← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
How the compass became a political weapon
00:37:20
Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the unexpected history of the four cardinal directions
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [00:21]
Advertisement Voice
Payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra Speed slower above 40 GB on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [00:35]
Spencer Mizzen
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Why did early Islamic cartographers place south at the top of their maps? Who invented the magnetic compass? And why has the west become an intensely political term as well as a geographical one? Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Jerry Broughton answers the most intriguing questions on the history of the four cardinal points. North, east, south and west.
- [01:13]
Jerry Broughton
So, Gerry, thank you very much for joining us today. Your new book explores the history of the four points of the compass. When does this story start?
- [01:26]
It's a good question because the more I did the research on it, the further back you go. And you could almost say that it starts when you first have an understanding, when humanity first sees the sunrise and the sunset. So the sun sets, of course, we think about it setting in the west and it rises in the east. Subsequent to that. You work out that at midday the sun is due north on a north south axis. So quite early on, and we don't really obviously have recorded history of this, you start to get those basic four directional points. I'd sort of date the way in which we think about these four points. We say of the compass, we'll get onto that, because it's not really because these directions massively predate invention of the compass, but we have really from Mesopotamian times. So we're going back 4,5000 years. You have maps which start to use terms which come from those cultures and civilizations which describe north, south, east and west. And what they do is they describe them actually according to winds. So the first way we have this kind of language about these four directional points is really through winds. So the Mesopotamians will talk about Imkor and Immatu, and they'll say that these are northeastern southwestern winds. So it's really about a mixture of kind of climate, really. It's about the sun rising, the sun setting, and it's about winds. And that's of course, crucial for agricultural societies. So it's A way of starting to understand your world around direction, because it's about, will a wind destroy your crops or will it be sunny enough? And at a certain point, do you need to change something in terms of how you're farming? So that's really how these terms start to emerge. But there's a much longer subsequent story to what happens.
- [03:21]
Is this something that occurred in all cultures independently of one another? Obviously, there was very few connections between different cultures around the world at that time. But did they all come up with the same idea at roughly the same time?
- [03:35]
What is extraordinary is that nearly all cultures, actually not all, but nearly all cultures that we know, have some sense of those directions based on the sun rising, the sun setting, and then how we would talk about north and south. So it's embedded in really also how we understand our bodies. So a lot of the synonyms for north, south, east and west are related to how we talk about the front or the back of our bodies or the left and right of our bodies. So left and right hands front. And so it's what we'd call a somatic thing that we absolutely. We're hardwired to understand ourselves in relation to our wider environment. So all cultures use directions in some ways, but they'll use different ways of expressing that, and indeed, they'll privilege different directions. And that's what's so fascinating when we start to see these directions, impact maps and mapping, because you'll have different cultures which will put north at the top. Some will put south at the top, some will even put east at the top. What's really interesting is that I find no cultures from doing this research that put west at the top of their maps, in other words, as the cardinal direction that they privilege, west. And it seems that that's because that's the west, which is usually associated with sunset. And we also tend to think about those directions that east is sunrise, so it's birth, it's renewal, and sunset is related to death and darkness. So what's interesting is I find absolutely nowhere culture will put west at the top of its maps. So again, that's very much about sort of personal relationship, about how we see ourselves and our front and our back and our left and our right in relation to the wider world, which we then give these other terms of east and west, north and south. It seems the east and west start. All cultures seem to understand that axis between east and west because they see the sunrise and the sunset. To then understand how north and south work, that's a slightly different matter. And the astronomical issues about the polestar, that's much later. So initially it is about the sun, which again is why so many early cultures worship the sun. And so they see east as basically the most important direction, and west is the certainly direction of death and disappearance and darkness, which is of course what scares you. So you don't want to go there.
- [06:01]
Has there always been four directions? I mean, has there ever been a culture that's had five or six compass points?
