Re-Discovering the Greater Egypt: The Cartographic Treasure Trove of Rare Nineteenth Century German Geographic Journals
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Demhardt, I.
1UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON Email: demhardt@uta.edu
Abstract
When the enlightened thinking blended with the emerging second age of discoveries at about 1800, it ushered in the ‘golden era of geography’. This coincided with a never before or after experienced popular interest in travel accounts, regional geography and associated cartographic products. The educated classes across Europe followed the adventures and discoveries of idolized travelers like Humboldt, Franklin, Livingstone or Hedin who took the audiences to the many corners of the globe hitherto little or not known at all to the Occident. While the historiography of explorative cartography always made good use of primary sources, monographs published by the explorers and, of course, the secondary literature, it appears that an exceptional vibrant category of sources for mostly logistical reasons was not yet fully appreciated: contemporary geography magazines. When taking Germany as a case study, one of the powerhouses of geographical thought and exploration in the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1780s – 1914), one is surprised to find out that there were at least about 30 magazines with a geographical focus active in that period. But for a long time only a hand full like Petermanns Mittheilungen or Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin were consulted internationally. Beyond these regulars, however, there was a vibrant scene of periodicals which deserves more attention because they provided broader audiences with almost ‘real time’ and thus perception forming coverage of geographic discoveries and cartographic unveiling. The adversaries responsible for hitherto ‘flying beneath the radar’ do include but are not limited to an often odd journal structure, mushrooming yet short lived appearances, hard to find complete paper runs at major scholarly libraries even within Germany and, not only for foreign researchers, the gothic typesetting. Thanks to the advances in the digital age increasingly such journals become accessible and, with the help of OCR- and translation software, digestible even for scholars with a different mother tongue. Against this technological backdrop the paper reports results of a research project aimed at identifying trends in the exploration coverage and accompanying cartographic visualizations. The paper will address challenges and benefits of researching rare journals, present overall findings of the research project including pointing to digital access points and, finally, highlight four key areas of Greater Egypt: the Suez Canal and Sinai, the Oasis in the Western Desert, the Upper Nile (Sudan) and Libya. Disclosure: An abstract on the Arctic in German Geography Journals will be submitted to the ICHC in Antwerp. Due to the different regional focus the overlap is restricted to the formal discussion of the project background and methods.
Keywords
Exploration; Northeast Africa; Cartography in Journals