Oculi Mundi: A Beautiful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes


When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion of the world hung on the wall of an ele­men­tary-school class­room; maybe it was a road atlas in the glove box of your par­ents’ car. For Neil Sun­der­land, the ear­li­est car­to­graph­ic high seems to have come in child­hood, from a hum­ble map of Lan­cashire. When he found suc­cess in finance, his addic­tion grew in pro­por­tion to his means, and today his mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar map col­lec­tion includes the work of renowned six­teenth-cen­tu­ry artists like Albrecht Dür­er, Hans Hol­bein, and Gio­van­ni Cimer­li­no, who in 1566 depict­ed the known world in the shape of a heart.

Cimer­li­no’s cordi­form Earth (bot­tom) is just one of the 130 his­toric “world maps, celes­tial maps, atlases, books of knowl­edge and globes” now avail­able for your perusal at Oculi Mun­di, an elab­o­rate web site with the dig­i­tized hold­ings of the Sun­der­land Col­lec­tion. “A plat­form to explore high-res­o­lu­tion images of these beau­ti­ful objects, to peek inside the books, and to dis­cov­er infor­ma­tion and sto­ries,” it offers both a chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered “research” mode and a more free-form “explore” mode for brows­ing.

Either way, with its old­est arti­fact dat­ing to the ear­ly thir­teenth cen­tu­ry and its newest to the ear­ly nine­teenth, it con­tains a great swath of car­to­graph­ic his­to­ry to behold.

The New York Times’ Susanne Fowler quotes Sun­der­land’s daugh­ter Helen Sun­der­land-Cohen, who over­sees the Oculi Mun­di project, describ­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly ven­er­a­ble atlas by fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry human­ist schol­ar Francesco Berlinghieri as “one of the ear­li­est uses of cop­per plate, in atlases and in print. You can see how fine­ly engraved the lines are, and how they’re learn­ing to use cop­per plate.” All art may be insep­a­ra­ble from the state of tech­nol­o­gy of its time, but maps — the mak­ers of which have always been dri­ven to visu­al­ize and orga­nize as much knowl­edge of the world as pos­si­ble — reflect it with a spe­cial clar­i­ty.

Explor­ing the Sun­der­land Col­lec­tion through Oculi Mun­di, you can also trace changes in what sort of knowl­edge belongs on maps in the first place. Sun­der­land-Cohen names as a per­son­al favorite the “Rudi­men­tum Novi­tio­rum” from 1475 (above), “an illus­trat­ed chron­i­cle in Latin used by monks as a teach­ing aid for novices.” Besides maps, it includes “Bib­li­cal his­to­ry that is illus­trat­ed with lots of won­der­ful wood­block draw­ings, and everybody’s wear­ing cloth­ing of the day, and in the hous­es of the day”; the con­nois­seur will notice tech­niques import­ed from illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts. As for what such a work costs today, well, if you have to ask, you’re not ful­ly hooked on maps yet. Enter Oculi Mun­di here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold a 19th-Century Atlas of the United States, Designed for Blind Students (1837)

In 1835, the New Eng­land Insti­tu­tion for Edu­ca­tion of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a print­ing press.

Under the lead­er­ship of its first direc­tor, Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe, the press was cus­tomized in order to print in raised text that allowed blind and visu­al­ly impaired peo­ple to read unas­sist­ed.

Inclu­siv­i­ty was a prime moti­va­tor for Howe, who strove to make sure his stu­dents would not be “doomed to inequal­i­ty” or regard­ed as “mere objects of pity.”

After inves­ti­gat­ing Euro­pean tac­tile print­ing sys­tems, he devel­oped Boston Line Type, an embossed Roman alpha­bet that could be read with the fin­gers.

It eschewed flour­ish­es and cap­i­tal let­ters, but read­ing it required a lot of train­ing and even then, was like­ly to be slow going. Howe esti­mat­ed that read­ing it would take three times as long as a sight­ed per­son would take to read an equiv­a­lent amount of tra­di­tion­al­ly print­ed text.

