Part V: Civilian Mapping of Late Ottoman Turkey

Efforts during the late 19 ^th  and early 20 ^th  centuries to produce accurate maps of the physical and cultural landscape of Asia Minor (and indeed the entire Ottoman empire) were by no means made exclusively by the military authorities whose work is the focus of Parts II–IV. Their mapping – as seen in  Part I  – developed from the initiatives of Heinrich Kiepert and many other civilian travelers. Meantime, a growing variety of maps also came to be produced for all kinds of other purposes, which this Part V aims to illustrate. Notably, Ottoman civil authorities – whose staff members now included many Europeans – recognized the value of maps for their work. Salname (‘year-book’ reports providing a range of statistical data) issued by vilayets (provinces) between the mid-1860s and 1921–1922 came to include a very small-scale sketch map of the province’s area, marking principal settlements and routes. Three examples are shown here. However, there was no standard format for salname, and vilayets differed widely in how often they issued them. None of these maps bears a date, which can only be presumed as the year to which the salname related.

As a supplement to his Specialkarte vom westlichen Kleinasien (see Part I sect. 6), Heinrich Kiepert issued an outline map of the vilayets and their sub-districts within its scope. Dated 1892, the outline was based on salname of 1891–1892, but Kiepert cautioned users that despite his best efforts it might not be wholly accurate (its demarcation of boundaries in particular).

It was data (again, of mixed reliability) from salname that assisted the French scholar Vital Cuinet’s major project to publish a detailed description (geographical, administrative, statistical) of the Asia Minor vilayets as well as others south-west to Crete and south-east to the Persian Gulf. Cuinet’s four substantial volumes were published in Paris between 1892 and 1894. They include 20 outline maps covering 23 vilayets (or the equivalent), as well as a comprehensive overview map at the start. None of these maps is dated, and most do not state a scale although they provide a scalebar.

Comparable to Cuinet’s outline maps is a set for Asia Minor made by the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, presumably for its European governing council (text in French). This large organization was established in 1881 to collect payments owed by the Ottoman administration to European lenders. There is a total of 12 maps in the set, one for each nazaret (district) into which the OPDA divided its operations. The scale is uniform (1:750,000), except in one instance (Metelin, 1:1,000,000).

The poor condition of land routes across Asia Minor’s challenging terrain is reflected in the use of hours to record the distance from one principal settlement to the next. Even so, no attempt is made to represent terrain, nor is any clue given to the conditions necessary to achieve the journey times envisaged (type of conveyance, for example, beast of burden, load, season). The maps are undated, but were most probably made around 1900. Note that on Konia the Anatolia Railroad has reached that city (as it did in 1896), but no extension beyond is marked (only opened in 1904).

At the turn of the century R. Huber, a former German artillery officer attached to the Ottoman General Staff, produced an overview (1:1,500,000) of the empire’s administrative divisions as reflected in salname of 1899. This wall map intended for a European audience (text in French) must have been officially approved, because it was printed by the Sultan’s lithographer (and then colored by hand). As on the OPDA’s set of maps above, the distance from one principal settlement to the next is recorded in hours – except in cases where both settlements have railroad stations, in which case the figure is kilometers.

Two further maps illustrate vividly the underdeveloped infrastructure of land communications in Asia Minor and beyond.  The first, issued by the Ottoman General Staff in 1893, shows the distances between the empire’s principal cities measured in hours.  Roads are classified into three grades (chaussée/paved highway; main; local), the first of these drawn in red, with the linework dashed where this grade was planned, but yet to be achieved.

Second, the German General Imhoff’s overview of railroads by 1914 – both completed and projected – shows how slow and limited the pace and range of construction remained, even after many surveys had been made for projected lines. As already noted in  Part II  (sect. 12), construction of the Asia Minor section of the Baghdad Railroad from Konia to Nisibin (Nusaybin) was seriously delayed by the ruggedness of the Taurus and Amanus mountains, so much so that this route in its entirety was not completed until late 1918.

Normally, Heinrich Kiepert had been too sceptical about the value and accuracy of Ottoman or Greek maps to rely on them, but the ambitious scale of his Specialkarte vom westlichen Kleinasien on the one hand, and the growth of mapmaking within the Ottoman empire on the other, motivated him to consult Ottoman and Greek maps for information about regions not yet traversed by Westerners. To caution users of the Specialkarte, Heinrich ensured that settlement names derived from such maps were italicized, and that the associated point symbols (if not omitted altogether) were distinctively square rather than round. The Ottoman maps he consulted were in manuscript only (not printed), so these were either handcopied for him or photographed, and are now irrecoverable. However, two Greek maps that he valued were in books by locally based scholars, one (1:500,000 scale) by Vasileos Kandes, a resident of Prousa, the other (1:125,000) by Georg Weber, resident of Smyrna. Heinrich used an 1885 Greek translation of Weber’s map; because a copy has yet to be found, the 1880 original (published in French) is shown here.

For Asia Minor’s coastline, the maps relied on most by the Kieperts were British Admiralty charts, which had a high reputation for accuracy. Even so, when combining Karte von Kleinasien sheets to produce his map for Richard Leonhard’s Paphlagonia in 1908 (see  Part I  sect. 8), Richard Kiepert expressed frustration at the age of the two Black Sea charts he had to use. Both were based on an 1834 Russian survey later found often unreliable, but a thorough revision had still to be undertaken.

