A pre-modern world

In 1986, seven maps drawn in ink on thin pieces of wood were discovered in the grave of a military officer buried around 239 bce; the maps represent a small region at a scale of c. 1:300,000. Already in 1973, the excavation of the grave of a ruler of 168 bce had brought to light a map of a larger region; on it, drawn to a scale of c. 1:180,000, were marked plains, mountains, rivers, roads and places with standardized symbols and names. The same grave preserved another map, which presented a detail of the same region, at a scale c. 1:100,000, marking forts and lines of defence. During their lifetimes, the officer and the ruler had both apparently had access to scale maps that were so important to them that they were buried with them. We also have literary evidence from the same period of the use of maps. A historical work from the second/first century bce, for example, relates that in 227 bce the son of a ruler ordered a man to kill a neighbouring dynast. To get close to his intended victim, the killer pretended to want to offer the dynast a map sent to him as a present by his master. He gained access to the man and was able to conceal a dagger in the map roll. But the victim survived and founded his own dynasty. Twenty years later, in 207 bce, his capital was attacked, and, although the soldiers could have ransacked the palace and looted its treasures, they were interested only in the administrative centre with its archive and its maps – which ultimately contributed to the formation of a new dynasty that lasted until 9 ce.

The pre-modern world to which these artefacts and stories belong is not that of Greece and Rome. Rather, the events described above took place in ancient China; there are no comparable examples from the ancient Mediterranean. Is this lack of evidence from the classical world merely a coincidence? Or is it a consequence of a feature of pre-modern Europe, in which ‘high culture’ forms only a thin ‘veneer’, as Patricia Crone argues in her study of (non-classical) pre-industrial societies: