How north ended up on top of the map
america.aljazeera.com
america.aljazeera.com
It all just makes so much better intuitive sense than a "Conspiracy of Northern European Hegemony"
But note that the vast majority of people (and therefore civilizations) live in the Northern Hemisphere, so this is statistics more than anything else.
For example, the Chinese also live in the Northern hemisphere. But as the Al Jazeera article points out, the Chinese put south at the top. The Chinese discovered the compass, and they called it a "south-pointing stone."
It could easily have ended up the other way. The Chinese sent fleets on their own voyages of discovery. But the emperor died, another emperor took over, and the exploration program was cancelled.
As said earlier in the thread: Because of the North Star.
But that doesn't explain why north points up. It only explains why the compass rose points north.
As the article says: "These maps had no real up or down — pictures and words faced in all sorts of directions, generally pointing inward from the edge of the map."
So now you have another step: you have to orient the map. Why north at the top? Why not "orient" the map so that east faces up? Or west? Or south? The compass rose is just a reference -- you could face it in any way.
This is why the article comes up with all sorts of explanations and then finally says that it was just a convention established by Ptolemy. Because at every step of the way between the North Star and north-up, you could ask "Why this way? Why not the other way?" And then when that is answered, you could ask "Why?" again. And so on.
But when something is arbitrary, then there is no "Why?" to be answered. It's just arbitrary.
You want to see where a hand compass is pointing, you turn until the needle points ahead or 'up'; then you read off the heading (or the other way around). Not too far from that, to writing it on paper that way.
No, that's not how you use a compass to determine which way you're facing. (Perhaps that's what you meant by "or the other way around.")
To use a compass, you turn it until the magnetic needle points to "North" on the dial. Then you read the heading from the top of the dial, and that's the direction you're facing.
Note that the needle might point in any direction. The magnetic needle only points ahead (up) if you are facing north." What you're accomplishing by turning the compass is calibrating* the dial, so that it is aligned with the local magnetic field. In other words, so that "North" on the dial is actually magnetic north.
The only thing that your example says is that you have a strong cultural expectation that north is up. So you face north, and the compass needle points up. Circular reference.
But suppose we'd stuck with the traditional European map orientation -- with east being up. (Hence the verb "to orient," related to the adjective "oriental.") Then we'd think it perfectly natural for the compass rose to point left.
Take out the compass and rotate yourself until the needle points left. You are now facing due east. Start walking.
Anyway, what does this have to do with north facing up on maps? The procedure does not change based on which direction north faces on a map. Up, down, left, or right, it's irrelevant to the task of walking due east using a compass.
And what does "without re-orienting yourself" mean? Should I face north and walk sideways? I don't get it. It's usually best to re-orient yourself to face in the direction that you're traveling.
Besides, there is no "south star", even if you live in the southern hemisphere.
They do both. THe modern reference: they actually call their latest GPS copycat BeiDou
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beidou_Navigation_Satellite_Sys...
> The BeiDou Navigation System is named after the Big Dipper constellation, which is known in Chinese as Běidǒu. The name literally means "Northern Dipper", the name given by ancient Chinese astronomers to the seven brightest stars of the Ursa Major constellation
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/1492/zheng...
Zheng He not only had bigger ships than the Columbus ships... but also had 300 ships at his command. (with over 50 of them being extremely large treasure ships). Zheng He's treasure ships had live crops and livestock growing on them. They were a fleet of ships designed to work independently, and go around the world.
Zheng He traveled west first, to India. Afterwards, he planned to travel east (potentially to America). But that is when the Emperors changed and cut his explorations short. Zheng He most certainly had enough provisions to reach the Americas in the early 1400s.
* the Pacific ocean is twice as wide as the Atlantic (I don't know anything about wind patterns here)
* the Rockies are a lot more difficult than the Appalachians to get a military force with supply lines over
* the Europeans on the East Coast can sail around Florida and up the Mississippi to attack or defend it, whereas the Panana Canal needed to be built first for the Chinese to benefit in this way
* China didn't have "military inclination" because it was surround by SW dense forests, the Tianshan mountains in the west, desert in the north, and ocean elsewhere. They certainly ruled Korea when they had they chance, took over Xinjiang through the passage, South China, and the southwest when they could.
True, but the Pacific has a lot of islands in between, the Atlantic hardly has any. I don't know what the effective range of Chinese ships was at the time, though.
Very akin to how the US uses the Nimitz Class Carrier today. The official mission of the Nimitz Class Carriers is military... but as the largest warship ever built it tends to be more practically used as a diplomatic tool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier#S...
Similarly, Zheng He's fleet was the largest of its time. Its official purpose may have been exploration, but practically speaking, it probably was used more for diplomatic missions. When 300 giant ships arrive on your horizon, it is one way for China to physically prove their naval superiority over their neighbors.