Reimer, the Specialkarte’s publisher in 1890–1892, is not known to have issued any revised edition, and would hardly have been expected to do so once it was decided that Richard Kiepert’s Karte von Kleinasien would cover all Asia Minor at a uniform scale. However, a revision with puzzlingly little documentation was made. Only the six sheets shown here have so far been traced – all undated, and with no publisher named. Reimer must at least have assisted this initiative, because the sheets are evidently reprints of its originals, although now lacking color (except blue for open water on sheets IV and VII), omitting elevation data, and incorporating some adjustments. In particular, each sheet is now named, with indicators to adjoining sheets added in the margins. On V, the railroad extension opened in 1912 from Soma north through Balikesri and on to Panderma has been added. Likewise added on IX is the extension south from Dineir opened the same year. So presumably this revision of the Specialkarte was not made until 1912 at the earliest. Why its production should be so economical and anonymous remains obscure, as do the intended users.

The Prussian officer and explorer Walther von Diest, in sorrow that death prevented his friend Heinrich Kiepert from mapping Asia Minor further, resolved to produce improved and updated maps of the north-west (extending as far as Angora and Konia), using both materials from Heinrich and records of his own travels. This set of four sheets at 1:500,000 scale published in 1903 is the result. How von Diest regarded the Karte von Kleinasien which Richard Kiepert had been issuing from 1901 is left unclear, but it is true that by 1903 there was as yet minimal overlap between its sheets to date and von Diest’s set of four.

The Austrian botanist Heinrich von Handel-Mazzetti explored Pontus in 1907 (with the geologist Franz Kossmat), and Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in 1910. His report on the latter year’s journeys in Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen (1912) was accompanied by the three maps at 1:400,000 scale, and an overview at 1:3,700,000, shown here. Richard Kiepert added routes taken by him to three sheets of Karte von Kleinasien’s second edition.

The impressive topographical and geological maps of western Asia Minor each issued in six sheets by Perthes (Gotha) between 1910 and 1914 were no doubt intended in part to outclass Heinrich Kiepert’s Specialkarte and Richard’s Karte von Kleinasien. The mapmaker was Alfred Philippson, a geologist and physical geographer who had traveled extensively in the region. His coverage does not extend quite as far east as the Specialkarte, and his choice of scale is somewhat smaller (1:300,000 rather than 1:250,000). In addition, between 1919 and 1921 the Perthes journal Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen published reduced-scale (1:900,000) maps created by him for four themes: peoples, vegetation, landscape, elevations. Needless to add, the first of these four maps was already outdated.

Likewise in Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen (1920), the cartographer Hans Fischer published a detailed account of the exploration and mapping of Asia Minor to 1914, illustrating it with this overview map (which extends through Mesopotamia as far as Basra). Predictably, the regions remaining least known (in yellow) are those remote from main routes.

Despite their small scales, two maps of Greek and Roman Asia Minor published in 1903 and 1909 respectively were to remain standard reference works far into the 20 ^th  century. The earlier, intended primarily for classroom use, was produced in 1903 by John Anderson as one of Murray’s Handy Classical Maps edited by G. B. Grundy (with gazetteer). Its use of as many as 14 tints to represent variations in elevation is striking. Anderson (a Scot who taught at Oxford) had traveled extensively in Asia Minor, and – as mentioned in  Part II  (section 15) – was to inspire William Calder. Anderson’s findings were incorporated in as many as eight sheets of Richard Kiepert’s Karte von Kleinasien. In the 1950s, when Anderson’s map had still not been superseded, Calder would collaborate with George Bean to produce a partial revision of it, one which unfortunately did not show elevations at all.

The second notable map of classical Asia Minor was among those (36 in all) planned by Heinrich Kiepert for Formae Orbis Antiqui, a wide-ranging classical atlas for scholars that it had been his lifelong ambition to produce. However, he delayed embarking on it until the 1890s, so that it became another of the projects which Richard Kiepert loyally attempted to continue after his father’s death in 1899. Although the atlas would eventually be left unfinished, Richard was able to issue this map of Asia Minor and Cyprus in the early 2 ^nd  century CE, accompanied by 20 large pages of text on matters of detail (a longer text by far than was written for any of the other maps). The timing, 1909, was after the complete first edition of Karte von Kleinasien had appeared, but before major work on the second had begun.

This magnificent 1:1,000,000 scale wall map of the Turkish Republic in the year it was established (1923) provides an appropriate end to the exhibition: a new era was now beginning. Made by Muhammed Neshet Bey, a colonel retired from the Mapping Commission of the General Staff, the map was published in the Republic’s new capital, Ankara.

No doubt also in the 1920s, the same publisher produced from its Istanbul office a Great Anatolia Map in several sheets at 1:400,000 scale. The total number is uncertain, because copies of only two sheets (both undated) have so far been identified, one of them (the south-west) shown here.

 _{About the exhibition} 

This exhibition in five parts (2022-2023) was created by the Princeton University Library’s  Maps and Geospatial Information Center  in collaboration with  Richard Talbert , Research Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Maps generously contributed by libraries worldwide are acknowledged with gratitude. For further discussion and bibliography, see Richard Talbert’s article “The Exploration of Asia Minor: Kiepert Maps Unmentioned by Ronald Syme and Louis Robert,” History of Classical Scholarship 4 (2022) 181-233 at  https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/79 . For preparation of the exhibition, thanks to Berta Harvey and Dan Walker of the Maps and Geospatial Information Center, and Safiatou Bamba, Lindsay Holman, and Rachel Sarvey at the Ancient World Mapping Center, UNC Chapel Hill.

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