Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a gimmicky approach to writing history along the lines of Neil MacGregor’s “History of the World in 100 Objects,” but much more simplistic. The author concedes that the research performed for the book was performed to fill a large hole in her own knowledge map rather than being her academic or professional competency. This book struck me as comparable to enterprising ex-pats that moved to an exotic, historic locale and set themselves up as guides for (other) tourists! If this is how you like your history served, then “The Map of Knowledge” is a book for you. For the rest of us, the title is quite presumptuous. It is about the preservation of science (such as it was at the time), but the author isn’t very scientific in her approach to the subject. In this vein, David Abulafia (in Literary Review) writes: “Moller is a lively guide, although like most guides she tends to exaggerate and often chooses the most exciting story rather than the most plausible one.” For example, she uncritically repeats as fact the 17th Century dramatic tale of al-Rahman’s flight from ruthless Abbasid assassins to re-establish the Umayyad court in remote Andalusia of southern Spain. Abulafia continues, “her insistence that paper only began to be produced in Europe in the 14th century is contradicted by the vast amounts of paper documents in Italian archives from the century before. And finally, “judging from her notes and bibliography, she has often relied on quite superficial modern histories, which is surprising, as she has worked for the Bodleian Library, which possesses just about everything she would need to make this a deeper and more valuable book.” The author also acknowledges the Warburg Institute, which funded at least part of her research. The founder of the Warburg Institute ran in sufficiently high circles to know how the royal world functioned (and by backward extrapolation, the Byzantine Empire), but that perspective is not evident in this book or another recent book produced under the auspices of that institute that I have read and reviewed. (See my Amazon review of, “How the Classics Made Shakespeare,” by Jonathan Bate.) “The Knowledge Map” comes across more like a college term paper. It provides only a superficial survey of scholars and their royal patrons over a 1,000 year span of Islamic civilization (when the Byzantine Empire still dominated Europe). The author admits that some of the Islamic scholars she features are merely names with no significant biography. Portions of this book even read like a religious tract, such as the discussion of al-Mansur (pp 56-64) and al-Rakhman (pp 91-97). The style of those sections is more fitting for a parochial school primer. The author takes as her litmus test the preservation of three classical sources, Euclid (for geometry), Claudius Ptolemy (for astronomy) and Claudius Galen (for medicine). However, not much of these works passes for scientific knowledge these days. And far more knowledge of geometry, geography and astronomy was required to build just one monument in pre-classical times, that being the Great Pyramid, and in an age when the physician of the gods, Thoth, was even said to raise the dead. Even in Medieval times, the rulers and high religious heads could draw upon any number of sources for the higher knowledge (beyond Euclid’s geometry) required for their great building works, including gothic cathedrals, great mosques, palaces and many other magnificent structures. The “map of knowledge” associated with those initiatives remains mysterious. For this reason, I personally find the current debate over the preservation and reappearance of the diverse sources of the Ottoman Piri Reis Map of 1510 (produced after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, and incorporating the detailed coastline of Antarctica) to be far more interesting and potentially revealing about a proposed “knowledge map” than Galan, Claudius Ptolemy and Euclid. The author of “The Map of Knowledge” mentions, again quite uncritically, the strange 14 year delay in dealing with the Islamic Revolution by the sitting Byzantine emperor. She further passes uncritically over (p 69) a subsequent request to Byzantine emperor Constantine V for classical texts by his ostensible nemesis, the Islamic Caliph al-Mansur. Why would the Byzantine emperor grant such a thing? And why was Byzantium embroiled in an Islamic type reform (called the Iconoclasm Movement) at the very moment that Islam was being normalized as a major kingdom and dynasty? If we can’t answer that question, how can we hope to have enough insight to create a “map of knowledge” of the medieval world? We are still in the dark ages of writing that history. The royal family “owned the cattle on a thousand hills,” and could build a New Jerusalem on any spot they saw fit. Baghdad (as its original name Madinat al-Salaam, “City of Peace,” itself suggests) was just one such location, perched as it were on a narrow strip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates. As the author notes (but yet again misses the deeper significance), it was as much a place for those who conducted commerce by sea as by land. It was planned and built to be a world capital presided over by the international