"The map of Cassini or map of the Academy is the first topographic and geometric map established of the Kingdom of France as a whole. The map was for the time a real innovation and a decisive technical advance. It is the first map to be based on a geodesic triangulation. Four generations of the Cassini carried out the work."
This map is impressively detailed and accurate. When you look at a small village-sized area that you know today, you can often recognize the features on the Cassini map (no always though ; many hills were drawn as they appeared from afar, many of the tiniest locations were marked upon hearing word of them by locals).
But it gets even more impressive when you know what the times were like when this map was made.
Neighbouring valleys hosted different languages that sometimes were not intelligible to each other.
In places, local people didn't have a name for the prominent mountain they grew up and spent their life under.
One of Cassini's young cartographers was notoriously killed by villagers who put an axe in his head, because pointing his mysterious brass and glass instruments at mountains and bell towers made them be sure he was a bad wizard.
Those were the times. And this is the map !
I work with several professional cartographers here in France. All of them have several large printed maps in their offices, just for the beauty of them. I don't know of one who does not have a Cassini map along, somewhere on an office wall.
This article (in french) gives much more illustrations and maps on the geo referencing with the area now. Its in the structure of an interview with one of the authors.
Overlaying probably wouldn’t help. These maps are not scaled. They represent landmarks, so it’s more a waypoint navigation list than what we think of as a geographic map.
It would have still been nice to have some kind of visual representation. There must be a visual way to link the map to reality -- the map is a visual device, after all.
They even have this line:
> Geo-location revealed the territory represented on the slab bears an 80% accuracy to an area around a 18 mile-long stretch of the river.
Which 18 mile-long section? That alone could have been provided.
This reminds me of the role of Ogham stones plays in Ireland and parts of Britain that were originally Celtic or partially Celtic[1] A primitive early alphabet survived an incredible amount of time, from the fifth and sixth centuries. For reference, this is around the time of the collapse of the Western Roman empire.
The best place to do something like that is in a cave, ideally in the side of a mountain, so that erosion doesn't have a chance. That's where iirc most cave paintings and artefacts are found nowadays. That, or buried in ruins covered by time.
"It was probably a way to affirm the ownership of the territory by a small prince or king at the time,"
Frustratingly I can't find a lovely quote I stumbled across recently that was (poorly paraphrased) something like 'Small men pointing at things on a map is the leading cause of war'.
It might have been from one of Simon Winder's superb European trilogy.
Certainly there does seem to be a trend amongst insecure monarchs and dictators eager to accurately audit their domain, and identify the neighbouring realms that desperately need to be liberated from their current owners / occupants.
> Small men pointing at things on a map is the leading cause of war'
That may be true for people looking for conquest.
Wars can also be waged over resources when you’re running out of them (like a growing pop or your land has become infertile, etc.)
That quote trivializes things a bit. Kings couldn’t go to war just because. They’d have to get general agreement from lots of stakeholders, else they hold the bag.
My personal reaction to this statement in the article was that it seemed like an overreaching assumption. The map could have been a land separation agreement between two sheep herders, or something else similarly prosaic. Not sure why we need to ascribe great importance to items that don't present any evidence of such.
But this kind of artifact must have been expensive to produce, requiring time and skill of one or more masons. I can't find the weight mentioned, but given the dimensions and the density of schist, it should be around 3000 pounds.
Agreed that it may be similar to the archaeological catch-all of 'this was probably used in religious ceremonies'.
OTOH for something like this to have been constructed ~3800 years ago suggests that it was probably the product of a more sophisticated kingdom than a couple of sheep herders would have had either the means or inclination to construct.
That it has survived this long - well, maybe a bias, but also may indicate that it was well cared for, and stored away carefully at some point, such that it survived the next few millennia.
For all we know, there was not that much of a difference between very successful sheepherders and small princes back then - and bronze was not a common material back then. Animal skin parchment was readily available - It is a good assumption that they chose bronze because they wanted the agreement to persist for a long time, and to show it's importance.
> Certainly there does seem to be a trend amongst insecure monarchs and dictators eager to accurately audit their domain
or just to know where they can and can't levy taxes. Or go hunting without impinging on a neighbor's land. Or cutting trees, digging a quarry or a mine and so on
2 meters by 1.5 meters is a nice big table size... They could use something like this with carved miniatures for visually understanding the domain, or planning certain initiatives, though there's no evidence in the article to suggest they did. In our context we'd be more likely to use something like this for war games.
From my admittedly very amateur reading about the bronze age, civilization and especially warfare was actually pretty advanced at that point (especially at the later stages). I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was a war room planning table type thing. Totally conjecture though.
"The map of Cassini or map of the Academy is the first topographic and geometric map established of the Kingdom of France as a whole. The map was for the time a real innovation and a decisive technical advance. It is the first map to be based on a geodesic triangulation. Four generations of the Cassini carried out the work."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini_map