Discovered in the ancient city of Madaba, in what is now Jordan, in 1884, the earliest map of the Land of Israel known to archaeologists was created in the 6th century CE. It was constructed by Byzantine Christians from mosaic tiles and is thought to have been 65 feet in length, although only about half survives. Pnina Arad writes:
The Madaba map is the earliest known map to display the Holy Land and the only known instance in the first millennium of a map depicting a country in full. That is to say that the Madaba map was novel due to the fact that it represented a new kind of visual medium—a graphic description of an entire country, one of the striking features of which was that it didn’t show roads. The map does show mountain ranges, rivers, streams, [and] architectural symbols representing towns and holy sites.
The holy places are depicted via simple structures with red roofs, probably symbolic representations of churches that existed there. The towns are represented through a range of symbols that hint at their varying importance. The Greek titles mostly note place names, but there are also short inscriptions associating particular locations with specific biblical events.
For example: “Galgala, also the twelve stones,” “Bethabara of St. John, the Baptism,” “Ephraim which is Ephraea, there walked the Lord,” “Ailamon, where stood the moon in the time of Joshua [son of] Nun one day.” The names of the Tribes of Israel are also noted and their distribution on the map represents the division of Canaan according to the Bible.
What we have here is a picture that combines topography and religious tradition, and that eliminates the gaps between past and present. The inscriptions create a narrative that seemed to have two aims: to place the past of the Scriptures in the geographic space of the land, and to conceptualize that land as a sacred space.
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