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The article does get to my base assumptions, but it takes awhile. (1) North Star was what people navigated by first, so would orient maps to that regardless of

The article does get to my base assumptions, but it takes awhile. (1) North Star was what people navigated by first, so would orient maps to that regardless of which way the words were written -- so people started writing the words to fit. (2) Compasses, pick north or south for same reason. North was picked because we were already using the North Star. It all just makes so much better intuitive sense than a "Conspiracy of Northern European Hegemony"

asolove 13y ago
I agree that "conspiracy" isn't the right explanation, but only people in the Northern Hemisphere would navigate by the North Star to begin with. So we're still stuck at this being based on who made the maps. But note that the vast majority of people (and therefore civilizations) live in the Northern Hemisphere, so this is statistics more than anything else.
- mcv 13y ago
  As it happens, the vast majority of the people in the world live in the northern hemisphere. There's really not a lot of land in the southern hemisphere. The equator bisects Africa, South America and Indonesia. China, India, the Middle East, they're all in the northern hemisphere.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    That's true, but that doesn't explain why North is at the top. For example, the Chinese also live in the Northern hemisphere. But as the Al Jazeera article points out, the Chinese put south at the top. The Chinese discovered the compass, and they called it a "south-pointing stone." It could easily have ended up the other way. The Chinese sent fleets on their own voyages of discovery. But the emperor died, another emperor took over, and the exploration program was cancelled.
    - ars 13y ago
      > That's true, but that doesn't explain why North is at the top. As said earlier in the thread: Because of the North Star.
      - na85 13y ago
        It's not quite so one dimensional as that.
        gertef 13y ago
        North and South are in the same dimension.
      - tanzam75 13y ago
        > As said earlier in the thread: Because of the North Star. But that doesn't explain why north points up. It only explains why the compass rose points north. As the article says: "These maps had no real up or down — pictures and words faced in all sorts of directions, generally pointing inward from the edge of the map." So now you have another step: you have to orient the map. Why north at the top? Why not "orient" the map so that east faces up? Or west? Or south? The compass rose is just a reference -- you could face it in any way. This is why the article comes up with all sorts of explanations and then finally says that it was just a convention established by Ptolemy. Because at every step of the way between the North Star and north-up, you could ask "Why this way? Why not the other way?" And then when that is answered, you could ask "Why?" again. And so on. But when something is arbitrary, then there is no "Why?" to be answered. It's just arbitrary.
        JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        I think that goes too far. We have a context: the convention of reading with the letters facing up, orienting pictures with words, etc. You want to see where a hand compass is pointing, you turn until the needle points ahead or 'up'; then you read off the heading (or the other way around). Not too far from that, to writing it on paper that way.
georgecmu 13y ago
(1) North Star was what people navigated by first, so would orient maps to that regardless of which way the words were written -- so people started writing the words to fit. This would be true only for the people that consistently navigated in Northern latitudes, where the North star is high enough above the horizon. For Arabs, who were the predominant maritime power until 1500s, esp. in the Indian Ocean, that was not the case.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Well, there's the southern cross in the southern hemisphere, I wonder if they used that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux
  - lotharbot 13y ago
    Yes, but it's more complicated. The southern cross is quite a long way (like 30 degrees) from true south; we use it and a handful of other stars to find the blank part of the sky where true South is. The other complicating factor is that Earth has a long "wobble" over the course of about 27,000 years (the technical term is "axial precession".) Right now, Polaris is within a degree of true north, but back in the fifth century it was 8 degrees away. In another 12 millennia true North will be all the way over by Vega. Likewise, the southern cross points somewhere vaguely close to true south, but how close it is varies from one millennium to the next.
    - na85 13y ago
      Of course, in the fifth century I'm sure they neither knew nor cared that the North star was a few degrees off of actual North. It's not really relevant if the navigation error only changes by less than a degree over the course of a lifetime. The earliest navigators in Sumer in the 4th millennium BCE wouldn't care if a particular constellation points 5 or 20 degrees away from North.
      - lotharbot 13y ago
miguelpais 13y ago
But remember also that northern hemisphere navigators like the Portuguese also had to align their maps in a different direction as they crossed the equator and lost their main reference star on their way around Africa. They soon discovered how to navigate by then aligning with a group of stars called "Cruzeiro do Sul", the Crux constellation[1], which means that it could be reasonable to actually start aligning the maps southwards (and the portuguese were the ones mapping the whole coast of Africa at the time). But I guess that by that time (around the 1470s), they were already too used to aligning northwards... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux Edit: I meant northern hemisphere navigators, instead of northern european.
- danmaz74 13y ago
  If Portugal is in northern Europe, who is then in southern Europe??
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Roman North Africa? ;-)
- einhverfr 13y ago
  One of the most interesting beliefs one runs into in the Middle Ages is the idea that although the world is round, it is impossible to travel across the equator by sea or land. This factors into medieval accounts of Alexander the Great for example.
  - DrStalker 13y ago
    What did they think prevented this?
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      At least from the medieval literature I have read, it seems like there was a sense that divine retribution would prevent it. I.e. not necessarily about physical barriers but because it was hubris to attempt such a feat.
einhverfr 13y ago
I don't think it is just that. If you haven't read Ptolomy (and in particular all of Tetrabiblos, the Almagest, and his Geographia), you really should. Ptolomy was quite an incredibly observant individual and he worked through things with an attention to detail that is quite impressive. He clearly understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere, but he placed Alexandria not in the southernmost part of the known world as the article suggests but in the center. A lot of this was pride and the sense that the center had everything good from the edges (see Tetrabiblos), but to some extent everywhere is the center, right? He painstakingly discusses the proof that the earth is a sphere in Almagest. His geographia is worth reading and directly relevant to this. I suspect that Ptolomy put the north at the top simply because he was in the Northern Hemisphere and knew it. He displays no great knowledge of navigation, though he does explain how the stars shift as you move north and south (again see Tetrabiblos and Almagest), and he even seemed to be aware that Mercury and Venus revolved around the sun (or so he seemed to say in Tetrabiblos). All in all he's one of those authors one really has to read if one is interested in history, even the seemingly weird works he wrote (Tetrabiblos is an astrology manual but includes a lot of information about Ptolomy's understanding of geography not found in Geographia, and astronomy not found in Almagest).
- asolove 13y ago
  Interesting, what do you mean he "understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere"? There are an infinite number of possible ways to divide a sphere into hemispheres, so how did he define the hemispheres and how did he describe the one he was in? Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? (I presume he didn't know that he was in the northern hemisphere because he thought he was closer to the northern magnetic pole.)
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    If you read Tetrabiblos, he describes Africans (presumably from Nubia) as "burned by the sun" and explains this due to the fact that the "sun is over their heads." While the Africans are too dark, he doesn't think much of Northern Europeans either, who he says look sickly and pale because the bear is over their heads. Alexandria, being the center of the world, and neither too light nor too dark, nor too far East nor too far West, is best of course in his eyes. In Almagest he describes two things. The first is the shape of the earth, where he points out that it must be a sphere because of the changes in inclination of the moon and stars as you head North and South, and the changes in times of lunar eclipses when you head East to West. His descriptions of the rotation of the earth and the position of the sun relative to the earth leave no doubt that he was aware of Northern and Southern hemispheres. > Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? It's a little hard. Alexandria's sub-tropical. He does mention the inclination of the earth relative to the equator though, iirc, in Almagest.
twelvechairs 13y ago
There's also (3) True north (the cold poles) aligns with magnetic north. South works too but once the world was cicumnavigated and this was understood it reinforces north-south as an important direction over east-west as temperature changes along this axis but not the other.
mrcactu5 13y ago
there's plenty of evidence for "Conspiracy of Northern European Hegemony" just leave Northern Europe and get someone's opinion from there.