Ulti­mate­ly it proved far less user-friend­ly than braille.

Text accom­pa­ny­ing the exhi­bi­tion Touch This Page! Mak­ing Sense of the Ways We Read, notes that braille had been in use in Great Britain and France for decades before being wide­ly adopt­ed in the US:

The amount of time and mon­ey that Perkins and oth­er Amer­i­can schools had invest­ed into Boston Line Type made them resis­tant to adopt­ing a new sys­tem. Boston Line Type was, how­ev­er, much hard­er to learn than braille, and only braille allowed indi­vid­u­als with visu­al impair­ments to read and write tac­tile­ly.

The school used its Boston Line Type press to pub­lish his­to­ry, gram­mar, and spelling books, as well as the New Tes­ta­ment, and a com­plete Bible.

After a vis­it to the school, Charles Dick­ens paid to have 250 Boston Line Type copies of his nov­el The Old Curios­i­ty Shop print­ed for dis­tri­b­u­tion to blind Amer­i­cans.

In light of Touch This Page!’s asser­tion that Boston Line Type’s print forms were “designed to be uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble rather than in those [print forms] most acces­si­ble to the touch”, we sus­pect that the school’s 1837 Atlas of the Unit­ed States offered its read­ers the best val­ue.

While there were many dense descrip­tive pas­sages in Boston Line Type to wade through, it also boast­ed embossed maps to ori­ent geog­ra­phy stu­dents with raised out­lines of each state.

Rivers were chart­ed as sol­id raised lines, while oceans were indi­cat­ed with par­al­lel lines. Sets of tri­an­gles rep­re­sent­ed moun­tains.

Lon­gi­tudes, lat­i­tudes, and city loca­tions were also not­ed, but the pres­ence of neg­a­tive space gave blind and low vision stu­dents the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grasp infor­ma­tion quick­ly.

50 copies were print­ed, of which four sur­vive.

Explore the Atlas of the Unit­ed States Print­ed for the Use of the Blind here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Tac­tile Map of the Roman Empire: An Inno­v­a­tive Map That Allowed Blind & Sight­ed Stu­dents to Expe­ri­ence Geog­ra­phy by Touch (1888)

Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Expe­ri­ence His Own Por­trait for the First Time

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Plan Your Trip Across the Roads of the Roman Empire, Using Modern Web Mapping Technology

At the moment, I hap­pen to be plan­ning some time in France, with a side trip to Bel­gium includ­ed. Mod­ern intra-Euro­pean train trav­el makes arrang­ing the lat­ter quite con­ve­nient: Thalys, the high-speed rail ser­vice con­nect­ing those two coun­tries, can get you from Paris to Brus­sels in about an hour and half. This stands in con­trast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its polit­i­cal pow­er lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expan­sive net­work of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imag­in­ing what it would have been like to trav­el Europe two mil­len­nia ago. And now, using the web­site OmnesVi­ae, you can get his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate direc­tions as well.

Big Think’s Frank Jacobs describes OmnesVi­ae as “the online route plan­ner the Romans nev­er knew they need­ed.” It “leans heav­i­ly on the Tab­u­la Peutin­ge­ri­ana” — also known as the Peutinger Map, and pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — “the clos­est thing we have to a gen­uine itin­er­ar­i­um (‘road map’) of the Roman Empire.”

Though not quite geo­graph­i­cal­ly accu­rate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were con­nect­ed and how. “Geolo­cat­ing thou­sands of points from Peutinger, OmnesVi­ae refor­mats the roads and des­ti­na­tions on the scroll onto a more famil­iar­ly land­scaped map. The short­est route between two (ancient) points is cal­cu­lat­ed using the dis­tances trav­eled over Roman rather than mod­ern roads, also tak­ing into account the rivers and moun­tains the net­work must cross.”

