209 - Beyond the Helvetian Desert: Ancient, Mysterious Germany

 

The proximity to, the ‘otherness’ of and the seemingly eternal conflict with the barbarian tribes across the Rhine stoked Imperial Rome’s interest in all matters German. To get a sense of the horror and fascination the Germans exerted on the Romans, think cowboys (Rome) and indians (Germany). One of the earliest ethnographic works was Tacitus’ Germania, dedicated entirely to those wild men on the other side of the river. The source for this map of Germania Magna (Greater Germany), however, is Ptolemaeus’ Geographia, which, while dealing with the whole known world and not specifically with Germany, gives very determinate coordinates for all the tribes, mountains, rivers and islands mentioned.

The Geographia is a compilation of what was known of all the world’s geography in the 2nd century AD. Although the knowledge of regions outside the Empire is sometimes quite sketchy, Ptolemy’s atlas (the original maps were lost, and reconstituted in later centuries based on the coordinates provided by Ptolemy for each locality) remained authoritative up until the age of Discovery.

This map is quite defective by modern standards: the course of the rivers, notably the Rhine, is oversimplified, the Jutland peninsula is the wrong shape, some of the islands appear fictional and there’s no sign of the Scandinavian peninsula.

Another issue rendering this map ‘unreadable’ to modern eyes is the proliferation of tribal names that more often than not have failed to make a lasting (or at least recognisable) mark on people and places today; many German tribes were exterminated, or were known by several names, or were absorbed by other tribes. Still, here follows an attempt to describe the map.

The neighbours

• Gallia – in Antiquity, the Rhine was the traditional border between Gaul and Germany – and by extension between the Roman Empire and the ‘barbarians’. Remarkably, later policy of the French kings was to establish natural borders between themselves and the Germans, often aiming for the Rhine.
• Raetia (often also Rhaetia) – united present-day eastern and central Switzerland with southern Bavaria, Upper Swabia, Voralberg, the better part of Tirol and part of Lombardy. In Roman times, it was bounded by the Limes Germanicus along the Danube in the north, by the Helvetii on the west, by Cisalpine Gaul in the south and by Noricum in the east. Little is known of the Raetians, apart from suggestions that they were related to the Etruscans and the fact that they probably were celtified to a large degree by the time of the Roman invasion. The mountain-dwelling Raetians subsisted on cattle-farming and timber-cutting, but some valleys also produced wine so good that Julius Caesar preferred Raetian to Italian wine. The name Raetia survives in Raeto-Roman, the name for Switzerland’s smallest and only native language.
• In between Gallia and Rhaetia is located the Fons Rheni, the source of the Rhine (nowadays, the Rhine is considered to have two sources: Lake Tuma near the Oberalp Pass, leading to the Vorderrhein; and the Paradies glacier near the Rheinquellhorn, both in present-day Switzerland.
• Noricum – Name of a Celtic federation of possibly 12 tribes, in 16 BC absorbed by Rome as a province, between Raetia in the west, the Danube on the north, Pannonia on the east and Italia and Dalmatia in the south, roughly corresponding to Styria and Carinthia, provinces of modern Austria, and other parts of Austria and Bavaria. Their area was fabled for its richness in gold, salt and iron ore. Noricum was the staging ground for almost all Celtic attacks on Italy. Before the Celts, Noricum was inhabited by the Illyrians and before that, as attested by the Hallstatt-culture relics, by a vigorous culture that made the transition from Bronze to Iron Age. The Achaeans referred to by Homer might even have originated here.
• Panonnia – the plains of central Europe in later times associated with Hungary. In ancient times inhabited by Panonnians, related to the Illyrians, in the 4th century BC invaded by Celts and around the beginning of the CE subdued by the Romans.
• Sarmatia – the region of Eastern Europe inhabited in Antiquity by the Sarmatians, a collection of tribes of Persian stock, in their greatest range around 100 BC occupying land from Barentsz Sea (north) to the Danube (south) and from the Vistula (west) to the Caspian Sea (east). The Sarmatians may be the origin of the centuries-old legends about women-warriors, as their females enjoyed an uncommon degree of participation in social life. The Sarmatians were related to the Scythians, allied themselves with the Huns in the 4th century and only disappeared from view at the time of the Gothic ascendancy in the Black Sea area. The modern-day Ossetians (in Georgia and Russia) might well be descendents of the Scythians/Sarmatians.

The Rivers

• Albis – the Elbe
• Amasius - unkown
• Chalusus – the Treve
• Danuvius – the Danube
• Rhenus – the Rhine
• Suebus - unknown
• Viadua – the Oder
• Vidrus – exact location unknown
• Vistula – the Vistula
• Visurgis – the Weser

The Seas, Islands and Peninsulas

• Chersonesus Cimbrica – the Cimbrian peninsula, nowadays known as Jutland.
• Alociae insulae – “Above the Cimbrian peninsula there are three other islands which are called the Alociae islands.”
• Saxonum insulae – the Saxon islands… Judging from their position, possibly Helgoland etc.?
• Scandiae insulae – first used by Greeks to denote different islands in the Mediterranean, it came to refer to various uncharted islands in Northern Europe, according to Pliny the Elder one island north of Britannia, according to Ptolemy a group of islands east of the Cimbrian peninsula, the largest of which was named Scandia.
• Oceanus Germanicus – obviously meaning both the North and Baltic Seas, not to be confused with the Oceanus Britannicus (the English Channel). The Mountains• Melibocus mons: at 517 metres, the Melibokus or Mal(s)chen is the highest mountain of the Bergstrasse in southern Hesse, overlooking the Rhine valley. According to Ptolemy, it divided the Cheruski from the Chamavi (which would make this map an inaccurate representation of that division).
• Abnoba montes: the Gaulish forest or river goddess Abnoba, often identified with Diana, was worshipped in the Black Forest and, according to Ptolemy, also gave her name to the mountain (and by extension, the whole mountain range) close to the source of the Danube. The Abnobae montes have been identified as the Baar foothills of the Swabian Alp near Furtwangen im Schwarzwald.
• Alpii montes: the Alps, originally from the Latin albus (white) or altus (high), or from an earlier Celtic or Ligurian name.
• Sudeti montes: northern Czech mountains described by Ptolemy as being above the Gabreta Forest. The etymology might refer to ‘Mountains of Wild Boars’, but this is very debatable.
• Asciburgius mons: location unknown today, but Ptolemy’s description enables some educated guesswork. He describes the mountain(s) as to the northeast of the Sudeti, near the city of Stragona (usually identified with Strzegom/Striegau west of Wroclaw/Breslau), making the Gora Sleza/Zobtenberg a likely candidate. The Slavic name might be a reference to the Silingi tribe, who lived there (and who also gave their name to Silesia). The Germanic root of the latinized name probably translates as ‘Ash Mountain’.
• Luna montes: no information found.
• Sarmatici montes: although Ptolemy also mentions the Carpathes (the first recorded use of the name, incidentally), he uses this term to describe what is now known as the Eastern Carpathian Mountains.
The Tribes

