The known world ("mundo") of the European polymath Ramon Llull around 1300 in a self drawn map:

"africa" - in the upper part. A mosque, tall buildings.
"Asia" - in the lower part left. Water and a bird.
"Europa" - in the lower part right. A bird resting on a tree.

A thread
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Ramon Llull (1230s-1315) was an influential writer and thinker from the Kingdom of Majorca. What is called "Lullism" refers to his searches for truth in all areas of knowledge including Christian, Muslim and Jewish mysticism. That is him, not smoking, but spreading wisdom.

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Fun fact for #bookhistory: Lullism includes the idea that celestial energies can be deciphered by manipulating the letters of the alphabet. Nota bene: Llull was not the first or last to approach alphabets and numbers to find higher or hidden knowledge.

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Around 1300, when Llull was, among others things, engaged in writing alchemistic works, this world map ("mundus") design was quite common: imagining and interpreting known territories in a non-objective depiction was part of the game. #maphistory

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There was likely never a mapless time in human history, as maps, in the words of Harley/Woodward (The History of cartography), are „graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world“.

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"Where am I", and how does it look far from here, were existential human questions. "Cartography" as Katharina Piechocki recently wrote in her Cartographic Humanism (2020) "allowed humans to locate and to be located, to define and to be defined, to include and exclude".

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So when Llull made and used a map like this around 1300, he referred to a cartographic practice well known in Europe. This is such an imagined 3 piece world map used and drawn in 7-8th century Europe, printed often in the 15th century.

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