These maps are from An Historical Atlas by Edward Quin and W. Hughs from 1856. They were accompanied by the historical context for each map, you can find the entire atlas here. This is part 1 and I'll post part 2 starting with The Discovery of America soon. Hope you guys like them!
If you're on the phone reddit's ui might make the map unreadable so you can either download the images from reddit or get the full size images of the maps here.
Edit: Reddit's being unpredictable with the compression so I'll be posting the remaining 6 maps individually with zooms.
*This atlas is obviously from the Christian European perspective (Given that they start with the literal flood) and was made for a similar audience, and even at that it's made by an Englishman and so is obviously somewhat biased in that way. The only way to learn the whole truth is to learn the truth from every perspective and source.
Posted by Parzival_2k7
16 Comments
Wonderful. Thanks for posting. Almost the historiography of historiography.
I don’t like historical maps announcing “discoveries” from a euro-centric (what would be a better term?) perspective. People lived in Africa longer than this, China had advanced civilization with maps, both Americas likely also had maps.
Looking forward to part two
Known to whom?
Man, something about seeing “fog of war” on a map just hits different. I can kinda understand the feeling people had of wanting to see what’s out there beyond the known world.
Japan be like, “you can’t see meeee!”
1856? Wasn’t like the entirity of Asia and Africa mapped by then?
From a limited viewpoint.
These are really cool perspectives
Really good finding. Thanks for posting.
r/MapsWithoutNZ
Known to who? eg. “the foundation of rome”- there were people living in other parts of Europe, Africa, there had been several Asian empires, people had been in the America’s for about 10.000 yrs.
those parts were known too, just from a different perspective.
Empire of Cyprus. Doesn’t include Cyprus.
Incredibly cool, thanks!
We can have the whole “known to who?” conversation and talk about how this is from a British/European perspective. I think a lot of Africans would disagree that they weren’t part of the ‘known’ world until some European met them.
But that aside, it is kind of fascinating that from this British perspective, they identify with people from the middle east. It is almost unspoken that of course the ancient Greeks and Romans are our predecessors.
Why doesn’t the map start around England and then when the Romans invaded Britain the map expands to include the Mediterranean? There is this underlying thought that Europeans are just descended from ancient jews and Christians in the middle east, which is kind of strange when you think about it.
Fascinating that the Chinese built an entire civilisation outside of the known world.