• Adrabaecampi – “a tribe of Greater Germany, dwelling on the north bank of the Danube, south of the Gabreta Fortest after the Marcomanni and Sudini.”
• Angrivarii – mentioned briefly in Ptolemy’s Geographia, they are believed to be synonymous with the 8th century Angrarii, one of three subdivisions of Saxony. Their district was named Angria, Engaria, etc., nowadays known as Engern, west of the Weser river, not far from the Teutoburger Forest. The name literally means ‘Men of Engern’.
• Avarpi – mentioned in Ptolemy’s Geographia as the Auarpoi, which was transliterated into Latin as Avarpi. Some also used Avarni, assuming the name referred to the Varni (in Mecklenburg). Ptolemy describes them as the Farodeinoi, however, and clearly specifies them as one of the neighbouring tribes to the Auarpoi (the others being the Teutonikai and Sueboi). This would place the Avarpi in or near Pomerania.
• Baemi – only mentioned by Ptolemy, he describes them as living between the Luna forest and the Danube river, corresponding more or less with modern Slovakia.
• Baenochaemae – Ptolemy places them east of the Chamavi, near the Elbe river.
• Bateni (Batini) – located east of the Banochaemae. Possibly the place-name Bautzen in Eastern Germany refers to them.
• Buguntes – no information found.
• Busacteri – no information found.
• Caritni – generally thought to inhabit western Bavaria, little more is known of them.
• C(h)asuari – dwelled ‘beyond the Chamavi and Agrivarii’ according to Tacitus, placing them in the vicinity of present-day Hannover. Ptolemy mentions them as east of the Abnoba mountains, close to Hesse. They might be the same people sometimes referred to as the Chattuari.
• Chaemae – Ptolemy mainly mentions they lived close to the Bructeri, which might suggest the Chaemae were in fact synonymous with the Chamavi. Both names derive from the Germanic root haimaz, ‘home’.
• Chaetvori – no information found.
• Chali – mentioned by Ptolemy as the Khaloi, another Germanic tribe occupying Jutland. No more is heard of them, but their name can probably be connected to Chalusus Fluvius (the River Trave, in Schleswig-Holstein) and maybe even to Halland, an historically Danish province in the south of Sweden.
• Chamavi – first mentioned by Tacitus, who locates them west of the Frisians, the Chamavi (or Hamavi) lived along the north bank of the Lower Rhine – the region even today is named after them: Hamaland, in the Dutch province of Gelderland. Tacitus mentions that the Chamavi displaced the Bructeri, of whose history and eventual fate no more than that oblique reference is known. The Chamavi themselves probably came from the north, as attested by several place-names, notably Hamm and more famously Hamburg. The etymology of the tribal name might mean ‘settlers’ (cham/ham being related to ‘heim’ and ‘home’). Later, the Chamavi became an important constituent of the Salian Franks (salian as in ‘salt-water people’, since they then lived close to the sea), but reminders of their separateness lingered on until at least the 9th century (e.g. the Lex Chamavorum Francorum).
• Charudes – lived on the eastern side of the Chersonesus Cimbrica (Jutland). Mentioned by Caesar in De Bello Gallico: 24.000 Harudes under Ariovistus crossed the Rhine to assist the Sequani against the Aedui (both Celtic tribes), but after defeating the latter, Ariovistus started resettling his troops also on territory of the Sequani, who appealed for help to Caesar, who routed the Germans. The Jutland district (syssel) of Hardsyssel is believed to be named after them. They were later replaced by Angles and Jutes, and may have migrated to Norway, where Hordaland and Hardanger fjord are believed to refer to them. The name also survives in Harding, a 9th century king in Norway and also still a family name. Post-invasion Britain knows them as the Heardingas, and in Iceland they are known as Haddings. Etymologically, the name means ‘pineforest-dwellers’.
• C(h)attae (Chatti) – occupying central and northern Hesse (its name derived from this tribe) and parts of Lower Saxony, they were the mother tribe of the Batavians, who were expelled after a quarrel. They were one of the tribes banding together to defeat Varrus’ legions at the Herrmannschlacht in 9AD, thus keeping Rome out of Germany. Later, they were incorporated into the Franks.
• Chauci – a populous tribe occupying the northern coast between the Frisians and the river Elbe, like the Frisians living on artificial mounds above the oft-flooded coastal plains near the North Sea. Pliny the Elder has a first-hand account of their way of life, Tacitus mentions they were respected among the German tribes for their levelheadedness. The Chauci became closely allied to the Romans, to whose legions they often contributed auxiliaries. The first known map of Ireland (by Ptolemy) shows Chauci colonisation of eastern Ireland, by the 1st or 2nd century AD. By the end of the 3rd century, the main body of the Chauci had merged with the Saxons, although it’s unclear how voluntarily this went about.
• Cherusci – inhabited parts of the northern Rhine valley and the plains and forests of northwestern Germany between Osnabrück and Hannover at the beginning of the Common Era. The name refers to a deer (Hirsch in German). Their finest hour was the defeat of Roman legions under Varrus at the Teutoburger Wald in 9AD, preventing the Romanisation of Germany. The shock was so great that the numbers of the ‘lost legions’ were never used again (XVII, XVIII, XIX). The leader at the time was Arminius (Herrmann) the Cherusc. The Cherusci were later absorbed by the Saxons.
• Cimbri – a Germanic tribe traditionally located in northern Jutland, that threatened the Roman republic in late 2nd century BC but still were to be found in Jutland at the beginning or our era. The modern name ‘Himmerland’ there preserves their name. The Cimbri are not to be confused with the Welsh, whose name for themselves is Cymri. In spite of their location in lands traditionally associated with (proto-)Germanic tribes, the Cimbri might well have been Celtic-speakers.
• Cobandi – mentioned by Ptolemy as the Kobandoi, this tribe occupied Jutland. Not much more is known about them.
• Cogni – only briefly mentioned by Ptolemy.
• Curiones – no information found.
• Danduti – no information found.
• Etvaeones – no information found.
• Farodini – no information found.
• Fundusii – only mentioned in passing.
• Frisii – coast-dwellers along the entire eastern edge of the North Sea, the Frisians managed to avoid conquest by concluding a treaty with the Romans, but later rebelled against Roman taxes. The Frisians are today still recognisable as the same people in roughly the same place as when described by Ptolemy – practically the only one of all tribes mentioned here. Their language is the closest surviving relative of English.
• Ineriones – no information found.
• Intuergi – no information found.