royal elites and not the descendants of humble Bedouin folk. Royal power was again showcased when a second magnificent Islamic Jerusalem was built for a renewed caliphate in southern Spain. And despite the labor and expense of its rapid construction, Madinat al-Zahra was largely dismantled in the following generation by a magnate known as al-Mansur. However, the author doesn’t seem to recognize the poetic ending of it being destroyed by someone with the same name as the builder of the first Islamic Jerusalem in Baghdad! Important clues are being overlooked here. The author, Violet Moller, begins her book by uncritically accepting a statement attributed to the physician Galen that the imperial rulers had no genuine interest in the refinement of knowledge. Galen was either unaware or objected to the practice of royal role playing in the classical tradition, and even by the Roman emperors that he himself served, namely Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Severus. The very lives of these contemporary rulers were dedicated to keeping classical knowledge alive by assuming the natures and emulating the actions of the various members of the ancient pantheon upon which the classics were based. Certain of these “divine archetypes” pursued knowledge, wisdom and innovation (such Ptah/Iapetus and Ra/Prometheus), whereas others were more content with the enjoying the good life (such as Osiris/Dionysos) or even bent on domination and destruction (like Set/Apollo). The classics were not merely studied by the royal family in all generations, but something they acted out in detail upon the world stage with each successive dynasty. One can certainly question the need for this, but not the enduring royal commitment to it. Violet Moller notes (p 4) that Domitian, a Roman emperor with one of the worst intellectual reputations, spared no expense in ensuring that libraries were resupplied as needed with essential works. She fails to mention the technological wonders of Nero’s floating causeway across the Bay of Naples and Caligula’s Nemi ships. There was certainly an element of vanity to these projects, but the innovative spirit also can’t be denied. The losing and recovery of lost knowledge is a very old stock theme in the ancient world. Examples include the finding of a worm-eaten treatise of the Egyptian Memphite trilogy commemorated on the Shabaka Stone; the boasting by Assurbanipal of locating and even reading (interpreting/translating) texts for his renowned library that were said to originate from before the Great Flood; and the biblical chronicle of a revival based on the “chance discovery” of an old book of the Law by the priest Hilkiah. Book burning was surprisingly a related stock theme associated with the founding of a new age (such as the one ordered by Sargon the Great to mark the transition from Sumerian to Akkadian culture). However, royal persons would not eliminate anything that they considered truly irreplaceable. The so-called classics were a wide assortment of stories that preserved a relatively small amount of “sacred knowledge,” but expressed that knowledge in a multitude of different cultural contexts and scenarios. There was some danger that minor details of the Hermetic Corpus could go missing, but little risk that the essence of ancient tradition (rebranded as “classical knowledge”) would be irretrievably lost. It was too broadly encoded and dispersed for that to happen. It was an ancient form of “fault tolerance.” The potential for losing the Hermetic forest in a super-abundance of mythological trees would have been a greater concern. Every major revival of classical thinking depended upon an imperial covering, including and especially the ones that took place in the Age of Dar al-Islam. By the time Venice became a major player, the city was already firmly under the thumb of royal power, as the author herself admits. The royal family was opposed to private collections of knowledge at certain places and times, but not against the idea of knowledge itself. Regardless, it isn’t too surprising (as the author notes) to find instances of scholars attempting to secret away their precious writings rather than having them seized, even for the purposes of placement in a public library. The royal family really couldn’t be trusted to act in their best interest, and centralized control over texts may have also slowed technological progress in the long run. Royal consent enjoyed by scholars on one day could be snatched violently away on the next. Certainly, the Technological Age we see today is at least partially due to the royal family’s loss of control. This would be a more interesting topic of research into the classics than the one pursued by this book. Until we have a much better handle on medieval power structures, books such as this one are almost pointless. Perhaps, there are people living today with close ties to modern day royalty that still understand how royal culture maintained a knowledge base … but they ain’t talking! In Academia, the study of history is so stove-piped that there may never be a genuine attempt to uncover the true links between Byzantine and Roman Europe and the contemporary Islamic Caliphates, much less the ebb and flow of scholarship and knowledge across their ever changing borders.