Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Faculty member, Geography Department, Iranology Foundation, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Islamic civilization, as one of the main centers of scientific and civilizational developments in the third to tenth centuries AH/ninth to sixteenth centuries AD, played an unparalleled role in the collection, development, and dissemination of world knowledge. In a large part of the eastern lands and during the aforementioned period, Islamic civilization not only preserved the heritage of the Greek, Indian, Iranian, and Roman civilizations, but also led to the production of new knowledge with remarkable innovations. Among them, the knowledge of geography and cartography, as one of the valuable achievements of this civilization, has a special place. Islamic cartography, by intelligently adapting the knowledge of its predecessors and being fully aware of geographical sources such as Ptolemy's Almagest, and combining it with new findings in the form of different styles and schools of map drawing, quickly became a leading field in the science of cartography and left a rich legacy for other civilizations. After the Middle Ages, Europeans, motivated by the discovery of new lands, needed accurate and scientific maps and geographical texts, and they were able to obtain a large part of them from the scientific geographical capital of Muslims. The turning point of this civilizational shift occurred on the island of "Sicily", although Europe had been familiar with Muslim geographical works for a century or two earlier. This study, using the method of historical research and comparative analysis, aims to examine the role and impact of cartography during the Islamic period on modern European cartography, and analyzes the status of cartography in both civilizational areas and the process and ways of transferring cartographic knowledge from the East (Islam) to the West (Europe). This study highlights the importance of cultural and scientific interactions between civilizations and shows that Islamic cartography is one of the foundations of modern European cartography.
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