• Jazyges – a nomadic branch of the Sarmatians, and therefore also of Iranian stock. First known to reside near the Sea of Azov, later settled on the Pannonian plain. Often fighting with, and sometimes for Rome, Jazygian cavalry in Britain may have contributed to the formation of the Arthurian legend. Their name is preserved in that of the Romanian city of Iasi.
• Langobardi – reached the apex of their fame after they migrated south from their homeland near the Elbe estuary and conquered Byzantine Italy, establishing a kingdom and giving their name to the northern Italian region of Lombardy. Their name literally means ‘longbeards’, and refers to the mythical origin of the tribe, in which the women tied their long hair in front of their faces to intimidate the Vandals (up until then, they were known as the Winniler)… although another theory states that Langbardr (also meaning ‘longbeard’) was their name for the supreme Germanic god Odin, hence their own beards and their name.
• Lugi Buri – Tacitus mentions the Buri, not linking them to the Lugii. Ptolemy, however, calls them Lugi Buri, placing them between the Sudetes and the upper Vistula. They are distinct from the Silingi on the upper Oder. Some Buri accompanied the Suebi when invading Iberia, giving their name to the Terras de Bouro (‘Lands of the Buri’) in Portugal.’Lugi’ might indicate that the tribe(s) concerned were Slavic (as lyudi is Slavic for ‘people’); other alliances seem to be with the Omani and the Didunii.
• Marcomanni – probably related to the Buri or Suebi, their name is thought to derive either from the ancient Germanic for borderland (cf. ‘march’); or from Marcus Fabius Romanus, a Roman legate deserting Drusus’ legions to band together a ragtag group of tribes into a unified fighting force. This force would found powerful kingdoms and threaten the Danube border of the Empire for many years to come.
• Marvingi – no information found.
• Nerleanae – no information found.
• Parmaecampi – no information found.
• Quadi – one of the smaller, lesser-known tribes of which no material evidence remains. In the 1st century, they were the fellow-travellers of the more numerous Marcomanni, migrating towards Moravia, Slovakia and Austria, displacing local Celts and coming into fleeting contact with the nearby Roman Empire. They might have been mentioned in Strabo’s Geographia (as the Koldouoi) and briefly figure in Tacitus’ Germania. Marcus Aurelius fought them in the Marcomannic Wars, defeating them in 174 AD. The Emperor’s death in 180 prevented a further routing of the Quadi – and an extension of Roman territory over the Danube to the Carpathian Mountains. Reputedly, Emperor Valentinian died in 375 AD while receiving a delegation of Quadi seeking a peace treaty – so enraged was he by their insolent behaviour. The Quadi would later dissolve into the Bavarian ethnos.
• Racatae – no information found.
• Racatriae – no information found.
• Ruticlei – no information found.
• Sabalingii – only mentioned in passing.
• Saxones - positioned by Ptolemy approximately in the area still called Niedersachsen, the Saxons rose to prominence many centuries after his Geographia. They constitute not only an important part of German ethnos, but also of ‘native’ Dutch, Norman, French and English peoples. As a constituent of the Anglo-Saxon society in Britain, their name survives in the epithet of today’s globally dominant culture. The tribal name is thought to derive from seax, which refers to a category of single-edged knives. The Saxons, not surprisingly, were considered very warlike. Only via the so-called Saxon Wars was Charlemagne (ca. 800 AD) able to defeat and (forcibly) convert them to Christianity.
• Sidini – no information found.
• Sidones – no information found.
• Sigulones – Ptolemy mentions they live in the western part of the Cimbrian peninsula, north of the Saxons.
• Silingae – an East Germanic tribe, probably part of the larger Vandal group, located in Lower Silesia. The name of that area, now mainly in Poland, is possibly derived from them.  Many Silingae took part in the Vandal migration through Iberia (cf. [V]andalusia) into North Africa.
• Sudini – only known from the quote about the Adrabaecampi.
• Sugambri – occupying an area around the Rhine delta in what is now the Netherlands at the beginning of the Common Era, the Sugambri (or Sicambri) were absorbed by the Franks around the 4th century. Caesar thought the Sugambri were ‘born for war and raids’, and indeed they raided the Eburones at the invitation of the Romans and then made war on the Romans themselves. They were part of the tribes that defeated Varrus’ three legions in the Herrmannschlacht. Although absorbed into the Frankish ethnos, the tribe’s name survived as a poetic distinction, recall St Remigius’ exhortation of Clovis at the latter’s baptism: “Bend down your head, Sicamber. Honour what you have burnt, burn what you have honoured.” An obscure, patently unhistorical legend holds the Sugambri to be descendents of 12.000 Trojans led by Priam to Pannonnia, their descendants later migrating to the Rhine.
• Suebi – Ariovistus’ defeat by Caesar got the Suebi their first mention. They remained a threat to Roman rule in the north, eventually settling in the Alsace, Bavaria and Switzerland. Others migrated to Portugal and Spain. Before all these migrations, they occupied a large swathe of central Germany. As Tacitus explains: “The Suebi do not, like the Chatti or Tencteri, constitute a single nation. They actually occupy more than half of Germany, and are divided into a number of distinct tribes under distinct names, though all generally are called Suebi.” The Suebi comprise (among others) the Semnones (“the oldest and noblest of the Suebi”), the Langobardi, the seven tribes of Jutland and Holstein (“Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Suarini, Nuitones), the Hermunduri on the Elbe, three along the Danube (“Naristi, Marcomanni, Quadi”), the Marsigni and Buri, etc. etc.
• Tenct(e)ri – probably dwelled on the eastern bank of the Lower Rhine, defeated by Caesar in 55 BC, expelled from their homelands by the Suebi across the Rhine to where the Menapii lived.
• Teuriochaemae – no information found.
• Teutones – mentioned by Strabo, Marcus Velleius Paterculus and Ptolemy, usually in close connection with the Cimbri, they migrated from Jutland (or even Scandinavia) south, eventually clashing with the expanding Roman Empire. They were defeated in 102 BC at Aquae Sextae (Aix-en-Provence), at which point the Teutonic women committed mass suicide. The term Teutonic has in later centuries been applied to all Germanic tribes, or even the whole of (modern-day) Germany – not always favourably.
• Teutonovari – probably just means ‘Teutonic Men’, a variation on Teutones.
• Tubanti – no information found.
• Turoni – no information found.
• Vargiones – no information found.
• Varisti – no information found.
• Viruni – no information found.
• Visburgii – placed in an area possibly conforming with modern northern Slovakia.
• Vispi – no information found.
Other features