- [06:06]
It is really interesting that four tends to be the predominant idea of cardinal directions. But not all cultures believe in that. So Aztec culture has a fifth point. So it does have the four points, but then it has a central point, what's called the quincunx. And that is effectively where you are. And what's very interesting, I think that we have a similar fifth direction now because the book ends, it goes right back through prehistory, but ends with online mapping. And I think now the fifth direction that many of us have is what I call the blue dot. So we tend to direct and orientate. And orientation, of course, is an interesting word because it comes from the Latin for east. But to orientate ourselves on our phone, we tend to just follow the blue dot on our phone. And the blue dot is really us moving through the landscape, regardless of north, south, east and west. So we are the fifth point. But there are earlier cultures who also use that fifth point as well, particularly as I say, the Aztecs. But beyond that, 4 is a really important way in which you kind of understand meaning and culture and ideas. You tend to need to organize things around fours. It's key to mathematics, it's key to philosophy. You do it a lot if you think how we understand things through the number four. And you can see why direction works on that basis. But they're a very sort of almost natural phenomenon. It's not that they're immutable, because where north is moves around a lot. And to understand the North Pole and the South Pole, it's a whole other conversation. But they are somehow kind of anchored in the reality of the world. You see the sun rise, that is where the east is, you see the sunset, and then midday, you understand north and south. Although one of the things I think that's happening, of course, with technology is that kids these days, kids these days actually don't understand the four points of the compass. And I think that's partly as a result of technological innovation because we live predominantly in built up cities. So who sees a sunrise and even a sunset to some extent? So you can't understand east and west according to that. And we tend to be so glued to our phones that. But I find that young kids today, my own kids, I needed to teach that great little thing of northeast, south and west. Never eat Shredded Wheat.
- [08:26]
Right. You say this is something that's hardwired into humanity. But is there any evidence that the animal kingdom as a recognition of north, east, south and west, that they align themselves to the four different compass points?
- [08:40]
So fascinating. Animals seem to do this as well, and scientists are still trying to understand this. So it's almost in its infancy to get a sense. Do animals have a sort of what you might call a neurological toolbox to navigate? So we understand the migration of birds, and is that somehow connected to the way in which they have some inbuilt navigational system that allows them to know how they're moving? The answer does seem to be yes, that, for instance, magnetism obviously defines the sense of north and South Poles. We live basically on a giant rotating magnet. Animals seem to be somehow hooked up to that magnetic impulse. And we also now know that many animals, including birds, but also frogs, have traces of magnetite in their heads, which means that that is obviously a naturally recurring magnetic mineral, which means they are literally hardwired north and south because they can be pulled, as it were, towards the north. We believe that this happens with a lot of fish, which is why fish move according to their migration patterns. So the answer, I think, is yes, the animals are more hardwired and I think, than humans are. And that's what's interesting about why we need things like maps and compasses, because they historically have always helped us to orientate ourselves, whereas animals seem to have an as yet still not fully understood way of navigating. But magnetite in their heads is something that's emerged recently in studies which has been fascinating to watch, to say. Yeah, cardinal directions are absolutely central to the way in which animals live their lives and move across the earth.
- [10:23]
Now, why are they called cardinal points? Where does the word cardinal come from?
- [10:27]
So cardinal is from the Latin, which really means hinge. So the idea of the four points being like a sort of hinge, so north and south and east and west is like an axis, it's like the hinge of a door, but looked at four ways. So it is interesting that as a result of that cardinal, we think of the cardinal as a religious term within the Catholic Church. And that indeed is, of course, where it comes from, the idea of four, again, as a crucial number within the Bible, within how you define different elements of the church. So the cardinals are sort of those hinges on which the church sort of operates. So, cardinal. Yeah, fascinating word. But again, that shows that it's very centered on a very Christian, very western, quite European tradition. But you can see once that word starts to emerge, you say it's about the west. Well, then you start to say, oh, what's in relation to the east? And that's what's so fascinating about this story because it quickly unravels and makes you question all these assumptions. Where did cardinal directions come from? What is the East? What is the West? When we talk about the middle east, what is the middle East? That assumes that it's in the east of something which is centered somewhere else. It was fascinating with the book. It sort of proliferated that you were then asking scientific questions, but then quickly they also became political questions and also philosophical questions about how we understand our relationship to the wider world. Somebody said to me just the other day, they said, I was feeling a bit sort of confused because I'd just come out of hospital. And I said, I feel disoriented. And she said, I suddenly realized what that word meant because it comes from, of course, orient, which is from the Latin, which means the sun rising. The Orient. So we think of the Orient and the East. So when we talk about disorientation, it comes from the fact that the Christian tradition is to celebrate the east. And so to be disoriented is to literally lose your sense of the east. So again, we are hardwired to think about these directions in such a profound way.
- [12:36]
Dave
Oh, such a clutch off season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant Those blackout motorized shades. Lines.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install hall of fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window cover offerings in the world. Blinds.com is the goat shop.
- [13:00]
Advertisement Voice
Blinds.com right now. And get up to 40% off select styles plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [13:06]
Jerry Broughton
Now, when did we start using compasses? And how did that change our relationship with the four cardinal directions?
