Theater of the World

THE FIRST IMAGES OF THE WORLD

Bedolina, Italy

46° 02′ 00″ N

10° 20′ 29″ E

Val Camonica is a fertile valley in northern Italy, where people have lived for several thousand years. Today it is located somewhat off the beaten track–route E45 and the railway line weave their way from south to north through Verona and the Alps slightly further east. But the valley is a cradle of cartography–home to the 3,000-year-old Bedolina Map.

The map is carved in stone, high up on a mountainside with a good view of the valley. A large, advanced rock carving measuring 4.3 metres wide by 2.4 metres high, it depicts people, animals, warriors and deer in addition to houses, footpaths and rectangular dotted fields–a total of 109 figures representing a village and agricultural landscape as seen from above. But who created this map so long, long ago–and why?

The Romans called the area Vallis Camunnorum–Valley of the Camuni–after the people who had lived there since the Iron Age. Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo mentioned them in his Geographica around the year 1 BC: ‘Next, in order, come those parts of the mountains that are towards the east, and those that bend round towards the south: the Rhaeti and the Vindelici occupy them […]. The Rhaeti reach down as far as that part of Italy which is above Verona […]; and [the] Camuni belong to this stock.’

Around 2,500 years ago, the Camuni came into contact with the Etruscans, a people who lived further south, from whom they learned how to write alphabetic characters. The rock faces near the map feature over 200 textual inscriptions, although nobody has ever managed to decipher and read them. But we can therefore say with some degree of certainty that this was indeed a map, carved into the stone around 3,000 years ago, although we have no written sources to confirm this.

The Bedolina Map is not a geographically correct map–it can’t be used to find the route from one place to another. So then what was its purpose? Italian archaeologist Alberto Marretta believes that the map should be understood in purely symbolic terms–according to Marretta, it represents a crossroads in the history of the people who created it: the transition from a hunting society to an agricultural one. Other rock carvings and archaeological findings from the area show that the Camuni had a landowning aristocracy, and the purpose of the map, Marretta believes, was to show the symbolic power the aristocracy held over the landscape. Maps are always created to fulfil a need, and many of the oldest maps we know of were made to demonstrate ownership of certain areas. Others are more elaborate, and fulfil a religious need to show the place of human beings within the cosmos.

When encountering prehistoric rock carvings and cave paintings, we have to ask ourselves what a map actually is. What distinctive qualities distinguish a map from other motifs? How can we recognise a map when we know little of the society in which it was created? In their preface to the classic work The History of Cartography, editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward provide the following definition: ‘Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.’ This definition therefore includes even the most primitive representations of space, and ‘the human world’ refers to our surroundings in the broadest possible sense–including cosmic space and the afterlife. But what constitutes a map ultimately remains a question of interpretation.

Norwegian archaeologist Sverre Marstrander studied rock carvings across the Scandinavian peninsula. In his book Østfold’s jordbruksristninger (Østfold’s Agricultural Rock Carvings), published in 1963, he described ‘some strange, irregular, grid-like patterns,’ which he believed were ‘primitive schematic depictions of a specific type of field complex used in Bronze Age agriculture.’ There could ‘no longer be any doubt,’ Marstrander asserted, ‘that these formations depict ancient fields.’

But Marstrander decided not to call these depictions of fields maps. Instead, he viewed them in the context of the fertility rites intended to ensure that the fields would bear crops. Might another archaeologist have interpreted them along the lines of maps indicating land ownership?

Modern maps are always equipped with explanations–legends that clarify the symbols depicting roads, cities, footpaths, schools and ski trails. Of course, no such explanatory material is available to us when we encounter what we suspect may be a prehistoric map, so we are forced to guess and make interpretations–and anyone who has ever attempted to navigate the icons on an unfamiliar mobile phone knows how difficult this can be. Maps can never be fully translated, and societies have a tendency to simplify symbols to an ever-greater extent, until they ultimately become completely incomprehensible to outsiders. Hidden, symbolic and coded messages are first revealed when cartographers have studied not only what they believe to be a map, but also the entire society that surrounds it. And studying a map created by people who lived thousands of years ago is a demanding exercise.

