History // The Daily Render by Nikolas R. Schiller // Page Number 9

The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

|| 5/17/2007 || 11:09 am || Comments Off || ||
Darfur was on the map in 1858…

but its not on the map today. I wonder if Americans would care more about the people of Darfur if it wasn’t just a region in Sudan?

Image links to high resolution version from the Perry-CastaÃ±eda Library
Map Collection at the University of Texas Library via the Michigan State University Library.

|| 5/14/2007 || 9:20 am || Comments Off || ||
Quadrant Map of DC – Translated into Latin – “Novus Columbus Quadrans”

Legend:
+ New Columbia – Novus Columbus
+ North West – Septentrio Occidens
+ North East – Septentrio Oriens
+ South West – Merides Occidens
+ South East – Merides Oriens
+ Anno Domino MMVII – Year of Our Lord 2007
+ Signature written in Arabic

This is my first draft of this map. I’ll probably make another with a different color scheme. I feel that there is a lot to be added to this map, but not sure where to start. It’s my first time using Latin as a main focus of a map. I got the idea after looking through the old maps yesterday that it would be funny to label the quadrants of DC in Latin (and future maps with historic samplings). Being that some feel Washington is the modern day Rome, I felt this lexical motif works well. It’s partly educational, partly humorous, and it crosses a few lingusitic barriers that I’ve never approached. Moreover, I am well aware that the water in the area of DC I live in has lead in the water, just like the Romans!

The choice of New Columbia as the title is a reference to the name that DC residents chose to-be for the state of the District of Columbia. I’ve honestly never liked the name “New Columbia” for the state’s name, it’s too old. There is nothing New about naming another state New. Plus, as for abbreviations, NC is already used by North Carolina! So after DC becomes a state, would it be called New Columbia in name but still go by DC or Washington? Or all three?

|| 4/3/2007 || 2:20 pm || Comments Off || ||
What a difference a year (and an internationally syndicated story) makes!

Over a half million hits last month! Check the stats for the month of March 2006 & 2005 after the fold…

+ MORE

|| 3/23/2007 || 5:39 pm || Comments Off || ||
Map proves Portuguese discovered Australia

If Trickett is right, Mendonca’s map shows he sailed past Fraser Island off Australia’s northeast coast, into Botany Bay in Sydney, and south to Kangaroo Island off southern Australia, before returning to Malacca via New Zealand’s north island.

Mendonca’s discovery was kept secret to prevent other European powers reaching the new land, said Trickett, who believes his theory is supported by discoveries of 16th century Portuguese artifacts on the Australian and New Zealand coasts.

Read the rest of the Reuters report here.

|| 3/21/2007 || 9:49 am || Comments Off || ||
Hic sunt dracones!

I’ve had a few friends and strangers comment that they loved the story, but they didn’t understand what the name “Here be dragons” meant. Unless you know a little bit about cartographic history, it could mean a lot of things….

This morning I found a good explaination from the MapHist website:

How and when did the notion that old maps commonly bore the phrase “here be dragons” become established in popular belief? Did a Shakespeare or a Byron put it into circulation? It must at least pre-date the publication of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short story “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head” in Lord Peter Views the Body (London: Gollancz, 1928), in which a character refers to having seen “hic dracones” on an old map [spotted by both Andrew S. Cook and Benjamin Darius Weiss]. Does it pre-date the publication of the text of the LenoxGlobe in 1879? Why dragons, and not one of the other terrifying creatures depicted on old maps? We don’t know.

According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “The animal called a dragon is a winged crocodile with a serpent’s tail; whence the words serpent and dragon are sometimes interchangeable.” Furthermore, says Brewer, the word “dragon” was used “by ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages as the symbol of sin in general and paganism in particular. The metaphor is derived from Rev. xii. 9, where Satan is termed ‘the great dragon’.” In this sense, a picture of a dragon on an old map is analogous to a modern map which shows Commonwealth countries in pink, not to a vignette of the Official State Bird, or the notation “unsurveyed area”. As M. Hoogvliet pointed out to MapHist, “The dragon (draco) is a sub-species of the serpents (cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae XII,4,4: “Draco maior cunctorum serpentium …”); most medieval maps have serpents in southern Africa (i.e. southernmost part of habitable world), which derives from Classical Roman authors, e.g. Pliny the Elder and Soninus.”

Read the rest here. Or to summarize, “Here Be Dragons” / “Hic sunt dracones” was placed at the edges of maps showing the edge of the known world. However, I am told there aren’t any maps that actually use the exact text and I have not seen a map with that text on it.

|| 9/29/2005 || 9:00 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
Ball of Destruction

: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :
Ball of Destruction by Nikolas Schiller

Ball of Destruction

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|| 6/20/2005 || 12:15 am || Comments Off || ||
accelerated Administration planning for the Iraq War

I am in the process of cleaning up my room and archiving the documents I’ve amassed in the last few months. I was looking over some of the documents from my formerly elected officials (now that I’ve transfered residences to DC) and I found a timely document from Kit Bond. Timely because on Thursday I went to the White House for a rally concerning the Downing Street Memo. Finding this document makes me wonder about what was discussed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting…