Quotes of the Day

At the dawn of the first millennium, a man could walk south from Ethiopia and get all the way to China. Six hundred years later, the Mediterranean was literally the center of the world, and the island now called Sri Lanka occupied the eastern half of the Red Sea. In the 1660s, the Mekong River, along with the Yangtze and the Salween, dangled like scraggly chin hairs from a Tibetan lake roughly the size of Taiwan. Or so it appeared on the most accurate European map from each of these eras.

In today's world, where aerial photographs can show us the precise location of Manhattan's manholes and the Internet can inform us in seconds how to travel most efficiently from Tiananmen Square to the Champs Elysées, maps have become monotonously correct. Everyone can have them. Almost everyone can use them. But their precision and ubiquity have made them humdrum. They intrigue us only slightly more than garden shears and can openers.

The maps of our forebears, on the other hand, blended together all the marvels of painting, literature, religion and science. They were not mere tools, but objects of mystery and luxury, the treasures of Kings and the seducers of sailors. Yet these old maps now captivate us as much for their many errors as for what they got right. Thus Kenneth Nebenzahl's Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond: 2,000 Years of Exploring the East, an elegant compilation of many of history's finest—if arrestingly flawed—cartographic specimens, cannot help but enchant. Its dozens of plates offer fodder for hours of visual grazing.

As Nebenzahl's title somewhat misleadingly suggests, the parameters of this collection coincide roughly with those of Asia. The "silk road" here distends geographically and semantically to encompass any and all lands east of Western Europe. But the Orient is more than a geographic orientation for the collection—it is an evolving and affecting idea. Nebenzahl's mapmakers—with only two exceptions—are Westerners, and the pictures they drew of unknown lands reveal more about Europe's imagination than Asia's landscape.

After a brief glance at the 15th century rediscovery of the monumental 2nd century opus of Claudius Ptolemy (who was responsible for the idea that Africa and Asia were linked by a southern land bridge), Nebenzahl plunges into the world of fantasy and Christian ideology that dominated mapmaking between the fall of the Greeks and their rediscovery during the Renaissance. Many of the examples from this period scarcely look like maps at all. They are too beautiful, for one thing—they teem with castles and knights, thickets of blooming vines, schools of fish, piles of jewels. They blend fact and myth to produce visions of Asia that are both alluring and terrifying. In a stunning Arabesque world map from the 8th century, Beatus of Liébana, a Benedictine monk who tutored the Spanish royal family, describes India as "famous for gems and elephants," and adds that "there are men of all colors, huge elephants and dragons, the Monoceros beast, the parrot bird, ebony wood, cinnamon, pepper and aromatic reed. It sends forth ivory, precious stones, beryls, adamant burning carbuncles, and pearls." But, he warns, there are also "mountains of gold impossible to approach because of dragons and gryphons and monsters of enormous men."

Much of Nebenzahl's commentary on the maps focuses on the complex networks of patronage and scholarly collaboration that led to their creation. Inevitably, the maps sometimes flatter the rulers for whom they were drawn. The 12th century Moroccan nobleman Al-Idrisi, for example, produced a world map for Roger II of Sicily that swelled his kingdom so that it was approximately half the size of the Iberian Peninsula. Yet Al-Idrisi also achieved a new level of accuracy by integrating the knowledge of Muslim mariners with that of Christian scholars, so that Asia was at last separated from Africa by an island-dotted Indian Ocean.

A far more elaborate synthesis of existing sources of geographic knowledge informs the spectacular Catalan Atlas, commissioned by the crown prince of Aragon as a present for the 13-year-old Charles VI of France in 1375. The work of Cresques Abraham, the "master of maps and compasses" of the Spanish court, the Atlas was the earliest map to incorporate the travels of Marco Polo a century earlier, and thus sketched a recognizable outline of Asia that would be refined over the next 500 years of exploration. It includes a Europeanate illustration of Beijing and a portrait of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Cresques doesn't skimp on detail. He crams each of the Atlas' eight leaves with brilliant illuminations of myths (both biblical and classical), Kings, flags, ships and monsters, as well as the first known depiction of a Silk Road caravan, with caped traders' riding camels across the Taklimakan desert in what is now China's Xinjiang province.

Sadly, the Catalan Atlas, like many of the other maps shrunk down to fit the pages of this book, is so intricate and large that much of its detail is incomprehensible, even with the help of a magnifying glass and a Latin dictionary. Another frustration is that many of the maps' most eye-catching details go unexplained because Nebenzahl's commentary focuses primarily on the historical context. But perhaps this failing is fitting. Presented like this, with their mysteries intact, the maps become, once again, invitations to further explorations. They beckon us into the shadowy waters of the past in search of shores whose edges we have only just begun to glimpse.

• Susan Jakes/Beijing
• An enchanting book charts the history of Europe's fanciful, flawed attempts to map the East