Aux origines de la cartographie
Authors: Rapin Claude 
Published: May 2019

Apart from a few exceptions such as the Neo-Babylonian Map of the World exhibited in the British Museum, the first representations of the oecumene are traditionally attributed to Greek geographers. This study, however, tries to show that the earliest “realistic” cartographic vision of Asia goes back to the earlier administration of the Achaemenid Empire.

The documents taken into account are the Achaemenid lists of countries published in various forms since the time of Darius I. The circular geographical order detected in their organization has indeed given rise to several cartographic reconstructions. The most complex list, that of the DNa inscription (from the funerary monument of Darius I at Naqsh-e Rustam), seems to enumerate the countries according to radial roads from the center of the empire. This scheme is however incompatible with that of other lists, like the earlier DB inscription of Bisutun, where some country sequences are reversed compared to DNa.

Faced with these contradictions, I propose to reorganize the countries in a more “realistic” way within the limits of a discoid scheme divided into four quadrants (with a later annular peripheral belt), that may form a common cartographic system compatible with all the Achaemenid lists. This map was designed under Darius I, with a unique codified system of reading which allowed to transform it into lists of countries. This reading system can fit all the lists only if the map is oriented to the southwest (and not to the north as the Greek maps), thence the western-southwestern countries of the empire are positioned at the top of the map. In the earliest lists, according to this reading system, the enumeration started from the southwestern countries on the top of the map (types A and AB represented by DB and DPe), while later it started from the northeastern countries at the bottom of the map (type B lists mainly represented by DNa). The organization of the lists having a purely graphic origin, the variations between the maps reflect the expansion of the empire and do not seem to have been influenced by administrative or financial data.

At the same time, this cartographical approach makes it possible to understand the other lists of countries whose logic of development is difficult to identify, such as the list on the statue of Darius at Susa and related documents like the Suez inscriptions and the texts defining the four corners of the empire (DPh and DH). It allows also to interpret certain later iconographic programs, such as the bas-reliefs of Persepolis (Apadana ramp, 100 Columns Hall and Tripylon), where the organization of peoples stems from a spatial organization, free from any ideological, administrative or economic background. The same approach may finally allow to decode the list in the later Xerxes’ Daiva-inscription (XPh), whose disorderly character has nothing to do with a change in the administrative organization of the empire, but could simply be explained by the fact that the official codified reading rules of the original maps were forgotten after Darius’ reign.

This study will be developed in a second forthcoming paper that will explain how under Darius I Hecataeus was probably the only Greek geographer who had the opportunity to examine a copy of the circular Achaemenid map with the detail of the eastern regions. It will also show in what circumstances this early Greek map was lost even before Herodotus.

The Greeks were not able, until the expedition of Alexander, to reconstruct a relatively correct map of Central Asia. Even then, however, they failed to identify the Aral Sea – reached by Derdas, the ambassador Alexander sent to the Asian Scythians supposed to live “on the Bosphorus” – or to locate Chorasmia, topic of this colloquium in Bordeaux, a country that had been previously properly located in the pre-Achaemenid maps and then in the geography of Darius.