- [13:15]
I started this book by thinking that it was a story. We'd think about the compass because the compass is obviously oriented according to the earth's magnetic field. So it's north and south. And then you just have a pointer which. Which shows those. And then obviously the other axis is east and west. What I then discovered in the research is that these cardinal directions, these terms are used thousands of years before we know the Chinese are using the compass thousands of years ago, but they seem to be using it for different sort of feng shui practices around location of shrines and different architectural settings. The compass, in terms of how it emerges as we understand it, is itself a very, very strange story because it only seems to hit Europe and navigators in the Mediterranean around the 12th, 13th century. But we don't really know. We don't have a record of how that emerges. So it's one of those fascinating stories which I think still more has to be discovered to understand how that works when they do emerge. What's interesting is that gradually European navigators start to use north as sitting at the top of their map. But what's really interesting is that Chinese compasses are all south pointing. In fact, it's almost the word the south pointing thing is how we would describe the word for a compass in Chinese. So the Chinese say, well, there's no need to put north at the top. South works just as well. But gradually that Western tradition, as you can see, you talk about the Western tradition, then you're thinking where and what is, is the west starts to put north at the top of the map. But the compass is probably only one of the factors as to why that happens. But yes, Certainly by the 13th and by the 14th century, compasses are all over. You have compass, what we call a compass rose that you'll probably see on old maps, and they're used as basic orientation methods. And they will then split the points of the compass into intercardinal directions, so you'll have north, northeast, south, southwest and so on. So those beautiful compass roses can often be sp. Split up into 32 and sometimes even 64 points of the compass as navigation tries to become ever more precise by using compass directions.
- [15:35]
Now, one of the most interesting observations you make in the book is that over the centuries, the directions, the four points of the compass, are becoming laden with political and cultural connotations. I wonder if you could talk about that for a little bit pleasing. What exactly do you mean by that?
- [15:53]
What's interesting is that we think that the cardinal directions are really just about orientation. But over time, obviously, if you privilege one over another, then that place takes precedent. So the way in which, say, the west throughout history, but certainly from the Renaissance onwards, starts to denigrate what it sees as the East. Now, these terms itself become incredibly imprecise. So the idea spoke about the idea of the Orient. That's simply a Latin term for the rising of the sun. But through the 16th, 17th and 18th century, Western travelers, diplomats and increasingly imperial administrators start to understand that place the Orient as a place which is dark, dirty, despotic, backwards, and that still exists. And indeed the great Palestinian critic Edward Said wrote a book, very influential book, many of your readers and listeners may know about, called Orientalism, which was about the way in which the west creates an image of what Said calls the Orient. So you start to see that these directional terms then take on this political connotation. So we start to understand ourselves, we say we in the west as opposed to them in the East. And that also takes on certain political, economic and cultural assumptions. You may hear from my flat bowels, I am in England, that I would be called a Northern. So my identity is keyed to something about a magnetic point and a compass. Well, I sort of say I don't believe that. But I do buy into certain ideas about being a Northerner, you know, gritty, you know, mean coming from a sort of, you know, industrial wasteland. All those presumptions and stereotypes that come with this directional point, you know, and people talk about Southerners. Southerners are seen as, you know, more sophisticated, wealthier, but maybe, you know, not as friendly. All those are assumptions that come and they can be related to what we might call people from the Orient as well. And then of course, Westerners as well. So those political terms just multiply increasingly.
- [18:00]
What's quite interesting is, for example, take North. That's kind of got a dual meaning, hasn't it? Because like you say, if you come from the north of England, that's got certain connotations. But globally, the global north has traditionally been seen as the so called first world. So it's quite subjective, isn't it?
- [18:17]
Becomes very subjective and it becomes what I say in the book, quite situated. So it depends where you are on the globe. So absolutely, if you're in England, then the north has certain connotations of backwardness and poverty. To be blunt, if you're in Italy, it's completely the other way around. So the Italians make presumptions about the north as being more industrially developed, being wealthier, whereas the south is more agricultural, seen as more educationally backward in inverted commas and similarly you'd have a similar argument, say in the United States. So it very much depends on where you are. And for this I turn to things like philosophy and language because you have to understand what the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would say is a language game. It depends on the game of the language that you're using. So when I talk about the north and being a Northerner, that's very different if I'm sitting on a boat trying to understand direction and where the north is. So I inhabit a different kind of language game. If I'm trying to navigate and I don't know where I am and I'm literally at sea, that's different when I'm in a conversation or I'm discussing my sense of who I am and my identity. So these terms shift according to where you are on the globe and also what you're doing. But it is fascinating to track those different changes with these cardinal directions, that they're laden, as you've just indicated, by so many different and quite contradictory terms. So I often find myself in the book saying the north often means exactly its opposite.
