The centre of the world

For many centuries, interlacustrine Africa stood at the center of the world - at least in the minds of European and Arab cartographers and geographers.  This prominence had mainly to do with the obsession to find the sources of Nile.

Sebastian Münster's interpretation of Ptolemy in 1552 

The Greek geographer Ptolemy (c. 100-170) thought that the Nile had three tributaries which came from a mountain chain he called mountains of moon. Ptolemy founded his informed guessing on a variety of sources which were often little more than rumors and fables. Neither had he himself traveled into the region nor hardly any of his sources he relied on.  Notwithstanding this, his theory was shared by many of ancient philosophers like Aristoteles and Seneca.

Over the course of the next centuries the three tributaries of the Nile and the mountains of moon became an iconographic representation of Ptolemaic cartography.

Ptolemaic maps put the Nile at the center of its maps of Africa and the world. Look for instance at this map by the German geographer Sebastian Münster (1448-1552), where the Nile and its sources take a prominent place:

Typus Orbis Universalis by Sebastian Münster (1540)

Medieval European and Arabic cartographers added to the Ptolemaic worldview new rumors and fables, but they did not leave the basic assumptions of Ptolemy. Some cartographers located the sources of the Nile more in the south of the continent, some added or deleted a tributary.

They added other fantastic motifs to their maps like one-eyed behemoths, but also new information about African kingdoms provided by Portuguese seafarers.

For some centuries this debate was a joint venture of Europeans and Arabs. The later based their maps on Ptolemy. Arab geographers like Surat al-Ard of al-Khuwarizmi (c.780-c.846) or Al-Idrisi (1100-1165) took Ptolemy as the basis for new theories, which were eagerly adapted by the European colleagues.

The wandering of the sources across the maps of the continent was to some degree a result of new explorations along the coastline of Africa, which the cartographers tried to connect to their search for the sources of the Nile.




Tabula noua partis Africæ by Martin Waldseemüller (1541). You can see the knowledge of Portuguese seafarers in the dense inscription along the coast 

Modern geography begun to emerge in the later days of the 18^th century. Geographers thought the new science to be based on observation and measurement and not on unverifiable claims or rumors like the geographers of the Ptolemaic tradition did. Ptolemy, nevertheless, did not lose his importance. He remained a major reference. For no other region of Africa, and perhaps of the non-European world, European cartographers could rely on such a long tradition of knowledge.

Dozens of articles in geographical journals referred to Ptolemy in the later half of the 19^th century. Francis Burton wrote about Lake Tanganyika as one of the lake Ptolemy had suggested as a source of the Nile when he tried to make his case against Speke’s claims that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile. Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical society was eager to believe Speke because it fitted into basic assumptions of Ptolemy. One of Britain’s most renowned cartographers , Ernst Ravenstein, gave in 1891 a lecture were he put the results of forty years of exploration into the long tradition of European and Arab geography. Somehow surprisingly, many travelers and geographers admitted that Ptolemy had been very close to their own findings.

 

It is remarkable that Ravenstein demonstrated the success of geography in the 19th century taking the source of the Nile as his main example. The search for the sources of the Nile was to great part also a search for the soul of modern geography. That soul laid in the heart of Africa.