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The Third Dimension

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Bianca
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« on: May 29, 2009, 09:32:08 am »










After locating more than 400,000 texts, if Sezgin hasn’t found all the medieval Muslim scientific writings extant, he probably hasn’t missed too many. In his opinion, the most important manuscript he discovered was a copy of a landmark map drawn up for the ninth-century caliph al-Ma’mun. He stumbled across it in 1984, in a 1340 encyclopedia at Istanbul’s Topkapı Library as he was making a facsimile of the book.

“Ma’mun’s map was a giant step forward,” Sezgin explains. “It gives the first really accurate representations of longitude and the circumference of the Earth.” For example, where Ptolemy estimated the distance from the Canary Islands—then regarded as the westernmost point of the world—to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean as 63 degrees of longitude, al-Ma’mun’s cartographers calculated a substantially smaller figure that is only two or three degrees off the true 50-degree measurement. They also depicted the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as open bodies of water, not land-locked seas as Ptolemy had done.

Back down in the museum, Sezgin shows me a model of al-Ma’mun’s globe, vividly painted in gold and blue with red bands indicating mountain ranges and thin green lines for rivers. Nearby is a copy of Muhammad al-Idrisi’s 12th-century world map, first engraved for Roger ii, the Norman king of Sicily, on a ponderous 135-kilogram (300-pound) silver plate two meters (78") in diameter. Although the later map distorts the known world by squeezing land masses and oceans into seven equal climatic zones, it provides considerably more detail on northern Europe, northern Asia and the islands of what is now Indonesia.
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