asolove 13y ago

I agree that "conspiracy" isn't the right explanation, but only people in the Northern Hemisphere would navigate by the North Star to begin with. So we're still stuck at this being based on who made the maps. But note that the vast majority of people (and therefore civilizations) live in the Northern Hemisphere, so this is statistics more than anything else.

mcv 13y ago
As it happens, the vast majority of the people in the world live in the northern hemisphere. There's really not a lot of land in the southern hemisphere. The equator bisects Africa, South America and Indonesia. China, India, the Middle East, they're all in the northern hemisphere.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  That's true, but that doesn't explain why North is at the top. For example, the Chinese also live in the Northern hemisphere. But as the Al Jazeera article points out, the Chinese put south at the top. The Chinese discovered the compass, and they called it a "south-pointing stone." It could easily have ended up the other way. The Chinese sent fleets on their own voyages of discovery. But the emperor died, another emperor took over, and the exploration program was cancelled.
  - ars 13y ago
    > That's true, but that doesn't explain why North is at the top. As said earlier in the thread: Because of the North Star.
    - na85 13y ago
      It's not quite so one dimensional as that.
      - gertef 13y ago
        North and South are in the same dimension.
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      > As said earlier in the thread: Because of the North Star. But that doesn't explain why north points up. It only explains why the compass rose points north. As the article says: "These maps had no real up or down — pictures and words faced in all sorts of directions, generally pointing inward from the edge of the map." So now you have another step: you have to orient the map. Why north at the top? Why not "orient" the map so that east faces up? Or west? Or south? The compass rose is just a reference -- you could face it in any way. This is why the article comes up with all sorts of explanations and then finally says that it was just a convention established by Ptolemy. Because at every step of the way between the North Star and north-up, you could ask "Why this way? Why not the other way?" And then when that is answered, you could ask "Why?" again. And so on. But when something is arbitrary, then there is no "Why?" to be answered. It's just arbitrary.
      - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        I think that goes too far. We have a context: the convention of reading with the letters facing up, orienting pictures with words, etc. You want to see where a hand compass is pointing, you turn until the needle points ahead or 'up'; then you read off the heading (or the other way around). Not too far from that, to writing it on paper that way.

georgecmu 13y ago

(1) North Star was what people navigated by first, so would orient maps to that regardless of which way the words were written -- so people started writing the words to fit. This would be true only for the people that consistently navigated in Northern latitudes, where the North star is high enough above the horizon. For Arabs, who were the predominant maritime power until 1500s, esp. in the Indian Ocean, that was not the case.