Also, Spain took him on because there was intense competition between the European powers, and they didn't want Columbus working for anyone else.
On the other hand, all of China was ruled by the Ming dynasty. When the new Emperor turned down the eastern expedition, Zheng He had no one else to turn to. The Emperor had no competitors so he had no incentive to find new lands first.
Competition leads to innovation. Monopolies lead to stagnation.
(This interpretation of events is from "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond.)
From memory... The Ming around 1420-ish closed down the sea voyages to divert all military resources to defending the northern desert approaches to China. Because China had been ruled by the Mongols from 1250 to 1350, the dangers were fresh in the minds of the Chinese leadership when the tribes started raiding again, and building the Great Wall and Forbidden City for defense were more important than exploring and defending against the Great Southern Ocean.
You inadvertently made his point :)
Spain was Facebook and Columbus was Instagram...
It's the same with traffic rule, right? We could either go on the left side, or the right side of the roads. We happened to pick the right side, and everyone is driving on the right side now. Oh wait, the poor Brits are driving on the left side, and traffic must be chaotic over there :)
This would be true only for the people that consistently navigated in Northern latitudes, where the North star is high enough above the horizon. For Arabs, who were the predominant maritime power until 1500s, esp. in the Indian Ocean, that was not the case.
The other complicating factor is that Earth has a long "wobble" over the course of about 27,000 years (the technical term is "axial precession".) Right now, Polaris is within a degree of true north, but back in the fifth century it was 8 degrees away. In another 12 millennia true North will be all the way over by Vega. Likewise, the southern cross points somewhere vaguely close to true south, but how close it is varies from one millennium to the next.
It's not really relevant if the navigation error only changes by less than a degree over the course of a lifetime. The earliest navigators in Sumer in the 4th millennium BCE wouldn't care if a particular constellation points 5 or 20 degrees away from North.
They did, actually -- Pytheas had observed that true North was "devoid of stars" way back in 320 BC. Polaris didn't begin to be recognized as the "North Star" until much later (10th century according to wikipedia), because it wasn't particularly close. Navigators learned how to find where north was from several stars; it's only been the last several centuries that Polaris has been close enough to North as to be treated as the default for navigation.
They also knew about precession (credited to Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC, but possibly an older discovery.) So they knew that north wouldn't be in exactly the same place centuries later. Differences of a few degrees were a pretty big deal to people who both navigated by, and gave religious significance to, the stars.
I don't know the details of early Sumerian astronomical navigation schemes. From what I understand, our knowledge of their astronomy comes from Babylonian sources a couple thousand years later, and is not particularly detailed or reliable.
They soon discovered how to navigate by then aligning with a group of stars called "Cruzeiro do Sul", the Crux constellation[1], which means that it could be reasonable to actually start aligning the maps southwards (and the portuguese were the ones mapping the whole coast of Africa at the time).
But I guess that by that time (around the 1470s), they were already too used to aligning northwards...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux
Edit: I meant northern hemisphere navigators, instead of northern european.
It took them a couple of years to find a way out of that point, by making huge turns westwards into the atlantic (which eventually led them to end up in Brazil, but that's another story...)
He clearly understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere, but he placed Alexandria not in the southernmost part of the known world as the article suggests but in the center. A lot of this was pride and the sense that the center had everything good from the edges (see Tetrabiblos), but to some extent everywhere is the center, right?
He painstakingly discusses the proof that the earth is a sphere in Almagest. His geographia is worth reading and directly relevant to this.
I suspect that Ptolomy put the north at the top simply because he was in the Northern Hemisphere and knew it. He displays no great knowledge of navigation, though he does explain how the stars shift as you move north and south (again see Tetrabiblos and Almagest), and he even seemed to be aware that Mercury and Venus revolved around the sun (or so he seemed to say in Tetrabiblos).
All in all he's one of those authors one really has to read if one is interested in history, even the seemingly weird works he wrote (Tetrabiblos is an astrology manual but includes a lot of information about Ptolomy's understanding of geography not found in Geographia, and astronomy not found in Almagest).
Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? (I presume he didn't know that he was in the northern hemisphere because he thought he was closer to the northern magnetic pole.)
While the Africans are too dark, he doesn't think much of Northern Europeans either, who he says look sickly and pale because the bear is over their heads. Alexandria, being the center of the world, and neither too light nor too dark, nor too far East nor too far West, is best of course in his eyes.
In Almagest he describes two things. The first is the shape of the earth, where he points out that it must be a sphere because of the changes in inclination of the moon and stars as you head North and South, and the changes in times of lunar eclipses when you head East to West. His descriptions of the rotation of the earth and the position of the sun relative to the earth leave no doubt that he was aware of Northern and Southern hemispheres.
> Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt?
