52 books
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5 voters
Cartography
Cartography is the science of map-making.
Related Genres
“
Even if we admit that running-survey and compass techniques were somehow being used on ships to produce sea-charts as early as the thirteenth century (which most historians of science would rule out) we still come against the unexplained enigma of the miraculous and fully formed de novo appearance of the Carta Pisane. As we've seen, not a single chart pre-dates it that demonstrates in any way the gradual build-up of coastal profiles across the whole extent of the Mediterranean that must have occ
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― Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
― Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
“
To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and was known to Columbus. Indeed, as one commentator has observed, if his chart had been based on the Behaim scenario, 'Columbus could not even have known of the whereabouts of the New World, much less discover it.'
Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when
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”
― Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
― Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