• Helvetiorum desertum – deserted Helvetia (Switzerland) or the Helvetian Desert. No further information found.
• Silva Orcynia – the ancient and dense ‘Hercynian Forest’ stretched from the Rhine eastward across southern Germany, although it’s not clear how far east (Caesar has it stretching all the way to Dacia, present-day Romania). The Black Forest is a remnant of its western edge. The mountains associated with it (Aristotle mentions the Orkynios mountains in his Meteorologica) might be the Mittelgebirge. The forest, described by Caesar as 9 days’ march from south to north, effectively blocked a Roman conquest of Germania. Its gloomy, mysterious nature was mentioned by Pliny the Elder. The oak-strewn woods, teeming with reindeer, elk and aurochs, might be considered as the original ‘scary forest’. The name Hercynian derives from Celtic meaning ‘mountain forest’, and might have given rise to the name of the Harz mountains.

This map (found here) was an inset to a larger map (here), positioning the tribes on a modern map of Germany, in professor G. Droysen’s Allgemeiner historischer Atlas, published in 1886 in Bielefeld and Leipzig.

208 - Shifting Like A Snake: Ancient Mississippi Courses

As rivers go, the Mississippi is one of the world’s biggies. It’s 3.734 km (2.320 mi) long and has a watershed of more than 3,2 million sq. km (1.245.000 sq. mi), the third-largest in the world (preceded only by the Amazon and Congo rivers), draining 41% of the 48 contiguous states, and even a bit of Canada as well. By volume, it’s the fifth-largest in the world. And yet, the Mississippi isn’t even North America’s longest river (the Missouri River is).

The western border of the Mississippi’s ‘catchment’ corresponds almost entirely with the border of the former French territory of Louisiana, indicating, I presume, that this watershed boundary must have been chosen as that territory’s borders.

Water flowing out from its headwaters at Lake Itasca in Minnesota will take 90 days to reach its estuary into the Gulf of Mexico at Baton Rouge in Louisiana. In, 2002, Slovenian long-distance swimmer Martin Strel covered that same distance in 68 days, so only doing 22 days’ net worth of swimming – the lazy slacker.

The Mississippi’s effluent of fresh water is so massive (7.000 to 20.000 m³/sec, or 200.000 to 700.000 ft³/sec) that a plume of fresh water is detectable from outer space, even as it rounds Florida and up to the coast of Georgia.

The Mississippi was named by the Ojibwe, who appropriately called it the ‘Great River’ (misi-ziibi). Nowadays, it flows through two US states and forms the border of eight others; although the river has shifted in many places, the borders have not, leading to geo-political anomalies (see post #178 on the Kentucky Bend, one of several such peculiarities ‘marooned’ by the river). 

When looking at this map and seeing the jumble of ancient riverbeds - imagine all those shifts sped up: the Mississippi is like a shifting snake, twisting to find its easiest way down to the Gulf. These shifts occur every thousand years or so, especially in the lower parts of the river, through a process known as delta switching, or avulsion: when the river flow is slow, the sedimentation clogs the river channel and it eventually finds another channel. This process is by no means ‘historic’ (i.e. ‘over’) – from the 1950s onwards, the US government has worked on the Old River Control Structure, meant to prevent the Mississippi from switching to the Atchafalaya River channel.

Some other interesting Mississippi facts:

• Before being called the Mississippi by Europeans, the river had been named Rio de Espiritu Santo (’Holy Ghost River’) by Hernando de Soto (first European explorer of the river, in 1541) and Rivière Colbert (by French explorers de la Salle and de Tonty, in 1682).
• The Mississippi has many nicknames, including: the Father of Waters, the Gathering of Waters, Big River, Old Man River, the Great River, the Body of a Nation, the Mighty Mississippi, el Grande (de Soto), the Muddy Mississippi, Old Blue and Moon River.
• The river figures prominently in American music history, with songs such as Johnny Cash’s ‘Big River’, Randy Newman’s ‘Louisiana 1927’, Led Zep’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and ‘Moon River’ from the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned in the river, as he was swept away by the undertow of a passing boat.
• The main literary figure associated with the river is Mark Twain, mainly via ‘Huckleberry Finn’, which is basically a river journey tale, but also through earlier work such as ‘Life On the Mississippi’.
• Waterskiing was invented in 1922 on Lake Pepin, a part of the river between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ralph Samuelson, the sport’s inventor, also performed the first water ski jump in 1925.

“Looks like a spaghetti dinner brought to you by Crayola,”says Joseph Kinyon of the map he sent in. It’s one of many by Harold N. Fisk, an important figure in charting alluvial maps of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Kinyon refers to three articles at sciencedirect.com (here, here and here) with more information about Fisk (whose name, quite appropriately, means fish in Danish). Unfortunately, only the abstract is free; “each article is about $30.00 to download, but most universities with a geology or engineering programme have access to this for free at their library.”

207 - Antarctica, But Sliced Differently

 

Seven countries currently ‘officially’ claim territory in Antarctica. A map of these claims looks like a pie chart, as all are centred on the geographical South Pole(*). If all those claims would be realised, one would be able to visit those seven countries by simply walking in a circle around that one point. But all territorial claims on Antarctica were ‘frozen’ by the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, which also stipulated that thereafter, no new claim could be made. Present claimants are:

• France (Terre Adélie, since 1924)
• Chile (Antárctica, since 1940)
• Argentina (Antártida Argentina, since 1943)
• Australia (Australian Antarctic Territory, since 1933)
• United Kingdom (British Antarctic Territory, since 1908)
• Norway (Dronning Maud Land, since 1939; Peter I Island, since 1929)
• New Zealand (Ross Dependency, since 1923)

All claims apply to the areas south of 60°S, which is the northern limit of the Antarctic Treaty. The area between 90°W and 150°W remains unclaimed, except for Peter I Island, Norway’s claim on this territory being the only one in Antarctica that is not a sector (a ‘slice of the pie’).

This status quo has been maintained ever since 1961, certain signatories - notably the US and the USSR - nevertheless expressing their reservations about certain treaty restrictions. Which could be dangerous, as some claims overlap – notably between Chile, Argentina and the UK. The latter two countries already went to war over the nearby (but non-Antarctic) Falkland Islands in 1982.

A Brazilian geostrategist Therezinha de Castro proposes a different way of approaching the divvying-up of the South Pole – a method which of course is more beneficial to Brazil’s as yet unrecognised Antarctic claims, but which would also eliminate the inherent danger of overlapping claims. It goes like this: all non-South American nations withdraw their claims and bases from the South American sector of Anterctica (from 0°W to 90°W), and this sector is divided among the South American nations according to defrontação. This frontage signifies the ‘open’ sea acces to Antarctica via meridional lines. This would diminish the Chilean and Argentine sectors, give Uruguay, Peru and Ecuador a slice – and would give Brazil the biggest sector.

