{"id":2501,"date":"2014-07-27T21:06:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-27T21:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.wordpress.com\/2014\/07\/27\/drafting-defeat-10th-century-road-maps-and-21st-century-disasters\/"},"modified":"2014-07-27T21:06:55","modified_gmt":"2014-07-27T21:06:55","slug":"drafting-defeat-10th-century-road-maps-and-21st-century-disasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/?p=2501","title":{"rendered":"Drafting defeat: 10th century road maps and 21st century disasters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"E2P4-08\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Slavs & Tatars
\nDrafting defeat: <\/b> 10th century road maps and 21st century disasters.
\nMoscow: Slavs & Tatars<\/a>, [2007]. [16] p. with Russian folktale in inside cover
\n22 x 31 cm. Edition of 250.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"slavs_00069\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"slavs_00070\"<\/p>\n

A collection of highly stylized 10th century maps of the Middle East with translations of \u00a0the legends that accompanied them in a 1933 Soviet edition of Nasser Khosrow\u2019s Safarnameh (Book of Travels)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"slavs_00072\"<\/p>\n

Maps of\u00a0<\/strong>The Arabian Peninsula,\u00a0Egypt,\u00a0Syria,\u00a0The Persian Gulf,\u00a0The Caspian Sea and\u00a0Iraq\u00a0by Abu Ishaq Ibrahim Ibn Muhammad Al-Farsi al-Istakhri aka Abu\u2019l Qasim Ubaid\u2019Allah Ibn Khordadbeh aka Al Farsi aka Istakhri.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"slavs_00073\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We have always had an aesthetic weakness for the merciless and brutal banality of bureaucracy. Little did we know that such a weakness would extend to the bureaucrats themselves. The following are reproductions of 10th-century maps by Al-Istakhri (aka Ibn Khordadbeh or Al Farsi) found in a 1933 Soviet edition of Nasser Khosrow\u2019s\u00a0Safarnameh<\/em>, or\u00a0Book of Travels<\/em>. Both Istakhri and Khosrow were Persian bureaucrats whose legacy was a paper trail of the very antithesis of administration: a regime of curiosity that attempted to describe and map out the Middle East as a coherent geographic and cultural region. Khosrow, an 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher, had led an uneventful life as a tax collector in present day Turkemenistan when one night, in his sleep, a voice told him to leave behind his life of worldly pleasures. Khosrow dropped his avowed weakness for the medieval Merlot and began immediately to plan a seven-year trip through the Caucases and the Caspian to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. Khosrow was, to some extent, the millenary Muslim equivalent of a 21st-century born-again Christian. Except where the former asked questions, the latter offers only solutions. Where the former travelled extensively, the other is unlikely to have a passport.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Academia, the publisher of\u00a0Safarnameh<\/em>, was itself an unorthodox outfit in the Soviet landscape of the early 20th century with a reputation for smart, unexpected titles on relatively limited runs. These maps were drafted during a period when Islamic geography rekindled an interest in Roman and Greek scholarship abandoned by the Christian West. Early draftsmen including Istakhri contributed to\u00a0An Atlas of Islam<\/em>, with a visible bias for the Farsi-speaking peoples in the Middle East, where a boundless taste for geometric shapes and symmetry belongs today more to the world of fantasy than fact. Later cartographers such as Al-Idrisi went on to craft intricate maps on improbably luxurious materials (e.g. a 400-pound tablet of silver) with even more improbable names (such as\u00a0The Gardens of Humanity and the Amusement of the Soul<\/em>) that would serve for centuries to follow. When Christopher Columbus studied these maps, before setting out to sea, we wonder: did it occur to him that his future would be no less unpredictable than our past?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavs & Tatars Drafting defeat: 10th century road maps and 21st century disasters. Moscow: Slavs & Tatars, [2007]. [16] p. with Russian folktale in inside cover 22 x 31 cm. Edition of 250. A collection of highly stylized 10th century … Continue lendo →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[649,783],"class_list":["post-2501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapas","tag-o-mundo-no-papel","tag-slavs-tatars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colecaolivrodeartista.eba.ufmg.br\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}