- [19:53]
So that's the North. What about the West? I mean, you touched upon this earlier. You said in some ways it's seen as the most foreboding of all the cardinal points. And why is that?
- [20:02]
Well, rather like you were just raising about the contradictions of the north, they're also contradictory. And the west is probably the most contradictory because it's so connected to that political sense of people who are Western. So to follow through that idea that I might say I'm a northerner. But if I'm traveling abroad, I also say I'm a Westerner. And what's interesting about this is the contradiction between classical cultures usually seeing west as a place of foreboding and of death, but then again of rebirth. So the Egyptians understand that the body goes on a voyage rather like the day, from sunrise to sunset. But sunset in the west also leads to a form of rebirth. And most classical cultures do. The Greeks do they understand the idea of Elysium. The Elysium Islands are somewhere in the West. There's a whole Greek tradition. Atlantis itself is believed to be somewhere in the west in the Atlantic. That then morphs into the idea more recently that we understand of the west as a geopolitical concept, which again is very interesting because it's only really a 19th century idea that the west becomes hardened as this political concept. And all political commentators, even when they start to talk about the west from the 19th century, they start to say, by saying that the west is already in decline, it's in eclipse. And the German thinker Spengler has this book called the Decline of the west, an early 20th century book which has been taken up by A lot of right wing ideological political figures to say the west is in decline. It's very interesting in Spengler's book, the Decline of the west, the term that's being used is actually from the German. A literal translation would be the sunset of the West. So it is this idea, the sun is setting on the West. So all these ideas that go right back that we're hardwired to think about the west as both a site of death and disappearance and darkness and terror, but also of rebirth and rejuvenation. But it is interesting because there is no geographical place called the West. If we think about the Western world, that can include places in Southeast Asia, it can include parts of Australasia. Now we would look on a map and we would say, well, they're in the east or they're in the South. And so these very terms now that are being used are so fluid, we even talk, or I talk in the book, about multipolarity in terms of contemporary politics, that the idea of the west is so movable, as is the idea, of course, of the global South. So if you think of that language of political development that when I was growing up, we used to talk about the Third World or then the developing countries in South America, in Sub Saharan Africa and in Southeast Asia, well, now we talk about the global south in relation to the developed North. So again, that language has shifted, the language game has shifted terms to some extent. And the global south is now very much pushing back against the way in which the developed north has really driven what the map looks like. And again, you can see that if your map has north at the top, then no wonder cultures and societies in what we would call the global south are pushing back against that and saying, hey, no. That's a sort of symbol of the way in which politics is currently unequal, because you get to choose what's on top of the map.
- [23:24]
Now, speaking of which, can you tell us about MacArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the world and why is it significant?
- [23:33]
This is a wonderful map from the late 1970s. An Australian who was actually a school kid who was asked to draw a map and he drew it with Australia at the top. So what Many listeners may think of as the world upside down, but of course it's not. It's just a social and political convention to put north at the top. And Paul MacArthur was told off by his teacher who said, you've drawn it the wrong way, do it the right way. So he was so cross about this that he produced this universal corrective map. Map which put south at the top and said, long live Australia. Now, at the top of the map, there's a playfulness to it, and people may have seen it and we smile. But I think there's a wider point around what he's saying there, which is there is nothing universal or real or objective about putting north at the top. You can just as easily put south at the top. And what I think is interesting is when you do that, as often happens when you invert, when we talk about inversion, if you turn the world upside down, if you let servants become masters and vice versa, just by doing that, you look at the world in a slightly different way. And So I think MacArthur's map with south at the top was quite a brilliant thing to do. It wasn't adopted, but it made people just think, hang on, why do we put an Earth at the top?
- [24:58]
Okay, so when in research, in your book, you clearly studied some pretty remarkable cultural artifacts, maps, paintings, compasses, et cetera, I wonder if you could maybe talk us through one or two of the most fascinating and significant you think our listeners would really like to know about.
