Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Rapoport, Yossef

Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226540887)

Vendor: Yossef Rapoport
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$59.00
$59.00
$59.00
Subtotal: $59.00
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Rapoport, Yossef

Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo

$59.00
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo by Rapoport, Yossef

Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo

$59.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x
About a millennium ago, in Cairo, an unknown author completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, this book guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants. This treatise, known as The Book of Curiosities, was unknown to modern scholars until a remarkable manuscript copy surfaced in 2000.

Lost Maps of the Caliphs provides the first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. Opening with an account of the remarkable discovery of the manuscript and its purchase by the Bodleian Library, the authors use The Book of Curiosities to re-evaluate the development of astrology, geography, and cartography in the first four centuries of Islam. Their account assesses the transmission of Late Antique geography to the Islamic world, unearths the logic behind abstract maritime diagrams, and considers the palaces and walls that dominate medieval Islamic plans of towns and ports. Early astronomical maps and drawings demonstrate the medieval understanding of the structure of the cosmos and illustrate the pervasive assumption that almost any visible celestial event had an effect upon life on Earth. Lost Maps of the Caliphs also reconsiders the history of global communication networks at the turn of the previous millennium. It shows the Fatimid Empire, and its capital Cairo, as a global maritime power, with tentacles spanning from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and the East African coast.

As Lost Maps of the Caliphs makes clear, not only is The Book of Curiosities one of the greatest achievements of medieval mapmaking, it is also a remarkable contribution to the story of Islamic civilization that opens an unexpected window to the medieval Islamic view of the world.

Author: Yossef Rapoport, Emilie Savage-Smith
ISBN-10: 022654088X
ISBN-13: 9780226540887
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 12/11/2018
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2019
By Yossef Rapoport
By Yossef Rapoport
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Yossef Rapoport is a reader in Islamic history at Queen Mary University of London. Emilie Savage-Smith is a fellow of the British Academy and recently retired as professor of the history of Islamic science at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. She continues as Fellow Archivist of St Cross College. They are coeditors of An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, Edited with an Annotated Translation.

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