This month's issue of Archaeology Today (May Jun 2019) features a story on mapping the world and in the editor's opening comments, Pausanius is mentioned. He traveled the length and breadth of Greece describing the most impirtant sites, but as the editor mentions, he also described such seemingly minor details as the wild strawberries growing on Mount Helicon and the pine trees on Elis' beach.
That immediately brought to mind several things such as Herodotus who mapped and even larger part of the world by traveling and describing, and the way I got to read Herodotus, whose work is still available for purchase in bookstores and online though he wrote it in 484 BC or thereabouts.
I read Herodotus because I was teaching Art History to my middle School students and I realized that I had no idea where Scythia was or Anatolia or Assyria! I had just as good an education as any 20th Century person, and possibly much better than most in that I went to college for 12 years more or less. I had a degree in English from Glamssboro State, a degree in Art from Rutgers the State University, a Masters from University of the Arts in Phila, and I took courses in many art schools such as Fletcher Free School, and
Academy of Fine Arts. Still, the world is a big place and education is a big endeavor and school cannot do it all. The best it can do is give you a basic introduction to things and tools to help you educate yourself, which never stops.
In case you are wondering, Scythia is somewhere around the Baltic,
and Anatolia is Turkey, and Assyria is Iraq. The names of countries change, even in our own times (look at African nations or the former Yugoslavia now Croatia, Herzegovina and Serbia) and the borders of places change. And what was once a Danish peninsula becomes a German peninsula called Jutland, and back to the Danes again, and the origin of Holstein cattle (Holstein Schleswig).
On of my most popular posts on this site was the Old Salem Road from Burlington to Salem on a winter day. But in a way, all the posts here, or the majority of them, are a mapping of South Jersey as I found my way from place to place during my wandering years from 2006 to about 2016. My wandering stopped when my car got too old to make this long trips, and my eyesight too poor to make finding my way around too difficult as I can't read street signs, so even the gps isn't enough help if it tells you to turn at a particular street and you can't read the street name.
I don't mind. I have done a lot of traveling in my time - 38 countries of Europe and a colorful passport to prove it, and back and for from East to West and North to South and back again the United States, even once, across Canada. As you can see, the mapping of my life has gone from large to medium to small, and these days, even smaller. However, what I have always believed is that your imagination makes your mind the biggest place to travel of all, and magazines and books and film bring the world right into your own living room.
This reminds me of something I was thinking yesterday when I was walking my dog our twice a day mile. We walk a rectangle from street down to a long street that goes to the railroad, along the railroad and back through a side street = one mile. Along the way, I was take photos with my phone of the wide variety of wild flowers growing in the yards - wild violets, tiny wild pansies, my favorites the dandelions! and buttercups and many whose names I don't know. It reminded me of my city childhood when I used to wander up our street of brick row homes, in South Philadelphia, to an alley beside a row of parking garages fronted by both paved and graveled drives. I sad there with a popsickle stick and dug in the black gravel, marveling at how the sun shone on the crystals and made the gravel into jewels. I watched the energetic ants everpresent in even so uninviting a landscape, as they hurried from one spot to another building their hidden empires, and in all of this, kept company but the occasional friendly roaming cat or dog. In those days in the city, cats and dogs went out the doors and walked around on their own and came home when they were ready, if they weren't killed that day by a car or a poisoner.
In a much earlier blog, I mentioned taking my map out of my closed and emptied old school which had been replaced by a new state of the art school. That map had traveled with me from my English classroom in a high school to my middle school art room and it had gone from retirement in a storage closet in the high school to my classroom, when for mysterious reasons, teachers stopped having the maps hanging in the front of the classrooms. Even teaching English is helped by maps of the world and of the United States. Taking away those maps has increased the ignorance of our population about the geographical relationships of places and their locations. Most people, I would bet, cannot find on a map, the countries our own soldiers are fighting in around the world, or the location of the countries spewing their abused populations into the borders of other lands right now. I bet most Americans don't even know where Central America is let alone Guatemala.
In the book I read last winter on Marie Colvin, intrepid international journalist, I had to draw a copy of the map in my old encyclopedia of the Middle East, to understand the places she was covering in her reporting. I had a hard time understanding the geographical relationship of Lebanon and Israel and Syria, for example.
Someday, I would like to get out my New Jersey map and do a road by road, town by town blog of my favorite places, much like the WPA Guide to New Jersey - also still able to be purchased from amazon.com.
Happy Trails!
Oh I almost forgot, once on a trip to New England, I actually got to visit the DeLorme Map headquarters, sadly now closed, where you could see a two story tall globe of the earth!
You could still visit Ran McNally in Illinois, though.
Jo Ann
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