Friday 10 August 2012

The World The RIGHT Way Up or The Downunder Folk Are Revolting

Behold here is a map of the world as I reckon it should look! Totally perfect! I reckon it looks great. Aotearoa/New Zealand is now on top of the world where it belongs.

I am not alone in thinking this way either. The map above was actually created by one young Stuart McArthur of Melbourne, Australia. When he actually drew his first "right side up" map at the age of twelve years old his geography teacher told him to redraw his assignment the "correct" way up if he wanted to pass the subject. Years later while attending Melbourne University,  he produced the world's first modern "south up" map, and launched it on Australia Day in 1979.

Here's the thing. There is no particular reason why the Northern hemisphere should be perceived as being "up" or "on top" of the planet nor is this perspective necessarily "correct". Equally there is no reason why the South should be seen as "below" or "downunder" as it is often described as being. This is a convention that has taken place over a few centuries now, when northern hemisphere navigators started using the North Star and Magnetic compass.

Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is where the word orientation comes from. The perception therefore of North as "above" is a eurocentric idea, and because most of us in this modern westernised world grow up in cultures where this view is familiar, we "believe" unquestioningly that it is the only view.

So in Biblical Times the evidence from the Torah showed  that east was at the top of all maps. (At least this is how it was told to me, I am no biblical scholar myself). In Genesis when Abraham's nephew, Lot, is captured in war and carried away and Abraham races to the rescue, when he and his men catch up with Lot's captors and set him free, this happens in "Chovah which is to the left of Damascus." (Gen. 14:15). Chovah is north of Damascus. In Psalms 89:13 it says, "The north and the right, You created them". This implies that right is synonymous with south, so you are facing east when you read the map.

People in Ancient Arabia placed south at the top. This is because when you wake up (in Arabia) and face the sun, south is on the right. Because of positive associations with the right as opposed to left, they put that on top. Yemen is so named because it is on the "yamin" right of Arabia. And of course, with the sea to the south of them there was nothing "on top" of the country, so they preferred it that way.

The Ancient Chinese were the first to invent the compass, which they always thought of as pointing south. To them, South was a sacred direction, and in ceremonies, the king would always face south. (Living in the southern part of our world, in the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand even, I'm inclined to like this idea).

In Medieval Europe cartographers always drew Jerusalem on top of their maps because that was the Holy Land. This meant that east was more or less at the top. Again.

And in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the area where New Zealand's capital city Wellington now stands was known to our first nations people (tangatawhenua) as Te Upoku O Te Ika (the Head of the Fish). This fish - as we all know from the Maui legend - is the North Island of New Zealand. But when we look at the now "normalised" modern map of our world it shows the head of the fish facing "down" towards Antarctica; the tail of the fish is on the northern end of the fish body. The problem here is that in the Maori view of the sacred and profane (tapu and noa), the head can never below the tail. One does not, for example, place your bum on a pillow where your head may later lie. In Maori cosmology, therefore, the head of the fish has to be on the "above" and southern end of the North Island. South is pointing upwards and now the Antarctic is on the "top of the world", as shown in the McArthur map.

8 comments:

  1. Richard Dawkins, in The God Hypothesis has written on the unquestioning assumption that north is somehow right. He illustrates it by the hoary old science fiction premise where a starship is far away in space, and one of the crew says to another, "Just think, back on Earth it's spring now!"

    I found an analogy with the Americans. Once, back in the days ten years ago when I used to visit chat rooms, I had introduced myself as a dentist and after talking a while said I'd have to leave for work. At once, one of the Americans there jumped up. "Ha ha, what a liar you are, who ever heard of dentists working in the middle of the night?"

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    1. Oh I adored chatrooms for that sort of thing. Especially around New Year when us Kiwis would be living in 2012 (for example) while Americans were still on 2011 (ok, pretty childish but fun at the time).

      I reckon somewhere on Earth it will always be spring. Or Autumn, or Summer, or Winter. I'm liking the sound of Richard Dawkins book which I just googled and found a Wikipedia entry for in which is this point is mad: "At the end of chapter 4, Why there almost certainly is no God, Dawkins sums up his argument and states, "The temptation [to attribute the appearance of a design to actual design itself] is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable." (wikipedia)

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  2. Once in school, I asked why the US was in the middle of the map. I was sharply rebuked.

    It is somehow comforting to realize that it is always spring somewhere on earth. Then, again, somewhere it is always winter.

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    2. Ae. "Tis winter in Aotearoa/New Zealand as I type and what a thoroughly wintry day it is. I always feel it is such a shame when children are rebuked for thinking, don't you? Thanks for commenting.

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  4. I could happily live with that map even if it does look a bit bottom heavy at first sight. So far as I can see the only thing the north has got going for it is magnetism.

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    1. Hey look, its got to be better than a top-heavy world which looks like it could topple over at any moment!

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