On reading an Economist article about British territorial claims in Antarctica, Paul Youlten recently came up with a similar idea. “The useful little map (included in the Economist article) got me wondering about which other countries might also lay claim to a slice of Antarctica based on their having un-restricted southern passage across open seas to the continent.”

He used the ‘frontage’ principle not just for South America, but for the whole world. For a bit more about the sources and methods used by Paul Youlten, please click here to read his post on the subject. Via the Youlten method of frontage-ing, no less than 47 countries can lay a claim to Antarctica. To wit:

• From the Americas: USA, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Greenland.
• From Africa: Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Somalia and Madagascar.
• From Asia: Yemen, Oman, Iran, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma and Indonesia.
• From Oceania: Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand.

Remarkably, Iceland is the only European country with direct Antarctic access, unless you count the UK (via the Falklands and South Georgia). “Unexpected results include the surprising news that Somalia, Yemen and Oman could make claims,” says Mr Youlten. “As well as Iran, which I suspect might be tempted to set up an ‘Icelamic Republic’ – sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.”

Will a re-distribution like this ever happen? It reminds one of the attempts to broaden the UN Security Council: the vetoing powers might not all be world powers anymore, but they can still… veto any change, for example to include one vetoing member per continent. This will continue until the UN Security Council or its vetoing members achieve total irrelevance. Similarly, a ‘fairer’ division of Antarctica will not happen until the Treaty signatories are weak enough, or the other parties are strong enough. Which is not anytime soon.

(*) even though the Norwegian claim is only defined east-west, not north-south, and therefore in theory does not extend all the way down to the Pole itself.

206 - Going, Going, Gone: the Old Cherokee Country

Click this map to see it in its original size

This map, made in 1900 by a James Mooney and found here at the fantastic Perry-Castañeda map collection at the University of Texas, shows the shrinkage of Cherokee Country in its original location in the southeastern US.

• Original Cherokee lands (blue line): before European colonisation, contains the entire state of Kentucky, save for the so-called Jackson Purchase (acquired in 1818 from the Chickasaw) in the far west of the present state; the bigger, eastern portion of Kentucky; the northern quarter of Alabama; the northern third of Georgia; the northwestern half of South Carolina; the western tips of North Carolina and Virginia; and a southwestern chunk of West Virginia.

• Cherokee boundary at close of Revolution (red line): almost all of Kentucky is lost; the northern Cherokee border passes through the Cumberland Gap at the present-day state boundary tri-point between Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee; so all Cherokee lands in West Virginia and Virginia are lost; a small tip of North Carolina remains; the Cherokee are almost completely withdrawn from South Carolina; in Georgia, the loss is minimal; in Alabama the southern border remains the same.

• Cherokee boundary at final cession (green line): the southern border remains the same, but in all other directions, the Cherokee Country has shrunk, now only occupying small parts of Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

The Cherokee, with 250.000 members of federally recognised Nations and Bands (2000 census), are the most numerous of all remaining American Indian tribes in the USA. At the time of European contact in the 16th century, they lived mainly in what is now the Southeastern US. Later, most were forcibly removed west to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), via what became known as the ‘Trail of Tears’.

‘Official’ Cherokee nowadays can be found in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri and Alabama. In California, apparently without official recognition, there live up to half a million Cherokee, the largest American Indian group in any state.

In the early 18th century, a united Cherokee empire under Moytoy I and II frequently was at odds with European settlers in the Carolinas. The latter emperor, however, recognised the suzerainity of King George II of England around 1730.

This did not stop European encroachment on traditional Cherokee lands, leading some Cherokee to head out west, establishing settlements across the Mississippi by 1800. Eventually, the large numbers of Cherokee out west led to the establishment of a Cherokee Reservation in Arkansas. Again, by 1820, this land was coveted by white settlers, forcing the Cherokee to resettle in what is now Oklahoma. The descendants of those who stayed behind in Arkansas are still trying to get federal recognition as an ‘official’ Cherokee tribe.

In the 1830s, a gold rush in Georgia sounded the death-knell for the shrinking Cherokee areas in what is now the south-eastern US. They were forcibly removed west, despite a Supreme Court ruling in their favour. These forced marches became known as the ‘Trail of Tears’. Many perished on the road, and not being able to give these dead their traditional burial, the singing of ‘Amazing Grace’ had to suffice. This song has been considered the Cherokee National Anthem ever since.

In 1839 in Oklahoma, a 15 year civil war erupted among the Cherokee, leading some to relocate to Tennessee, others to seek out new lands for settlement even further west, in California (via what later became known as the ‘Cherokee Trail’).

Some Cherokee managed to escape deportation via the Trail of Tears, notably over 600 Cherokee who managed to obtain North Carolinan citizenship and thus were exempt from deportation, and over 400 Cherokee who hid in the remote Snowbird Mountains. Both groups later formed the beginning of the Eastern Band of Cherokees.

Meanwhile in Oklahoma, Cherokee sovereignity was constantly eroded to pave the way for Oklahoma Statehood in 1907. Only in 1938 did the Cherokee again manage to elect a principal chief for themselves.

The ‘Old Settlers’ (Cherokee that moved west before the ‘Trail of Tears’) are united in the United Keetowah Band, federally recognised as of 1934. UKB members must have at least a quarter of Cherokee blood, and must descend from an ancestor on the Final Dawes Roll of the Cherokee, published in the early 1900s.

The Cherokee Nation presently is a prosperous community, active in many economic and cultural fields (sponsoring the famous Sundance Film Festival in Utah, for example). A judicial ruling in early 2006 now also makes the so-called Cherokee Freedmen eligible for Cherokee Citizenship. These freedmen are descendents of African American citizens of the old Cherokee Nation. Some Cherokee are trying to work around the decision, as they do not want to give up on the principle of blood descent, which is still a prerequisite for being elected to Cherokee office.

205 - North America, the Balkans Version

North America must have the lowest nation/surface ratio in the world. The huge subcontinent is made up of only two sovereign states: Canada and the US (*). This is not to say that this was a ‘Manifest Destiny’: many regionalist revolts were crushed to form these two monoliths.

Which raises the question, at least in Matthew White’s mind: “What is the most fragmented that North America could have been?” White’s website (from the mid-nineties, but still online) serves up several ‘alternate history’ maps, that use a POD (point of divergence) somewhere in the past to construct a present slightly (or wildly) different from ours. White’s Balkanised North America, with 1787 as the POD, is by far the most interesting exercise.

“In this alternate reality, the westward expansion of the Anglo-American people proceeded pretty much as it did in our reality,” White writes, “but the United States government just couldn’t keep up. Every national identity crisis resolved itself in favor of the separatists instead.”

