F I S H I N G

The modern Middle East, where the oldest news come from:

The map is from Wikipedia public domain.

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Map of Hecataeus of the 5th century bC. The Earth is a plate, and they wonder why the sea does not fall off. Ethiopia is the southern limit of the world. The region on the left, where Spain and Carthage almost touch, is marked as The Pillars of Hercules.

 

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Map according to Herodotus, also of the 5th century bC. You can see Persia and Babylon, and the Nile river has a funny shape. It is based on travelers’ impressions, because at the time they did not have the maths, nor the instruments to figure out what any continent really looked like.

 

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The Piri Reis Harita map, said to be the oldest in the world. Some people say that it shows some extraterrestrial influence or traces of a former techno civilization, according to http://tinyurl.com/88rl6.

 

http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/booknmaps.html

It was drawn  in 1517.

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The famous Olaus Magnus sea map of Northern Europe was made about 2000 years later, but it seems closer to Herodotus than to us. Its world is still almost all imagined. The map shows the monsters that live in the sea and the ships fighting them, and some of the monsters bear scientific names in Latin.

 

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Map of modern Israel from Wikipedia showing the problematic location of Jerusalem.

 

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Here it is, completely figured out, though still largely unexplored and unknown. …………………………This map was a puzzle obtained at http://tinyurl.com/5hntg9 but no longer available..

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the map of the countries surrounding the Black Sea, where there are difficult neighbours, too.

 

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modern Europe.

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European colonies in 1938

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Map of WWII death in Europe according to Putzger .

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Map of Biblical Israel of about 830 BCE published by Wiki at http://tinyurl.com/ykzto8

 

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One of the maps that Columbus studied to figure out how to get from Europe to India by sailing West.

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This map shows the spread of Islam in the Middle Ages reaching Spain and ruling most of its regions for 800 years. The map is from http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?p=6057658

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The map of the Roman empire in 395, that is, rather late, when Rome felt no longer like a safe place.

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All the languages of the world?

No.

There are many more, so many that they can’t all be mapped. This map is from www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.

 

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the different meanings of  “Middle East”:

a traditional meaning, a definition made by the G8, and a de facto meaning widely accepted. The term was probably first used by the British Foreign Office, where China or Japan were “the Far East”.

 

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One is from the collection of the American Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/ and the other is a Wiki reproduction of Ortelius’ map that you can  enlarge  to various megas.

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And  what is this?

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