That’s pretty sweet
Even the borders look Arabic squiggly-like. Very interesting.
I saw some ancient pottery while visiting Alicante a few weeks ago and there were some Arabic pottery. You could just tell. The art style was just… Squiggly. Just like the letters of the(ir) alphabet. Can’t explain it, it’s just a style. It really separated itself from the other origins of pottery.
With thanks to @[email protected] for the find!
Funny enough, I was recently reading a series of essays on the European Crusades, and one of the more interesting (and compelling, given the evidence) suggestions was that maps made in the Islamic world had a much better idea of the geography of Frankish Europe than Frankish Europe itself had.
@[email protected] You might also find this interesting/amusing, though you may already be aware
Ouch. Clearly they hadn’t mapped the locations of places to the stars for that map, or it’d have been obvious they’re missing a looot of data. Like, two or three more continents’ worth.
Several estimates of the Earth’s size even in the BC era weren’t so far off reality.
Edit: After peeking at a real globe, it might just ‘look’ more off than it is because of how perspective works. It still doesn’t quite look right, but it may not be underestimating the size by tooo much. Though it’s definitely underestimating it by measurable quantities.
The main interest here is probably in estimating distances between known lands. An entire half-globe of ocean is probably a bit of a waste of materials.
But that completely defeats the point in representing it on an actual globe, though. Things get distorted when they’re not to scale. They should’ve known that, which begs the question as to why they did it.
By your logic, they’re making the entire thing far less useful and basically inaccurate so they can … show more detail?
I call BS. It’s far more likely, IMO, that they’d only go through the effort of producing something so intricate to attempt to either show how neat their current understanding was, or to explore that understanding. Neither requires them to lie to themselves.