On the map, White details as sovereign, areas that:
“1. administered themselves as autonomous nations at some point in American history, or
2. shed blood to achieve or maintain their independence, or at least
3. threatened to.”

One important caveat: “The Native American tribes throughout the continent fit all these criteria, but I limited myself to only three native enclaves.”

• In 1787, a fire in the Philadelphia State House kills George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other members of the Constitutional Convention. This leads to a radically different constitution, and a fundamentally weaker Union.
• Vermont was an independent state until it joined the US as its fourteenth state in 1791. Not in White’s timeline: “Annoyed at the way the new federal government under John Adams is shaping up, Vermont refuses to join the Union, declaring itself an independent republic instead.”
• President Aaron Burr (in reality he was only vice-president at the time, if only by a hair’s breadth) annoys the French so much that Napoleon refuses to sell the gigantic Louisiana Territory to the US.
• In 1812, following an unsuccessful US invasion of Canada, New England secedes. Napoleon does sell Upper Louisiana to the US, but retains the densely populated area around Nouvelle Orléans.
• French Louisiana declares itself independent in 1815, refusing to recognize the Bourbon dynasty reinstated after Napoleon’s Waterloo defeat.
• Indian tribes east of the Mississippi are expelled to what later will become the Five Nations area (our Oklahoma, more or less).
• In 1835, Louisiana supports Texas independence from Mexico on condition that the new republic not join the US.
• Seminole Indians in Florida, together with runaway slaves, drive out the invading US in 1837.
• The Mormons found the theocratic state of Deseret within Mexican territory.
• Upper Canada and Quebec rebel from Great Britain and achieve independence in 1837-’41.
• The slave vs. free state quarrel, playing out more in favour of the South in this timeline, prevents an accession of settlers in Oregon to the US. They declare independence instead, in 1846.
• The Californian Gold Rush still happens as it did in our timeline, but it causes California and Deseret to claim independence from Mexico (in 1852) and Texas to push its border south to the Rio Grande. Mexico only manages to retain part of ‘our’ Arizona and New Mexico.
• Abe Lincoln elected president. The South secedes. The North, lacking the industrial muscle of New England, cannot subdue the South. The Five Nations take advantage by declaring independence.
• Canadian mismanagement of relations with the métis (a people made up of French and native components) in 1870-’72 leads to a successful revolt along the Red River, establishing a Métis Nation.
• Custer’s command is wiped out at Little Bighorn in 1876, leading to the establishment of the Dakota Nation.

Not mentioned in this timeline, but present on the map: the Maritime Dominion, a British toehold on the North American subcontinent (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia); and Newfoundland, either a separate British dominion or an independent state. Depending on the latter, this ‘balkanised’ North America is composed of no less than 17, and possibly 18 territories with different sovereignties. Compared with the real-time country that stretches ‘from sea to shining sea’, this USA has been reduced to a rump state – somewhat reminiscent of present-day Serbia relative to former Yugoslavia.

(*): Please note that the definition of ‘North America’ varies: in Anglo-America (i.e. English-speaking Canada and the US) it is often held to be synonymous with the US and Canada. Sometimes, Mexico is included. And/or St Pierre and Miquelon (a French-administered collectivité territoriale off Canada’s Atlantic coast). And/or Bermuda. All of which would take the number of sovereign states covering North America up to five – still a very small number.

This map was sent in by Kári Tulinius, Matthew White’s website can be found here.

204 - One Ring To Rule Them All, Mate

“The koality of muh-cy is not strined”: I forget who once pondered the impossibility of believing Shakespeare spoken in an Australian accent. Maybe it’s the implied anachronism, for in Shakespeare’s time there wasn’t an Australian accent, owing mainly to Australia not having been discovered yet.

At first glance this map, transposing Tolkien’s fantasy world on Australia, seems equally out of place. The imagined continent of Middle-Earth has always been taken to represent or at least prefigure Europe. The Hobbits, for example, are, says Tolkien, “just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination.” A map, discussed earlier on this blog (#121 – Where On Earth Was Middle-Earth?) takes the parallel between Tolkien’s world and the outline of modern Europe to its extreme – Mordor is in Hungary, for example.

And yet, putting the eurocentric view of fantasy cartography to one side, it’s worth recalling that the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy wasn’t filmed in Hungary, England or anywhere else in Europe, but in New Zealand – Australia’s neighbour. Ironically, about as far away in the world from Tolkien’s rustic English countryfolk as you can get without getting your feet wet.

So if New Zealand can be the (rather spectacular) backdrop to Tolkien’s stories, why not Australia? Disbelief duly suspended, let’s examine the places mentioned in this map:

Many places take an existing Aussie name and tolkienify them, such as Western Australia (‘Westron Australia’), Perth (‘Middle-Perth’), Broome (‘Brun’), Alice Springs (‘Alfalas Springs’), Lake Eyre (‘Lake Corseyre’), Hobart (‘Hobartton’ – a nice reference to Hobbiton), Sydney (‘Sidnarin’), Quenyasland (‘Queensland’), Adelaide (‘Adeleade’), Brisbane (‘Brohan’) and Melbourne (‘Morborn’).

The thinly settled Northern Territory is rebaptised the ‘Northern Waste’, the Great Dividing Range becomes ‘Great Dividing Rangers’. I don’t know how the map-maker feels about the Australian federal government, but the legend covering the federal capital Canberra might give a hint: “Here was of old the witch-realm of Canbrar.”

This map was made and sent in by James Hutchings, not coincidentally an Australian. “A great place for a holiday”, he says about his tolkienified Australia, “but watch out for the kangarorcs.”

203 - Favourite Strange Map Book Covers 2007

The Mighty Barrister alerted me to a post on the blog of the Book Design Review by Joseph Sullivan of Chicago, listing his favourite book covers of 2007. Two of ‘em are map-based (and sufficiently strange to be included here):

Words Without Borders (cover design by Helen Yentus): contains 28 works of literature never before published in English. The international flair of the book is heightened by the map-like cover, with in the legend the names of some of the multinational array of writers, including Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Jonathan Safran Foer (US), Günter Grass (Germany), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).

The Cigarette Century (cover design by Rodrigo Corral): the book by Allan M. Brandt relates ‘the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America’ and illustrates this nation-defining characteristic by showing the eastern half of the United States made up out of the pernicious little smoke-sticks. It’s probably taking things too far to try to count how many cigarettes constitute each state. Two are quite easily countable, however: Florida, as far as I can see, equals about 12 cigarettes, Michigan (including the Upper Peninsula’s 4 ciggies) equals 10 smokes.

202 - United Pumpkins of America

Gone are the days when just carving three holes in a hollowed-out pumpkin and having a candle project its flickering light from inside would scare the bejeezus out of all the neighbourhood kids. That must have been somewhere around 1891, when those pumpkins were the most advanced piece of entertainment technology available.