raverbashing 13y ago
Well, there's the southern cross in the southern hemisphere, I wonder if they used that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux
- lotharbot 13y ago
  Yes, but it's more complicated. The southern cross is quite a long way (like 30 degrees) from true south; we use it and a handful of other stars to find the blank part of the sky where true South is. The other complicating factor is that Earth has a long "wobble" over the course of about 27,000 years (the technical term is "axial precession".) Right now, Polaris is within a degree of true north, but back in the fifth century it was 8 degrees away. In another 12 millennia true North will be all the way over by Vega. Likewise, the southern cross points somewhere vaguely close to true south, but how close it is varies from one millennium to the next.
  - na85 13y ago
    Of course, in the fifth century I'm sure they neither knew nor cared that the North star was a few degrees off of actual North. It's not really relevant if the navigation error only changes by less than a degree over the course of a lifetime. The earliest navigators in Sumer in the 4th millennium BCE wouldn't care if a particular constellation points 5 or 20 degrees away from North.
    - lotharbot 13y ago

miguelpais 13y ago

But remember also that northern hemisphere navigators like the Portuguese also had to align their maps in a different direction as they crossed the equator and lost their main reference star on their way around Africa. They soon discovered how to navigate by then aligning with a group of stars called "Cruzeiro do Sul", the Crux constellation[1], which means that it could be reasonable to actually start aligning the maps southwards (and the portuguese were the ones mapping the whole coast of Africa at the time). But I guess that by that time (around the 1470s), they were already too used to aligning northwards... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux Edit: I meant northern hemisphere navigators, instead of northern european.

danmaz74 13y ago
If Portugal is in northern Europe, who is then in southern Europe??
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Roman North Africa? ;-)
einhverfr 13y ago
One of the most interesting beliefs one runs into in the Middle Ages is the idea that although the world is round, it is impossible to travel across the equator by sea or land. This factors into medieval accounts of Alexander the Great for example.
- DrStalker 13y ago
  What did they think prevented this?
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    At least from the medieval literature I have read, it seems like there was a sense that divine retribution would prevent it. I.e. not necessarily about physical barriers but because it was hubris to attempt such a feat.

einhverfr 13y ago

I don't think it is just that. If you haven't read Ptolomy (and in particular all of Tetrabiblos, the Almagest, and his Geographia), you really should. Ptolomy was quite an incredibly observant individual and he worked through things with an attention to detail that is quite impressive. He clearly understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere, but he placed Alexandria not in the southernmost part of the known world as the article suggests but in the center. A lot of this was pride and the sense that the center had everything good from the edges (see Tetrabiblos), but to some extent everywhere is the center, right? He painstakingly discusses the proof that the earth is a sphere in Almagest. His geographia is worth reading and directly relevant to this. I suspect that Ptolomy put the north at the top simply because he was in the Northern Hemisphere and knew it. He displays no great knowledge of navigation, though he does explain how the stars shift as you move north and south (again see Tetrabiblos and Almagest), and he even seemed to be aware that Mercury and Venus revolved around the sun (or so he seemed to say in Tetrabiblos). All in all he's one of those authors one really has to read if one is interested in history, even the seemingly weird works he wrote (Tetrabiblos is an astrology manual but includes a lot of information about Ptolomy's understanding of geography not found in Geographia, and astronomy not found in Almagest).

asolove 13y ago
Interesting, what do you mean he "understood he was in the Northern Hemisphere"? There are an infinite number of possible ways to divide a sphere into hemispheres, so how did he define the hemispheres and how did he describe the one he was in? Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? (I presume he didn't know that he was in the northern hemisphere because he thought he was closer to the northern magnetic pole.)
- einhverfr 13y ago
  If you read Tetrabiblos, he describes Africans (presumably from Nubia) as "burned by the sun" and explains this due to the fact that the "sun is over their heads." While the Africans are too dark, he doesn't think much of Northern Europeans either, who he says look sickly and pale because the bear is over their heads. Alexandria, being the center of the world, and neither too light nor too dark, nor too far East nor too far West, is best of course in his eyes. In Almagest he describes two things. The first is the shape of the earth, where he points out that it must be a sphere because of the changes in inclination of the moon and stars as you head North and South, and the changes in times of lunar eclipses when you head East to West. His descriptions of the rotation of the earth and the position of the sun relative to the earth leave no doubt that he was aware of Northern and Southern hemispheres. > Was he aware that the seasons were the result of the Earth's tilt and that they would be swapped in the other hemisphere as defined by that tilt? It's a little hard. Alexandria's sub-tropical. He does mention the inclination of the earth relative to the equator though, iirc, in Almagest.

twelvechairs 13y ago

There's also (3) True north (the cold poles) aligns with magnetic north. South works too but once the world was cicumnavigated and this was understood it reinforces north-south as an important direction over east-west as temperature changes along this axis but not the other.

mrcactu5 13y ago

there's plenty of evidence for "Conspiracy of Northern European Hegemony" just leave Northern Europe and get someone's opinion from there.