- [25:19]
The most iconic one, I think, is the NASA whole Earth image, which is from the early 1970s, which is the most reproduced photographic image image in the entire world. So this was taken almost by chance on the Apollo space mission, which went up and they just said, take some photographs while you're up there. Kind of remarkable thing. And one of the astronauts, who we don't know, because there was a huge debate subsequently because they all claimed that they'd taken a series of snaps of seeing the whole Earth from space. Amazing image. What I found interesting is when I did the research for the book, that image which shows the whole Earth and it shows north at the top. Well, when NASA first got the contact strip of the photographs, the astronauts, because of the way in which they were circling the Earth, had taken the photograph with south at the top. And NASA looked at it and thought, we can't use that because globally people won't recognize the image. So they flipped it, they put north at the top. So I think that's an astonishing example of just how hardwired we are to see north at the top. So that was a fascinating revelation for me. The other was the map from 1569. It's by Gerard Mercator, who's a Flemish mapmaker, and many people have heard of him. They've heard of Mercator's projection, and Mercator's projection is one for navigators. So it's A way of trying to put the world on a flat piece of paper. But it's a globe. So he's showing you how you can draw a straight line of navigational bed. Say if you were sailing from Southampton to Cuba, you'd actually be sailing over a curved surface. So if you draw a straight line, you're going to go offline, you're going to go off course. So Mercator produced this projection which did sort of clever maths to basically slightly distort the world by putting it on a flat piece of paper. And then you could draw a straight line. What people often forget is that what Mercator did in that map, he put north at the top. So he is really, for me, the reason why European mapmakers and everybody since has tended to privilege the north at the top. But if you look at Mercator's map from 1569, the North Pole and then the South Pole at the bottom of the map are stretched to infinity. Because what he's had to do is he's had to warp the surface of the earth to put it on a flat, two dimensional, flat piece of paper in, in a rectangle. You obviously have to distort the earth as a result. So if you look at it, it's very accurate either side of the equator. And what that showed to me was ironically, and I say in the book, that north triumphs because of Mercator's projection. But it's almost by accident because what he's trying to do is show how you sail east to west, because of course, in the 16th century, that's the route that all the European navigators are following. Columbus da Gama, Magellan, they're all going east to west, either west to the Americas or east via the Cape of Good Hope and on to Southeast Asia. So the north becomes by default the top of the map. But it's the place that Mercator's no interest in. And he says you can't even sail there because it's full of ice and rock and it's impossible. So he projects it to infinity because he says it doesn't matter, you don't need to do that, you don't need to go over the top, you need to go east and west. So the big irony for me and the big reveal in the book is that north triumphs from a European mapmaker, not who's celebrating. And often people say this, that he's a terrible Eurocentric mapmaker. I think it's just by mistake, really. He puts north at the top, but what he's interested in is how you sail from east to west. And that's why all four points of the compass are all to some extent connected.
- [29:05]
Finally, Gerry, you mentioned earlier that over the past couple of decades, we gradually stopped using conventional maps to find our way from A to B. Instead, we're increasingly using digital route finders. So now we're always a blue dot in the centre of the map, as it were. I mean, how do you think that will change our relationship with the cardinal points over the coming decades?
- [29:32]
The future of the cardinal points may be that they disappear. This is what sort so striking and the profound nature of online digital technology, because our smartphones now are being used without compasses anymore. What many of the big tech companies have told me about how they're trying to enable us to immediately orientate ourselves, say when we get off a train or a tube, is not through a compass direction. You've probably done it yourself. You get off a tube, living in London, as I do, and I'm never sure which direction I'm going. And first the arrow points one way and then another, and that's of course, because it's trying to orientate you in terms of compass directions. And actually what they're now using is photographic material that immediately snaps on as soon as you enter a place so that you can understand where you are. So the compass is, I say this in the book, is sort of in decline in a way. And neuroscientists tell us that the hippocampus in our brain, which is the area that we believe the brain, is a kind of direction element area of the brain. It's rather remarkably shaped like a little seahorse. Neurologists have done tests on London cabbies who do the knowledge. So again, hardwired into their brain is every street in London that they can go to immediately if somebody says, take me to such and such a street. Neuroscientists did tests on those cabbies after they retired and they saw that their hippocampus shrank. So what's interesting is our very brains may be changing because since humanity sort of first emerged, we were able to understand and orientate ourselves according to those cardinal directions. And that's changing because we don't anymore. So I'm reluctant to sort of say this is a terrible, terrible thing, because I think evolution will always make some compensation. But there is this sense in which the hardwired neurological tools that we have within our brains and that we've always had around, threat around, making sure that we're safe, are going And I think this is one of the great fears around Are we just giving up our ability, our independent ability to orientate ourselves in our world to the tech that we have, particularly on our phones, and the way in which our brains. Things are changing. So it is a big issue.
- [31:58]
Spencer Mizzen
That was Gerry Broughton. Gerry's latest book, Four Points of the Compass, the Unexpected History of Direction, is published by Alan Lane. And for more on the history of mapmaking, be sure to check out our episode with Geri on the life and legacy of the geologist and cartographer Marie Tharp, uncovering her major role in mapping the ocean's floor. The link is in the episode description. Thanks for listening to the History Extra Podcast. This podcast was produced by Sam Leel Green.