Technology has moved on since then, and several revolutions (electronic, digital and virtual) later, the still ubiquitous Halloween pumpkin now struggles to be seen and feared amidst our modern gadgetry. A few of the more extravagant attempts are: pumpkins exposing themselves and puking, or pumpkins posing as octopi, oysters, hamburgers, the Death Star from Star Wars and even Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ (all and more to be found here).

I thank Ben Krall for finding among all those scary incarnations this pumpkin map of the USA. I’m not quite sure whom this is supposed to scare, though: anti-Americans? People with extreme map-phobia? Miss South Carolina?

Considering the convexity of pumpkins and the concomitant difficulty of carving out all those borders so neatly, a lot of work (and several pumpkins) must have gone into creating this rather good rendition of the United States.

Oklahoma seems to have been the top op the pumpkin, and Florida, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire seem to have been carved out of a different pumpkin.

201 - The Reeves (Equinational) Projection

Unfortunately, ‘Globehead! Journal of Extreme Cartography’ was a rather short-lived grad school magazine at Penn State (only 2 issues), otherwise we might have seen some more strange maps like this one.

This ‘equinational projection’ goes where no Mercator or Peters projection ever went, and shows a world in which every country is the same size. A world which is a little different from ours:

* The American continent, especially its northern half, is covered by relatively few states, resulting in an atrophied New World – except for the Carribean, where all those tiny island nations now occupy the same space as giants like the US and Canada.
* Europe, its territory littered with lots of states, medium or small (compared to America), holds a dominating position. Russia (Nr 138) is a mere appendage of Europe.
* Africa, long squeezed and thereafter painfully stretched by the aforementioned Mercator and Peters projections, now holds what at first glance seems the largest block of nations.
* Asia consists of a few very large countries (Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Pakistan) which accounts for its relatively small size. This constrasts to almost any other projection, be it size, population or economic growth.
* Australia and New Zealand are the most visible constituents of Oceania, except on this map, where all the Pacific island nations figure more prominently than usual.

“The equinational projection was invented by my friend Catherine Reeves for Globehead! in 1994,” writes Jeremy W. Crampton, editor of Cartographica and associate professor of Geography at Georgia State, who sent this map in. He kindly explains the cryptic acronym IASBS: International Association for the Study of Big Science.

Please click on the map to see it without the annoying sidebar!

200 - Japan Looks Like Its Phillips Curve

It’s said that dogs end up looking like their masters. A similar alchemy seems at work between the shape of a country and its results on an economic graph called the Phillips Curve.

This particular diagram compares a map of Japan to its Phillips Curve. The plotted dots resemble a map of the Japanese archipelago, not just the general curvature of the island group but also some characteristics of the main islands.
* the ‘mainland’ island of Honshu and the north island Hokkaido are clearly distinguishable.
* Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, is also there - although it has switched shores to float around in the sea between mainland Japan and China.
* oversized and too far removed from Honshu, the southernmost island of Kyushu nevertheless is recognisable in the rorschach-like blotches closest to the graph’s axis.

The concordance is far from exact, but remarkable nonetheless: the ensemble of the rorschach-like blotches does resemble the Japanese archipelago. Even more bizarre is the fact that this similarity is not a singularity: apparently, the Phillips Curve for Canada looks a lot like… Canada. Or so they claim over at the quirky economics blog called Marginal Revolution. The link to the relevant entry there was kindly provided by Jas Ellis. As she is an economist and I’m not, I shall quote her liberally:

“The Phillips Curve charts a historical regularity in which unemployment and inflation are negatively correlated. Each point records inflation and unemployment in a given year. Alban Phillips noticed the relation in 1958. For a while, it looked like governments might be able to reduce unemployment if they were prepared to suffer a slightly higher inflation rate.”

“However, this was not the case, as Edmund Phelps realised (and won a Nobel Prize for doing so). While the relationship might hold in the short run, long term (stable) unemployment is dependent on the overall structure of the economy, so higher inflation cannot have a long-term effect on unemployment. And when people’s expectations are taken into account, there isn’t even a short-term change in unemployment.”

“Interestingly, the Phillips curves for most modern economies no longer look the way they did in 1960. Any intervention on the base of this idea was doomed to fail by Phelps’s argument, as governments in the 1970s found. Now, modern monetary policy has improved so inflation is pretty stable, and the curve (for the US) has been almost horizontal since the mid-1980s — thus looking like the Marshall Islands, as the poster (of the Marginal Revolution entry) says. He is, however, referring to the famous economist Alfred Marshall, who had nothing (directly) to do with the Phillips curve!”

199 - A Simplified Map of London

Hilarious. Found in the Flickr group From Memory (Was: Maps From Memory).

198 - The Ideal City (Anno 1951)

Mid-20th century British illustrator Ronald Lampitt had a predilection for maps. It probably was no coincidence that he got to draw, in the Illustrated Magazine of 17 February 1951, the proposal of John Sleigh Pudney for an ideal city.

Pudney (1909-1977) was a prolific British journalist and writer (despite leaving school at 16), remembered mainly (if at all) for his short stories, his wartime poem For Johnny (1941) and his BAFTA-winning documentary ‘Elizabeth is Queen’ (1953). In the aforementioned article, he proposes his vision:

“In this age of planning it is surely time that some innocent traditionalist thrust his way forward to offer mankind the ideal city. Whose ideal? goes up the snarl from the idealists. Ideal for what? chorus the realists. Ideal against whom? demand the tacticians. Why a city? moan the simple-lifers. Allow me for a moment to toy with dreams, taking a holiday from the magic of the materialists. The ideal city which I shall venture to plan must be controversial: for it is myself of whom I am thinking rather than of humanity in general. I have the vice, before my ink is dry, of all planners. I have a sneaking notion already that what is good for me must be good for the rest of mankind.”

That nameless city under Lampitts brushstrokes becomes a spacious, undulating seaside paradise of a place, populated with monuments that look vaguely familiar. Which is because they are; they’re architectural icons from all over the world – the western world, that is. And yet, this ideal city looks suspiciously sterile: no rubbish tips, no shantytowns, no shopping malls, no advertising… Here follows a list of buildings referenced at the bottom of the map.

