Laron
QHHT & Past Life Regression
Staff member
Administrator
Creator of transients.info & The Roundtable
Research has shown that north-south maps do actually have psychological consequences. North can be said to contain expensive real estate, richer people and be a higher altitude. The south has cheaper prices, poorer folk and a lower altitude—the “north-south bias”. When people are presented with a north-down oriented maps, this bias disappears.
Educators of media literacy and cultural diversity are known to use south-up oriented maps to assist their students viscerally experience the frequently disorienting effect of seeing something familiar from a different perspective. When students consider the privileged position given to the Northern hemisphere (especially North America and Europe), this can help them confront their potential for culturally biased perceptions.
The earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, likely equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. There was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. In that same period, map makers in Arabia often drew maps with the south facing up possibly because this was how the Chinese did it.
South-up maps have been used for political statements in the past. As you can see above, one example is "McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World" (1979). An insert on the map says that the Australian, Stuart McArthur, tried to confront "the perpetual onslaught of 'downunder' jokes”—implications from Northern nations that the height of a country's prestige is determined by its equivalent spatial location on a conventional map of the world.
So who decided what way the maps should go? The answer is not clear, but there seems to have been a heavy influence by Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, poet and Hellenic cartographer. In the 2nd century A.D. he created a systematic approach to mapping the world, complete with intersecting lines of longitude and latitude on a half-eaten-doughnut-shaped projection that reflected the curvature of the earth. The cartographers who made the first big, beautiful maps of the entire world, Old and New—men like Henricus Martellus, Gerardus Mercator, Germanus and Martin Waldseemuller—were obsessed with Ptolemy. Ptolemy’s maps were north-up.
Sources:
http://america.aljazeera.com/…/maps-cartographycolonialismn…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-up_map_orientation
Educators of media literacy and cultural diversity are known to use south-up oriented maps to assist their students viscerally experience the frequently disorienting effect of seeing something familiar from a different perspective. When students consider the privileged position given to the Northern hemisphere (especially North America and Europe), this can help them confront their potential for culturally biased perceptions.
The earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, likely equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. There was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. In that same period, map makers in Arabia often drew maps with the south facing up possibly because this was how the Chinese did it.
South-up maps have been used for political statements in the past. As you can see above, one example is "McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World" (1979). An insert on the map says that the Australian, Stuart McArthur, tried to confront "the perpetual onslaught of 'downunder' jokes”—implications from Northern nations that the height of a country's prestige is determined by its equivalent spatial location on a conventional map of the world.
So who decided what way the maps should go? The answer is not clear, but there seems to have been a heavy influence by Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, poet and Hellenic cartographer. In the 2nd century A.D. he created a systematic approach to mapping the world, complete with intersecting lines of longitude and latitude on a half-eaten-doughnut-shaped projection that reflected the curvature of the earth. The cartographers who made the first big, beautiful maps of the entire world, Old and New—men like Henricus Martellus, Gerardus Mercator, Germanus and Martin Waldseemuller—were obsessed with Ptolemy. Ptolemy’s maps were north-up.
Sources:
http://america.aljazeera.com/…/maps-cartographycolonialismn…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-up_map_orientation