You can use OmnesVi­ae just like any oth­er way-find­ing appli­ca­tion, except you enter your ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities cur­rent day names are under­stood,” as the instruc­tions note, it works bet­ter — and feels so much more authen­tic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Lon­dinio.” The result­ing jour­ney between those two great cap­i­tals looks ardu­ous indeed, pass­ing at least three moun­tain­ous areas, thir­teen rivers, and count­less small­er set­tle­ments. And accord­ing to OmnesVi­ae, no roads led to Brus­sels: the clos­est an ancient trav­el­er could get to the loca­tion of the mod­ern-day seat of the Euro­pean Union was the Wal­loon vil­lage of Liber­chies — which, as the birth­place of Djan­go Rein­hardt, remains an impor­tant stop for the jazz-lov­ing trav­el­er of Europe today.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

How the Ancient Romans Built Their Roads, the Life­lines of Their Vast Empire

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

The First Tran­sit Map: a Close Look at the Sub­way-Style Tab­u­la Peutin­ge­ri­ana of the 5th-Cen­tu­ry Roman Empire

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Europe’s Oldest Map: Discover the Saint-Bélec Slab (Circa 2150–1600 BCE)

Image by Paul du Châtel­li­er, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1900, the French pre­his­to­ri­an Paul du Châtel­li­er dug up from a bur­ial ground a fair­ly siz­able stone, bro­ken but cov­ered with engraved mark­ings. Even after he put it back togeth­er, nei­ther he nor any­one else could work out what the mark­ings rep­re­sent­ed. “Some see a human form, oth­ers an ani­mal one,” he wrote in a report. “Let’s not let our imag­i­na­tion get the bet­ter of us and let us wait for a Cham­pol­lion to tell us what it says.” Cham­pol­lion, as Big Think’s Frank Jacobs explains, was “the Egyp­tol­o­gist who in 1822 deci­phered the hiero­glyph­ics” — which he did with the aid of a more famous inscrip­tion-bear­ing piece of rock, the Roset­ta Stone.

Still, the Saint-Bélec slab, as Châtel­lier’s dis­cov­ery is now known, has attained a great deal of recog­ni­tion in the more than 120 years since he unearthed it. But it did so rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly, after a long peri­od of rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty.

“In 1994, researchers revis­it­ing du Châtellier’s orig­i­nal draw­ing found that the intri­cate mark­ings on the stone looked a lot like a map,” writes Jacobs. “The stone itself, how­ev­er, had gone miss­ing.” Only in 2014 was it redis­cov­ered in a cel­lar below the moat of the chateau in Saint-Ger­main-en-Laye once owned by du Châtel­li­er, by which time it could be sub­ject­ed to the kind of high-tech analy­sis unimag­ined in his life­time.

Oper­at­ing on the the­o­ry that the arti­fact was indeed cre­at­ed as a map, France’s INRAP (the Nation­al Insti­tute for Pre­ven­tive Archae­o­log­i­cal Research) “found that the mark­ings on the slab cor­re­spond­ed to the land­scape of the Odet Val­ley” in mod­ern-day Brit­tany. Then, “using geolo­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy, the researchers estab­lished that the ter­ri­to­ry rep­re­sent­ed on the slab bears an 80 per­cent accu­rate resem­blance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet riv­er,” which seems to have been a small king­dom or prin­ci­pal­i­ty back in the ear­ly Bronze Age, between 2150 BC and 1600 BC. This makes the Saint-Bélec slab Europe’s old­est map, and quite pos­si­bly the ear­li­est map of any known ter­ri­to­ry — and cer­tain­ly the ear­li­est known map of a pop­u­lar kayak­ing des­ti­na­tion.

Draw­ing by Paul du Chatel­li­er, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Explore the Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Exis­tence (Cir­ca 1300)

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

What the Roset­ta Stone Actu­al­ly Says

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Explore the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Existence (Circa 1300)

If you want­ed to see a map of the world in the four­teenth cen­tu­ry, you could hard­ly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, pro­vid­ed you lived some­where in or near the British Isles, make a pil­grim­age to Here­ford Cathe­dral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Can­tilupe, the main attrac­tion for the true believ­er, but also what we now know as the Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di, a large-scale (64″ x 52″) depic­tion of the entire world — or at least entire world as con­ceived in the pious Eng­lish mind of the Mid­dle Ages, which turns out to be almost unrec­og­niz­able at first glance today.

