Challenges of Mapping the Classical World by Talbert Richard J. A.;

Author:Talbert, Richard J. A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Ségolène Débarre’s Cartographier l’Asie Mineure: L’orientalisme allemand à l’épreuve du terrain (1835–1895) (Paris: Peeters, 2016). Review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.05.27

Do not be deterred by the nineteenth-century focus: this remarkable revised dissertation offers plenty to engage scholars who study ancient Asia Minor. Débarre’s overall aim is to modify the claim advanced by Edward Said that German Orientalism conveyed a less real and tangible “Orient” than did its British or French counterparts. To demonstrate otherwise in one important sphere, she presents an original and absorbing investigation of German efforts to map Asia Minor. In the book’s six chapters these emerge as a succession of increasingly intense initiatives over a sixty-year period. This runs from 1835, when Helmuth von Moltke embarked upon the novel enterprise of a Prussian military mission to Constantinople (the subject of chapter 1), to 1895, when Colmar von der Goltz’s decade-long leadership of a second such mission ended and the map division of the Ottoman General Staff was initiating the first extensive trigonometrical surveys in Asia Minor (p. 313). The period encompasses the publication of two of Carl Ritter’s projected three massive volumes on Asia Minor–in 1858–1859, just before his death–which formed the sixth and final part of his monumental Die Erdkunde (p. 145). In Ritter’s view (p. 99), Asia Minor was a “transitional” region (Uebergangswelt) between the Asiatic and European worlds, and his perspective (the subject of chapter 4) boosted the conviction that there was a mission for Germany to accomplish in the decadent Orient.

The figure, however, who features as a unifying presence from chapter 2 onwards is Heinrich Kiepert (1818–1899). Ritter’s precocious pupil, he matured into an icon of German cartographic expertise at its finest, as a scene in Pierre Benoit’s 1918 novel Koenigsmark nicely reflects (p. 1).1 Kiepert’s first exposure to Asia Minor in 1841–1842–joining as a student, at his own expense (p. 74), the expedition headed by the antiquary August Schönborn and the naturalist Friedrich Löw–receives close attention in chapter 2. Débarre can re-evaluate this entire disappointing venture in unprecedented depth thanks to her discovery of 42 letters relating to it (p. 70). Kiepert’s journeys back to Asia Minor much later are treated in chapter 6, together with his other involvements in its mapping towards the end of the century, culminating in the Specialkarte vom Westlichen Kleinasien which appeared in 1890–1891 (15 sheets at 1:250,000).

The business of nineteenth-century mapmaking with special reference to Kiepert and Asia Minor fills the remaining two chapters. Chapter 3 tackles the aims and intellectual context of this cartography as “le travail de cabinet” (p. 107), the fundamental difficulties of acquiring physical, cultural and demographic data and assessing its accuracy, the problem of representing elevation changes in a landscape, and the enterprising strategies pursued by Kiepert’s successive publishers–Simon Schropp in the 1840s, thereafter Dietrich Reimer–to disseminate his mapping of Asia Minor. Chapter 5 takes a step backward to consider travelers’ collection of data on the ground–the multiple challenges posed by rudimentary means of transport through punishing terrain, as well

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