15 - The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200–1800

Summary

Cartography can help us understand how European knowledge of the topography and toponymy of the Delta has evolved over the centuries; however, we must be aware of the intellectual, social, religious and economic conditions under which maps were produced. Their content is far from exclusively geographic and the same map could show many levels of miscellaneous knowledge. Often, no European traveller had ever seen the cities drawn on the map. Consequently, before the nineteenth century, maps of Egypt and the Delta were unstable and contradictory – different maps expressed different Deltas, different representations of the world. The maps discussed in this chapter will paint a picture – a necessarily uncertain, shifting and composite picture – of knowledge acquired on the north of Egypt. This chapter will hopefully be a useful tool for understanding the evolution of European knowledge of the Delta and the research conducted in different places. By providing a list of the main documents, both cartographic and textual, relevant to the evolution of the cartography of the Delta, I hope to make place-specific research possible for those who wish it. It will also allow us to better understand what a thirteenth- or eighteenth-century map can say and not say.