse of time, to be by far the largest single domain ever to grace the globe. Then, sitting down at the machine again to consult the oracle about the scale once more—thinking that in the intervening time I had become so much more skilled at Googling that I would be successful now—I discovered that the missing scale is missing still. What had changed, in the meantime, is that lots of people had discovered this lack and had made their displeasure known. Too bad.

I had fairly recently looked at population data reaching back into antiquity and discovered in that process that Sparks could not have used headcounts to size his empires and realms. Not enough menaningful data. He may have used geographical extent—but surely, with Rand McNally as his publisher, someone there should have reminded him to note the fact. Yes, at its greatest extent Rome’s footprint pretty much covered Europe and bits of Africa and Asia, but how much territory did China then occupy—and India? Their populations, by guess and by golly, must have been quite large even then.

Well, too bad. We carry mental maps and censuses inside our heads—and in Dante’s world the memory of Rome, and the more recent memory of Charlemagne’s empire, still loomed very large. And, to be sure, Dante (1265-1321) might have known of Marco Polo (1254-1324) but may not have read Polo’s Il Milione; he was busy writing his own opus and may have written his Convivio (finished circa 1307) before he had heard of Kublai Khan.

The second photo shows the histomap from closer up, focus on Rome—as it usually is here in the West as we look back in time. Great realm! But without a scale, how can we know for sure that Octavian ascended the throne of empire with a nod from on High? If Dante had studied China, however, he might well have added the useful concept of The Mandate of Heaven to his arguments in Chapter 4, Book 4.

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If you can stomach the price, Amazon will sell you this item even today: Histomap of World History.

In Praise of Maps

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.” [First paragraph of E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed]

It has been a while since I have praised maps and their makers, but maps came into focus the other day—and last night again in the highest context—so I thought I would sink another benchmark in this survey. The first reminder came when we were slightly disoriented in Roseville, MI. We discovered that we had maps of the State of Missouri, of the cities of Quebec in Canada, Traverse City in Michigan, and Lake George in New York quite handy, but to find the map of this area led to frantic clawing. At last, here it was—South-East Michigan! And what a relief it was!

The other polarity of today’s inspiration was a set of diagrams in my edition of the Divine Comedy. I was looking at them last night in my by now out-of-breath ascent of the peak of Paradise. The thought came then, falling asleep, that great works all have the quality of maps. In Dante, one is always keenly aware of his own quite serious intent on producing an accurate cosmic map—the depths, the earth, the heavens. For Henry Corbin, that obscure but admirable philosopher of the invisible, orientation is a constant concern. Schumacher quite consciously set out to make a philosophical map in the work cited above. And my own life-long interest in the cyclic historians is anchored in my determination to see the big picture before I worry about the small.

Obviously map-making is not a peculiarly modern urge, although the really great advances in earth-measurement are modern. I was fascinated a while back by the figure of Colin MacKenzie (1754-1821); I encountered him in a show on PBS. He turned heaven and earth upside down in his attempts to survey India, and I became aware of the difficulties of this kind of work. I have a fine book, The Measure of All Things, by Ken Adler. It documents the labors of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (1749-1822), Pierre-François-André Méchain (1744-1804), and Joseph-Jérôme Lalande (1732-1807) who, in the midst of the French Revolution, and working right through it, in effect finessing and ignoring it, working with both sides in the conflict, mapped and measured the meridian that runs from Dunkerque through Paris to Barcelona in efforts of establish the length of the meter, defined as one-ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Such heroic work underlies all of our maps. We fold them any-which-way and toss them into drawers whereas, if we but knew the underlying labors, we would place them reverently high up on our shelves.

Back in Minnesota days I used to take Winnie (yellow Lab, a notable canine Ghulf) on his walk. We followed the tracks of Burlington Northern from the edges of suburban settlements into the wilds. One of my stops was a bridge across a creek. Winnie would run down the near-vertical drop off to forage along the shore and drink water. And down there, each time he descended, he passed a survey stone. As I became more knowledgeable about the art and science of earth measurement, that stone, initially just a grey thing with a mark, took on the character of a monument to a tribe of people too much neglected in the world’s history—while we make destroyers and powerful madmen famous.

Maps of all kinds—and obscure figures working away to perfect them. They deserve a nod and the occasional recognition. Was lost, but now, with their assistance, I am found.