1. Modern Airfield
2. Mount Holmen Koll, Oslo
3. Acropolis, Athens
4. Helsinki Hospitals, Clinics
5. Old Town and Castle, Antibes, France
6. White Wooden Houses of Carolina
7. Governmental Palace, Prague
8. Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin
9.Sacré Coeur, Paris
10. King’s College, Cambridge
11. Georgian Houses of Bath
12. Edinburgh Castle
13. Maritime Quarter, NY
14. Municipal Buildings
15. Modern Houses, Finland
16. Business Section, NY
17. Street of Steps, Valetta
18. Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen
19. Elevated Railway, NY
20. Broadway, NY
21. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
22. Moscow Underground
23. Art Gallery
24. St Paul’s Cathedral, London
25. La Scala, Milan
26. Piazza della Signoria, Florence
27. Paris Boulevards
28. Canals of Venice
29. Library
30. Cultural Centre
31. Stockholm Waterways
32. Gothenburg Concert Hall
33. St Stephen’s, Vienna
34. Museum

The map was found here, in the intriguingly idiosyncratic graphic collection at fulltable.com. Pudney’s article is here.

197 - The Colourful Side of the Moon

I have to agree with Brandon Keim, who reviewed this map for Wired Magazine (here): it most definitely is one of “the coolest planetary maps ever”.

This map is of the dark side of the moon, which here looks more like a Jackson Pollock action painting, its riotous colours corresponding to geological materials and phenomena. Many of the colour spots are circular in nature, reflecting the large number of meteorites that have impacted on the lunar surface, unprotected by an atmosphere, over many, many centuries.

The map is one of a series produced by NASA and the US Geological Survey between 1971 and 1998. “If you’re on a public or work computer that’s set to a generic desktop background, download some and spread the wonder,” Keim suggests. Hear, hear!

This map was suggested by Max Kahn. The original article (cf. sup.) also contains links to further maps of the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus and three moons of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede and Callisto).

196 - UFO Hotspots Map

Alien encounters, abductions and sightings are very much out of the picture since they were milked for televisual success by the popular series The X-Files in the 1990s. This diminution of media coverage for UFOs and suchlike could of course be part of the very elaborate cover-up by the US government, which obviously has to be in cahoots with the more ominous races of aliens currently running the show in Area 51.

That doesn’t prevent the brave J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies from Chicago from publishing a map of UFO sightings in the US. It indicates the number of UFO reports per 100.000 people by county in the continental US. Some observations:

• There is a marked difference in levels of UFO visitation between the eastern and western halves of the continental US. Apparently, extraterrestrials like it out west.
• Marked exceptions to this rule is a hotspot in northern Minnesota, several others spread out mainly in Missouri and Illinois and a small area in the Florida panhandle.
• Aliens like the west, but generally don’t care for Dixie: the south is remarkably UFO-free.
• Preferred landing spots of UFOs are concentrated in the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, the three coastal states and Nevada – with a spike around, of course, Area 51.

The map was sent in by nonie3234 and can be found here on www.scifi.com.

195 - Spam Maps

“Looks tasty, doesn’t it”, says one of the submitters of this map made out of Spam. Well, that’s a matter of opinion (but I think he was being ironic, anyway).

The map is the work of Manila-born US artist Michael Arcega, who on his website displays a series of maps made from Spam and explains: “Spam was used as ration by the US Armed Forces during WWII. It ultimately spread through many Pacific Island nations as a standard source of meat. Spam’s diasporic nature is symbolic of America’s ongoing influence on many nations.”

Arcega loves to play with words, so it’s no coincidence that s-p-a-m is m-a-p-s spelled in reverse.

This map was sent in by Mo Moussa, Ken Lacy and several others.

194 - The United States of Islam

For a brief window of time after the fall of communism, it really seemed that the world was at the ‘end of history‘. That phrase was coined by Francis Fukuyama, and also was the title of the book in which the American philosopher explained that the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the final victory of liberal democracy. The sole remaining ideology would go on to ‘conquer’ the rest of the world.

Fukuyama’s (essentially Hegelian) view of a dialectic progression towards political perfection has at least one thing wrong with it: to paraphrase Elbert Hubbart’s famous quote on life itself, history is “just one damned thing after another”. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001 were the start of another chapter of history, one that some perceive as a struggle for global dominance between the west and the east (not a communist, but an Islamic east this time).

That’s not how the governments of west (or east) describe the current ‘War on Terror‘, but it’s clear that extremists on both sides believe the current nastiness to be a ‘clash of civilisations’ (to quote another book title, this one by Samuel Huntingdon) - or wish that it were so, and help the conflict conflagrate by provoking the ‘other’ side. This might explain why this map seems to pop up on websites critical of Islam, even though it seems to originate from an Islamic organisation.

The map purports to show a plan for Islamic world dominance. Entitled ‘The Map of the United States of Islam’ – The Dream of 20th Century Muslims Will Be Real In 21st Century.’ That dream, for some Muslims, is the political unity of all Muslims in a religious state called the Caliphate, with the Caliph combining supreme spiritual and temporal powers, as it was in the early days of Islam. The map shows the countries and areas to be included in such a Caliphate in green, mainly, and surrounded by a black line. The list mentions these countries:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Chechnya, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kashmir, Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

The list is problematic, as it contains countries mainly non-Islamic, such as Uganda or Armenia, or containing significantly non-Islamic territories, such as Sudan or Nigeria. The Caliphate’s territory on the map is larger than the countries listed above, which again raises some issues:

• it includes the eastern part of China, not only the mainly Islamic area of Xinjiang (East Turkestan), but also Tibet, which is predominantly Buddhist.
• Some areas in central Russia are added, indeed inhabited by Tatars and other traditionally Islamic peoples – but also by many others.
• India, which has a large Muslim population of over 100 million, nevertheless is mainly Hindu.

Strangely, some majority Muslim countries are left out of the Caliphate, notably:
• Albania
• Malaysia
• Indonesia
• Bangladesh

The map specifies that the capital of the Caliphate would be ‘Saudi Arabia’, its head of state the ‘Khalifa’ (Caliph), the currency the Islamic dinar and the law the Quran and the ‘hadees’ (hadith). “The result”, it says, would be “all resources available in Islamic states:”
• strongest army in the world;
• strongest currency in the world;
• largest country in the world;
• atomic & super power country;
• Europe & US can not seize assets in future of Muslim Ummah;
• the heart of globe in Muslim hand;
• half population of world in Islamic state.

The smaller world map in the bottom right hand corner paints picture of a world where the issues raised above no longer apply: after 100 years, the whole world is coloured green, the colour of Islam, including the by then aptly named Arctic island of Greenland. It is somewhat ironic that the map name and some of the attributes of the Islamic superstate clearly refer to the ‘Great Satan’ itself, the United States - an enemy and an example…

The map refers to an organisation called the World Islamic Mission, which is a real organisation, although its website at first glance doesn’t include this map (which was taken here from the anti-Islamic site savecivilization.org).

The map was suggested to me by several readers, including Ilya Vinarsky, James Cambias and Bruno De Cordier, who remarks: “It’s unclear whether this map is a joke or the dream of some muslims.”