Cre­at­ed around 1300, the Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di “serves as a sort of visu­al ency­clo­pe­dia of the peri­od, with draw­ings inspired by Bib­li­cal times through the Mid­dle Ages,” write Chris Grif­fiths and Thomas But­tery at BBC Trav­el.

“In addi­tion to illus­trat­ing events mark­ing the his­to­ry of humankind and 420 cities and geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures, the map shows plants, ani­mals, birds and strange or unknown crea­tures, and peo­ple.” These include one “ ‘Blem­mye’ — a war-like crea­ture with no head, but with facial fea­tures in its chest,” two “Sci­apods,” “men with one large foot,” and “four cave-dwelling Troglodites,” one of whom feasts on a snake.

Amid geog­ra­phy we would now con­sid­er severe­ly lim­it­ed as well as fair­ly man­gled — Europe is labeled as Asia, and vice ver­sa, to name only the most obvi­ous mis­take — the map also includes “super­nat­ur­al scenes from clas­si­cal Greek and Roman mythol­o­gy, Bib­li­cal tales and a col­lec­tion of pop­u­lar leg­ends and sto­ries.” As such, this reflects less about the world itself than about human­i­ty’s world­view in an era that drew few­er lines of demar­ca­tion between fact and leg­end. You can learn more about what it has to tell us in the Mod­ern His­to­ry TV video below, as well as in the video fur­ther down from Youtu­ber ShūBa̱ck, which asks, “Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?”

The intent of the Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di, ShūBa̱ck says, is to show that “the Bible is right.” To that end, “east is on top, as that’s where they said Jesus would come from on the day of judg­ment. Jerusalem is, of course, at the cen­ter.” Oth­er points of inter­est include the site of the cru­ci­fix­ion, the Tow­er of Babel, and the Gar­den of Eden — not to men­tion the loca­tions of the Gold­en Fleece and Mount Olym­pus. You can exam­ine all of these up close at the Here­ford Cathe­dral’s site, which offers a detailed 3D scan of the map, view­able from every angle, embed­ded with expla­na­tions of all its major fea­tures: in oth­er words, a kind of Google Medieval Earth.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

40,000 Ear­ly Mod­ern Maps Are Now Freely Avail­able Online (Cour­tesy of the British Library)

The First Tran­sit Map: a Close Look at the Sub­way-Style Tab­u­la Peutin­ge­ri­ana of the 5th-Cen­tu­ry Roman Empire

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

The Biggest Mis­takes in Map­mak­ing His­to­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Rise & Fall of Roman Civilization: Every Year Shown in a Timelapse Map Animation (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

The Youtu­ber “Emper­or­Tiger­star” spe­cial­izes in doc­u­ment­ing the unfold­ing of world his­tor­i­cal events by stitch­ing togeth­er hun­dreds of maps into time­lapse films. In years past, we’ve fea­tured his “map ani­ma­tions” of the U.S. Civ­il War (1861–1865), World War I (1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945). Today, we’re high­light­ing a more ambi­tious project, an attempt to visu­al­ly doc­u­ment the rise and fall of the Romans. The video cov­ers 2,000 years of his­to­ry, in just ten min­utes.

