Thousand year old maps on display in Victoria
Posted October 7, 2012 12:13 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VICTORIA (NEWS1130) – Maps thousands of years old are on display in the provincial capital this weekend.
Envisioning the World: The First Printed Maps exhibit has opened up at the Royal BC Museum.
History Curator Lorne Hammond says the maps are a way to see how cultures used to see the natural world.
“As the world starts to come through the doorway to understand what the modern planet is and it’s just before they discover us,” Hammond notes. “Each one of these maps are extremely rare. Some of them were printed before [Christopher] Columbus. One of them goes back to a Roman map that pre-dates printing and is reprinted in the middle of the Renaissance.”
The exhibit also features a 1696 map that shows how little of the BC coast was charted at that time.
“You’ll never get a chance to see this kind of beauty again really. It’s small, it’s compact, it’s very meditative but it’s just absolutely glorious.”
The exhibit runs through Jan 27th before it returns to California.
