15th century map depicting Ptolemy's description of the Ecumene, Johannes Schnitzer, engraver
Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, by Hartmann Schedel.
(Turn your head it's upside down.)
This one and the next one are both attributed (on the internet, at least, to Muhammad al-Idrisi, 1154--probably both from his Tabula Rogeriana.
(This one is also upside down.)
Supposedly a recreation of what Ptolemy's original map would have looked like based on the coordinates he gave.
The Great Serpent Mound is an enormous earthwork shaped like a snake eating an egg and located in Ohio. It's 1,348 feet long, and attributed to various peoples. Carbon dating of charcoal fragments previously placed the Serpent's beginnings around the year 1070, but new research apparently suggests that it might actually be 1,400 years older than this--new carbon dates place the mound's beginnings around 321 BCE. Researchers suggest the later date may represent a layer of repairs made after a thousand years of wear had taken their toll on the Serpent.
One such thing was the existence of Antarctica. This occasionally leads to theories that ancient people must have actually discovered or even settled Antarctica, perhaps at some time when it was not ice-covered. The more reasonable explanation, IMO, is just that they had some mixed-up geographic knowledge that happened to get something right by random chance, given the sheer amount of bad and mixed-up geographic knowledge medieval maps display.
Medieval cartographers had a lot working against them. They had no reliable way to determine longitude, for example, and there was a strong belief that geography actually reflected theology. The quintessential Medieval map is the T-O map, so called because it looks like a T inside an O:
(From Etymologies, by Sait Isidore, Bishop of Seville, 12th century)
(Liber Floridus)
(St. Sever world map after Beatus, 1030 A.D.)
(Note: North is to the left on these. The convention of putting North at the top of the map probably didn't begin until compasses became widespread.)
Obviously no one was actually trying to navigate with these things. They are meant to show that the divine order of the world reflects the Christian Trinity--one continent for each part of the Trinity, with the world's center at Jerusalem.
There was just one problem with this tidy little package: ancient Greek philosophers had claimed the existence of a fourth, southerly continent, beyond the ocean's stream. This mysterious fourth island was known by a variety of names, such as the Antipodes and Terra Australis Incognita--the Unknown Southern Land.
(Beatus)
Beatus, probably the Osma copy, 1203
Beatus world map, London copy, 1109 A.D.
Macrobian World Map
Liber Floridus
The whole matter occasioned much debate, and not just because people thought three continents was much better than four. For you see, medieval geographers thought the equator was an impassable band of fiery burning heat. (Any Europeans who'd ventured into the Sahara would be forgiven for thinking that going even further south was a bad idea.) If the equator was impassible, then how could anyone know if there was land down there or not? How could anyone get there or live there? And if people did live down there, how could the evangelists have preached there (the Bible claims that they preached in all corners of the Earth, after all)?
But argue as they might, there it was in ancient Greek philosophy, and they were loathe to completely discard anything in Greek philosophy.
Where did the Greeks get the idea?
I'm not sure, but the most obvious idea is that they had contact with people who had actually sailed south of the equator and discovered land there (note that much of Africa is, in fact, south of the equator.) (If I recall correctly, the Egyptians manned an expedition that actually made it around Africa.) Couple these reports with the belief in a circling ocean stream at the equator, and it's not too hard to see how people might have gotten confused.
After a while, Europeans discovered that you didn't actually die hideously of burning fire if you sailed too far south, but belief that there was another island down there somewhere persisted, even as more and more of the world turned out not to contain it.
Oronteus Finaeus, 1531 AD
1604 copy of the 1602 Chinese map Kunyu Wanguo Quantu
Petrus Bertius’s P. Bertii tabularum geographicarum contractarum (Amsterdam, 1616).
I'm so sorry, but the legend on this map was not in English. Here it is, if you can read it: 1619 tarihli bir dünya haritası
Fra Mauro, Map of the world, 1448-1453 (okay, that was probably just Madagascar.)
Abraham Ortelius, 1592
Johannes Schöner, globe of 1533: southern hemisphere.
Terre Australle, 1583, by Jacques de Vaux
With each new discovery of land in the southern hemisphere, map makers thought they'd found the edges of the fabled southern continent. But when even the continent south of Indonesia turned out not to extend over the south pole, cartographers threw up their hands and decided to just name it "Australia" and be done with it, somewhere around 1804-1814.