Mov­ing from 753 BC  to 1479 AD, the ani­mat­ed map shows Rome’s ter­ri­to­r­i­al bound­aries chang­ing as the Roman King­dom morphs into the Roman Repub­lic and lat­er the Roman Empire. Then the grav­i­ty of his­to­ry takes over and we expe­ri­ence the grad­ual decline of Roman civ­i­liza­tion. We see the bifur­ca­tion that splits the Empire into West­ern and East­ern (Byzan­tine) parts, until only a lit­tle piece remains.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Min­utes: A Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

The Splen­did Book Design of the 1946 Edi­tion of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

An 8‑Minute Ani­mat­ed Flight Over Ancient Rome

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

The His­to­ry of the Byzan­tine Empire (or East Roman Empire): An Ani­mat­ed Time­line Cov­er­ing 1,100 Years of His­to­ry

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Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

The USGS Astro­ge­ol­o­gy Sci­ence Cen­ter has recent­ly released a series of col­or­ful and intri­cate­ly-detailed maps of Mars. These col­or­ful maps, notes USGS, “pro­vide high­ly detailed views of the [plantet’s] sur­face and allow sci­en­tists to inves­ti­gate com­plex geo­log­ic rela­tion­ships both on and beneath the sur­face. These types of maps are use­ful for both plan­ning for and then con­duct­ing land­ed mis­sions.”

The map above lets you see Olym­pus Mons, the tallest vol­cano in the solar sys­tem, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Ever­est. The USGS goes on to add: “Map read­ers can visu­al­ize the caldera com­plex more eas­i­ly due to the detail that is avail­able at the 1:200,000 scale and the addi­tion of con­tour lines to the map. The map cov­ers a region that is rough­ly the size of the Dal­las-Ft. Worth met­ro­pol­i­tan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s sum­mit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olym­pus Mons caldera com­plex allows sci­en­tists to more eas­i­ly com­pare it to sim­i­lar fea­tures on Earth (known as ter­res­tri­al analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mau­na Loa.”

You can find more Mar­t­ian maps here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Sur­face of Mars Shown in Stun­ning 4K Res­o­lu­tion

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Vin­tage Geo­log­i­cal Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topo­graph­i­cal Won­ders

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How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

The old­est known writ­ing sys­tems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alpha­bet, which I’m using to write this post and you’re using to read it, grad­u­al­ly took the shape we know between the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC and the Mid­dle Ages. Over the eras since, it has spread out­ward from Europe to become the most wide­ly used script in the world. These are impor­tant devel­op­ments in the his­to­ry of writ­ing, but hard­ly the only ones. It is with all known writ­ing sys­tems that his­tor­i­cal map ani­ma­tor Ollie Bye deals in the video above: not just those used today, but over the whole of the past five mil­len­nia.

The con­quests of Alexan­der the Great; the Gal­lic Wars; the col­o­niza­tion of Latin Amer­i­ca; the “scram­ble for Africa”: these and oth­er major his­tor­i­cal events are vivid­ly reflect­ed in the spread of cer­tain writ­ing sys­tems.

Up until 1492 — after the expi­ra­tion of eight and a half of the video’s eleven min­utes — the map con­cerns itself only with Europe, Asia, and the north­ern three-quar­ters of Africa (as well as an inlaid sec­tion depict­ing the civ­i­liza­tions of what is now Cen­tral Amer­i­ca). There­after it zooms out to include the New World, and indeed the whole world, though cen­turies pass before most of its blank spaces fill up with the col­ors that indi­cate the adop­tion of a dom­i­nant script.

Ara­bic and Per­sian appear in lime green, sim­pli­fied Chi­nese in red, and Cyril­lic in light blue. Before Bye’s ani­ma­tion reach­es the mid­dle twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, most of the world has turned medi­um blue, which rep­re­sents the now-mighty Latin alpha­bet. The use of these very let­ters for all writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion by such a wide vari­ety of cul­tures mer­its a vol­umes-long his­to­ry by itself. But per­haps most intrigu­ing here is the per­sis­tence of rel­a­tive­ly minor scripts: Cree, used among the natives of north­ern Cana­da; hira­ganakatakana, and kan­ji in Japan; and also hangul in Korea — which I read and write myself every day of my life in Seoul, and to whose con­tin­ued dom­i­nance here I can con­fi­dent­ly attest.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Atlas of Endan­gered Alpha­bets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Pre­serve Writ­ing Sys­tems That May Soon Dis­ap­pear

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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