It's a little hard. Alexandria's sub-tropical. He does mention the inclination of the earth relative to the equator though, iirc, in Almagest.
One of the more interesting points is that while Europeans were generally aware that the world was round since at least the 13th century (and monks from at least the 8th century) they thought it was impossible to sale across the equator until remarkably late. And the really revolutionary part of Columbus's voyages was that it destroyed the Augustinian view of people, since the Augustinian view was that if there were other continents, they must not be inhabited (because of only three sons of Noah meant only three inhabited continents).
Think I mentioned this here before but never mind. Another great book about the whole round/flat debate (and much much more) is Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Basically the ancient Greeks had this one all figured out - Aristarchus[1] "who presented the first known model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it" I didn't know about the crossing the equator thing, nor did I know about the Augustinian view but it doesn't surprise me :)
Overall, the article offers an interesting discussion of trade-offs in map-making, including the trade-off of what country to put in the middle of a flat wall map that shows the whole world. I have become quite used to Chinese wall maps of the world in Mercator or equal-area projections that display China in the middle (left-to-right) and consequently split North America along both sides of the map.
Of course, the association of North with evil is itself probably because of the Northern hemisphere seasons. North, cold, winter and evil and all grouped together in opposition to South, warm, summer, and good.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass#Geomancy_and_feng_shui
Weather also does play a role, as the south was able to generate three harvests a year vs. two in the north. Historically, the capital of China has been in the south, only being moved north during the Ming (aka second to last) Dynasty.
Not sure how much any of that has to do with compass points, but did want to elaborate a little on the cultural/historical context of north vs. south in China.
Really interesting article on making a compass. http://www.wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/navigation/rbimprov...
"...possibly ultimately from PIE ner- "left," also "below," as north is to the left when one faces the rising sun..."*
It's pretty much arguing over our ancestors saying "to the left" in reference to the rising sun.
Would you use a map application that always put the location you searched for in the top left?
The article referenced this briefly (Italy and Jerusalem were disappointed to not be at the center).
The manufactured controversy that Europe and America are traditionally at the top of global maps is rather silly.
Also, magnetic north on a compass is a natural way to orient something.
More so than magnetic south?
Perhaps more so than magnetic west-by-northwest, etc. The point is that there are two orientations that make sense with respect to compasses, rather than a hundred. As to why it's a particular one of the two available possibilities, that doesn't seem to require a conspiracy. At some point a critical mass of cartographers simply chose north rather than south.
Not any more natural than magnetic South, so far as I can see.
Generally, land vehicles use the ENU (East-North-Up) convention, with East corresponding to the X axis and Z axis point up (against the gravity vector), while sea and aircraft use the NED (North-East-Down) convention, with X axis pointing North, and Z axis pointing down, aligned with the gravity vector.
The thing is, I don't think that is lost to history. Ptolomy was amazingly meticulous and while he didn't spell out why, he was very clear about enough details I think this could be pieced together further.
Also, it is important to remember that sea level is an entirely arbitrary concept that depends on your frame of reference. On nautical charts elevations are usually measured against the lowest tide level which will be different to the datum on GPS (for example).
Later I researched it though and while that may have contributed, the more likely original meaning came from people wanting to build their churches and such to face east.
cheers.
"While there is something endearing about the idea of an Indiana map maker in 1871 [ preparing an atlas http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/91721z ] with Indiana squarely in the center of the world, the unfortunate side effect was that most of the Midwest disappeared into the gaping crease between atlas pages."
This clearly was not written by a geek. Obviously the top right is preferable, since it's the only region where both decimal latitude and longitude are positive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Magnetic_Pole
I get your point ( with correction by @JoeAltmaier ) but with GPS and the like being the `new` tool, and with them needing new thought rather than continuation of the old "because we always did it that way"... I'd definitely go East in the future... along with changing calendars away from solar orientation ( Gregorian primarily ).
But as with most things involving the masses, this all falls into the category of why most use Metric versus Imperial, and why that is such a radical change to expect. Still, great to see a post questioning "up" ...
I get what you mean, if this were still a boat-based world. I am saying we are not in a boat-based world now. Our consciousness can re-orient.
Since we don't live in a boat-based world for the most part, it'd be more helpful to tend toward an orientation to a place where people have minds more often than people have ships. Part of why the world is the way it is, is because we don't allow our minds and the mental framework of the masses follow forward to an overall update to what in the world is actually worth orienting to.
So it's not change for change's sake. It's updating to be true to what we know, giving our minds the benefit of advancing onto a better framework.
Digital maps don't distort for curves. They just keep going with the surface of the planet. Remaining true to a boat-based world is a disservice to mind-having individuals.
BTW, GPS devices initially calculate their location in geocentric coordinates from the centre of the earth with the reference plane aligned to the equator. It is calculated from the orbital parameters of the satellites.