Antarctica was spotted in 1820.
Whoops.
Well, Brazil got its name in a funny way, too.
They were an essentially apocalyptic sect. They associated the year 1666 with the number of the beast of Revelations, and believed that Jesus was about to begin the 1,000 year "fifth monarchy" (the first four were Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.)
Two Fifth Monarchists were judges at Charles I's trial and signed his death warrant. After Oliver Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament, the Fifth Monarchists proposed that the country should be ruled by a body of "saints," based on the Old Testament Sanhedrin. These saints, they believed, would usher in the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ.
Oliver Cromwell actually tried to implement this scheme. English churches nominated 129 men for the new government; Scottish churches nominated five; and the Irish, six. Many of those nominated were Fifth Monarchists themselves or were otherwise sympathetic to their cause. This Parliament of Saints, (also known as the Barebones Parliament,) lasted a whole 6 months before it dissolved itself for the good of the people.
After that, Fifth Monarchists' power and influence waned. They tried and failed to overthrow Cromwell's Protectorate. They later tried to conquer London (on Jesus's behalf,) and many were subsequently killed hideously for treason.
Shakers believed in Christ's immanent return to Earth--as a woman. Many of their preachers were female, and in 1770, one of their leaders, Anne Lee, was declared the Messiah. (Thereafter she was called Mother Anne.)
The Shakers had split from the Quakers, taking with them many of the more charismatic members and leaving behind a calmer set of Quakers. Shakers spoke in tongues, danced, shook, and received divine revelations. They believed that God was both male and female and practiced male/female equality in community leadership and structure. They became conscientious objectors during the Civil War, and as you probably already know, had no children.
They are also an example of successful religious communism--possibly because membership was voluntary, control was local, and the lifestyle agrarian.
Shaker communities managed to attract new members and remained economically successful until the Industrial Revolution radically changed the economic landscape, though I'm not sure it's really the IR's fault. There were 5 or 6,000 Shakers in the US in the 1800s (remember, the whole population of the US was much lower back then); today there are 3, in Maine.
We tend to think of "communism" as starting with Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Marx was certainly a significant political theorist, but he was actually part of an existing, much larger movement that has its origins in the same reforming impulse that lead to American democracy and many religious communes.
Today we think of "communism" and "democracy" as opposites, but in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, they were more or less the same. Democracy meant a community of people had the right to determine their own laws, instead of the King dictating laws to them. Communism of the day was meant that the community had a right to determine their economic fates, rather than the King. In religious communes, in particular, councils voted on both legal and economic matters. Later, the idea of collectively running one's own country and of collectively running one's own factory can be seen as the same idea expressed at different levels.
As I understand it, our notion that the government and the economy are two separate entities is fairly modern. 500 years or so ago, the political and economic systems were completely entwined, via that system popularly known as feudalism.
I'm still not clear on when or why democracy/communism first became a big deal, but we see at least some interesting groups emerging in the 1600s, with a variety of systems. The Pilgrims of the Plymouth Bay Colony, in 1620, established a democratic society, apparently in keeping with Calvinist doctrines. The colony's government also administered certain economic concerns, like regulating the purchasing of land, but does not appear to have banned private property.
Some Quaker and Shaker groups did hold all property in common. The Diggers, around 1650, were agrarian socialists who attempted to farm on common lands. I believe the Mormons also practiced some form of centralized economic direction in the settling of Utah. And, of course, many monasteries and convents have been essentially communistic for centuries.
Some groups were obviously more successful than others, but overall, religious communes seem to have done pretty well, and may have provided much of the inspiration for the secular communism movement.
I would not be surprised to find that many of the more enthusiastic-personalitied Brits immigrated to the US as a result, leaving their calmer brethren behind, and contributing to the development of our respective national characters.
Occident and Orient you probably already know, but what about Septentrion and Midi?
Septentrion = Septen + trion = 7 + plough ox, (or potentially "threshing ox,") in Latin. It's another name for the Big Dipper, which points to the North Star.
Midi is short for Meridional, from the Latin meri dies, or midday. At northerly latitudes, the sun is always slightly to the south at midday.
Map by Alain Manesson-Mallet, 1687.
