An idiosyncratic method of locational referencing that has me stumped

Here’s a curiosity I ran into, the other week, while examining the map collection of the Rare Book School [RBS] at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. (I am grateful to the RBS for permission to reproduce some of the pictures of the map that I took with my phone [no flash!].) The map itself is mostly conventional, but it includes some very unusual coordinate and location systems that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Specifically, the map seeks to locate the Holy Land within a system based on London. Maybe “system” is too grand a word, as the coordinates and grid lines are not necessarily coincident or coherent. But the presence on the map of spatial references to London are, frankly, weird.

The map itself is simply called Palestine. In the lower right-hand margin is an imprint—“Published by T. Nelson & Sons., London, Edinburgh & New York”—but the map bears neither date nor authorial attribution. It also has the statement, centered in the lower margin, which first caught my eye:

This Map comprises a Square of 200 English miles subdivided into smaller Squares of 10 miles.

It is a monochrome lithograph, showing the region along the Mediterranean, from Gaza north to (in an extension) Beirut, populated with Biblical toponyms. Relief is shown with fine hachures that shade the main escarpments. The framing of the map is very similar indeed to other lower-resolution regional maps of Palestine issued by European publishers throughout the first half of the nineteenth century (many of which are imaged in Goren, Faehndrich, and Schelhaas 2017). The stub at upper right indicates that the map was originally bound into a book, opening out to the left. All told, pretty much in the genre of the maps that illustrate nineteenth century geographical texts.

From the publisher, title, and the lower marginal note, this map is one of the four maps included in a book by a Scottish Presbyterian minister and prolific writer on religion and social reform, William Garden Blaikie (1820–99): Outlines of Bible Geography, Physical and Political (1861). According to worldcat, the book is relatively scarce and I have not yet had a chance to study an actual copy of the book. (Alas, as ever, the google digitized image has all the maps folded.) Blaikie’s front matter describes the RBS map closely, and especially in its square dimensions and grid (Blaikie 1861, [xi]). The portions of the other maps visible in the google version have similar phrases and typography. Also in the front matter, Blaikie offers a series of “exercises on the map,” all of the form, “what is the distance from Damascus to Idumea?” And, in several places in the book, Blaikie references the distances of places in Palestine from both London and Rome.

It is this fixation on referring the geographical situation of Palestine to London that struck me. The grid has neither an indexical nor a coordinate function: the columns and rows of the small squares are unlettered, so they cannot serve, in the common manner, as a way to index the locations of places (e.g., Jerusalem in square Jm). And the grid lines themselves are unnumbered and so cannot be used to fix locations with (x,y) coordinates. The squares are unreferenced in Blaikie’s book.

What the grid does have are some extra, angled lines. The more vertical lines are identified as “meridians 1,450/1,500/1,550 miles E of London”:

Running more horizontally are marginal ticks labeled “2,200/2,300 miles north of the Equator”

and full lines marked, in the margin, as “1,300/1,400 miles S. of London”:

And then, leaving the best to last, there are the straight lines—as befit such short chords of such large circles—running diagonally across the map’s surface, labeled “Circle of 2,200/2,300 Miles from London”:

I mean, what?

The circles and the references to meridians and parallels as determined vis-à-vis London would permit some interpretation of the domestication of the Holy Land by a British reference system. Yet the grid itself is underdetermined: it’s just a grid, fixing the Holy Land according to British measures, but that’s about it.

Is this some weird reference to Blake’s conceit that Jerusalem was “builded here” in Britain?

Question: Does anyone else know of anything else like this??? (Please respond to H-MAPS)

References

Blaikie, W. G. 1861. Outlines of Bible Geography, Physical and Political. London: T. Nelson and Sons.

Goren, Haim, Jutta Faehndrich, and Bruno Schelhaas. 2017. Mapping the Holy Land: The Foundation of a Scientific Cartography of Palestine. London: I. B. Taurus.