But on the other hand, we can compare prehistoric works with each other. Minusinsk, Russia, is home to a large rock carving similar to the Bedolina Map, which also features houses, people and animals scattered across a large area almost ten metres in length–this too is a representation of a village. Here, however, the stonecutter was more interested in reproducing the houses than showing how they were situated in relation to each other, and everything is drawn in profile. It is also difficult to say whether the rock carving was created as a single picture; whether the houses were drawn together, or whether new ones were simply added where there was space to draw them on the rock. The comparison suggests that the rock carving at Bedolina is a map, while that in Minusinsk is an image.

MAPS IN THE MIND | The ability to communicate geographical information was developed by certain species long before the age of modern humans–the most widely known of these techniques is the dance honey bees perform to tell each other where flowers can be found. The bee moves up the honeycomb while waggling its tail, before turning to the right in a semicircle, back to the starting point, and beginning the dance again. Then the bee turns down to the left. If the flowers it has found are in the direction of the Sun, the bee dances straight up the honeycomb; if the other bees must fly to the left or right of the Sun to reach the flowers, the bee marks the exact angle in the dance. The further forwards the bee dances, the further away the flowers are; the more intensely the bee waggles its tail, the more enthusiastic it is about its findings. Aristotle noticed that bees must be able to give each other directions: ‘[…] each bee on her return is followed by three or four companions,’ wrote the Greek philosopher in his History of Animals over 2,000 years ago.

The dance of the honey bee has a clear function–the hive gets richer when bees who know where food can be found share this information with the others. The same must have been true of prehistoric peoples–those who were able to communicate where prey, plentiful fruit or fresh water could be found ensured that the community would grow fat and survive. The early humans were nomads, and while our closest relatives, the other apes and Prosimians, lived mainly in the forests, we spent much of our time out on the plains. This resulted in us developing better sight than our predecessors, along with a different relationship to distances, space and direction. Spatial awareness was probably the first part of our primitive consciousness.

Humans also acquired four additional traits that were central to the development of our ability to think in maps. First, the ability to go on exploratory expeditions; second, the ability to store acquired information; third, the ability to abstract and generalise; and fourth, the ability to know what to do with the information. While our ancestors were generally only able to talk about what was happening in the here and now, humans learned to link events in terms of the past, present and future–and to physical space.

Putting the world into words–this tree, that lake and that mountain–makes the world simultaneously larger and smaller, and more comprehensible. It facilitates the dissemination of information, and it is therefore easy to see how the development of spatial awareness and language have helped each other. Because they wished to articulate the maps they had in their heads, prehistoric peoples may have built up a vocabulary to express long and short distances, directions, landmarks and the time it takes to reach a specific location. They may then have created the first maps from sticks and stones, using sand, earth and snow, and making marks with their fingers or a brush on cave walls.

PREHISTORIC MAPS | Humans began creating representations of the world around 40,000 years ago–or at least, the oldest images we know of–depictions of animals painted in black, red and yellow on the walls of the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain–are from this period. The cave-dwelling peoples here used the pigments they found in clay and soot, and mixed them with fat, wax, blood or water. Rock carvings discovered in Australia are also estimated to be around 40,000 years old.

What is believed to be the world’s oldest map is carved into the tusk of a mammoth. Estimated to be somewhere between 32,500 and 38,000 years old, it was discovered in the Alb-Donau-Kreis region of Germany, and according to German professor Michael A. Rappenglueck is a celestial map of Orion. Rappenglueck also claims that a 17,300-year-old painting discovered in the Lascaux Caves in south-west France, which depicts an ox, a man with a bird’s head and a bird, is a map of the stars Vega, Deneb and Altair, also known as the Summer Triangle–the first stars to become visible on Nordic summer evenings. Rappenglueck illustrates this by drawing three lines between the eyes of the figures.

Not everyone is convinced by Rappenglueck’s theory, but it is logical to think that humans created maps of the stars before creating maps of the landscape–it’s much easier to obtain an overview of the sky than the terrain. The stars hang above us, arranged into formations as if stretched across a canvas or a wall, and are easy to represent using dots. Celestial maps may have played an important role in the earliest agricultural societies–the emergence of certain constellations continues to be used today as a sign of when crops should be sown. But not all prehistoric dot formations are celestial maps.