Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Thomas Suarez

Southeast Asia reasonably well represented by the fingers, but inland features could be indicated as well, by means of the knuckles and joints. The origin of the idea is not known.

      Music as a Map, and the Mapping of Music

      In some parts of Southeast Asia, geographic data may have been recorded in an entirely non-material form. Song could preserve the essential knowledge for a voyage or trek in a way that was much easier to commit to memory than cold data and which was also impervious to material wear and loss, in effect a 'pilot book' bound in the medium of music. The Arab pilot Ahmad ibn Majid, who sailed in Southeast Asian waters, composed a navigational text in 1462 which was written in poetry to facilitate memorizing its instructions and there may have been similar native Southeast Asian examples.

      Fig. 13 Map of the Caroline Islands, based on indigenous data, as interpreted by missionaries; from the Philosophical Transactions, 1721. The figures within each island indicate the number of days its inhabitants said it took them to sail around it, while the numbers between the islands indicate the duration of a voyage, in days, from one island to the next. (18 x 20.5 cm)

      The societies of Southeast Asia proper are not known to have notated their music. The 'mapping' of music is, however, found in Tibet. Possibly as early as the ninth or tenth century, Tibet developed forms of so-called 'neumatic' notation, in which music was recorded with graphic signs representing the pitch movement of a melody -well within our definition of 'map'.⁴¹ Various inflections of a line, looking not unlike the stylized coasts of sea charts, indicated melodic ascent, descent, angular movement, vibrato, and the degrees of each. Forms of neumatic notation were also used in various parts of Europe and western Asia.

      Principal Types of Southeast Asian Maps

      We do not know how representative surviving Southeast Asian maps are, either in terms of quantity or characteristics, since the durability of the various media used, as well as the inclination of their makers to preserve them, spanned the range from perhaps as little as seconds, to millennia. The extant corpus of Southeast Asian maps probably does not accurately represent the relative numbers of various types of maps in everyday Southeast Asian life, since the survival of maps is heavily skewed in favor of cosmological maps. Stone edifices, by a great margin the most durable of cartographic media, were used for cosmological and religious cartography, and such cartography did not become obsolete. Geographic maps would more likely have been on far less permanent media, would have been subject to wear and loss, and might be superceded by more current mapping. The sand mandalas of Tibet are the exception, since the impermanence of these cosmographic maps was part of their very meaning, but their story is still part of the 'permanent' record of their society.

      With these limitations in mind, we can look at the various types of Southeast Asian maps and the dates of surviving examples of each, and then comment on their counterparts in the West. Southeast Asian maps can be divided into four general categories:

      1) those which are purely cosmographic (in this context meaning 'metaphysical' or 'spiritual') in nature, or otherwise non-geographic.

      2) those that symbolically represent actual geographic features for religious or cosmographic purposes.

      3) those that attempt to record true geography, whether by report or empirical observation.

      4) itineraries, which might be written, memorized, or committed to song, that served to construct a mental image of time and space, direction and position, topography, and landmarks.

      There is not always a fine line separating these categories. Just as daily life in Southeast Asia could entwine the mundane with the magical, Southeast Asian cartographic thought could blur the distinction among the cosmographic, symbolic, and empirical.

      Cosmographic Maps

      In pre-modern Southeast Asia, mapping one's path to a different level of existence was as important as charting the way to the next valley. Maps representing the intangible or metaphysical world in the form of stone temples or edifices are the earliest surviving examples of Southeast Asian maps.

      In order to look at Southeast Asia's cosmological maps, it is necessary to look at the place of mountains in Southeast Asian life. Not only are mountains are a primary feature of the Southeast Asian physical landscape, but they are also an integral part of the region's spiritual landscape too. A king's sovereignty was often inextricably linked with a mountain, either actual or symbolic. Mountains could represent the embodiment of higher states of existence and at the same time be the dwelling place of gods. This reverence for mountains was indigenous, but was complemented by outside influences. The most famous of spiritual mountains was Sumeru, believed to lie to the north, in the center of the world, that is, in the Tibetan Himalayas or the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia.

      When Hinduism spread through Southeast Asia, beginning in about the first century A.D., it brought with it the idea of Sumeru and other Indian traditions about mountains, which subsequently merged with indigenous animist religions. The Hindu god, Indra, was sovereign of Sumeru, and dwelled in a place called Trayastrima at the mountain's summit. The Khmers of Cambodia had their own equivalent of Sumeru, which they called Mount Mahendra; when Hindu beliefs reached Cambodia, they merged with the religious aspect of Mahendra with early Khmer rulers becoming identified as the earthly incarnations of the deities of this cosmic mountain.⁴² Siva, the most powerful of Hindu gods, was the 'Lord of the Mountain', and the veneration of Siva as a mountain deity existed in Cambodia as early as the fifth century.⁴³ In Burma as well, the imported Hindu veneration of mountains assimilated indigenous spirits.⁴⁴ The concept of sacred mountains continued with the arrival of Buddhism; early thirteenth century Chinese annals record that in a country to the west of Cambodia "there is a mountain called Wu-nung [probably from the Malay word for mountain, gunong]" from which one enters Nirvana.⁴⁵

      The island of Bali, according to local legend, was originally a flat, mountainless land. However, when Islam supplanted Hinduism throughout most of Java, the Hindu gods, having elected to resettle on neighboring Bali, first needed to create on their new island home, mountains that were high enough to be their abode. In another version, the mountains were moved from eastern Java. The most exalted of these god-dwellings, the Balinese 'Sumeru', was Gunung Agung, on the east of the island.⁴⁶ Bali was the world, and Mount Agung was its 'navel' (puseh). Representations of Sumeru, which are in effect cosmological maps, are invariably found in the temples of even the most humble Balinese villages.

      Mountains were the source of spiritual life; they were also the origin of the other 'element' of the world, rivers, and thus were the source of physical life as well. In this last respect, the perfect silhouette of an Indonesian mountain, towering above the valley floor or rising above the seas, was sometimes compared to the image of a breast.

      The fertility of the land was part of the iconography of a type of symbolic map which is known in the form of stone carvings from Champa (central eastern Vietnam).⁴⁷ These had their origins as magical "stones of the soil," in which the stone embodied the god of the earth; unlike imported beliefs, in which gods inhabited earthly entities, the indigenous view may have regarded the earth itself as a god. Such mystical objects were analogous to stones or earth mounds worshiped by Vietnamese and Chinese. The Champa monoliths were in the form of Lingas, Hindu phallic symbols representing the god Siva, or the reproductive power of nature. They were placed at the center of a village and appear to have formed a multi-faceted microcosm of the territory, the embodiment of the kingdom or feudal group of which the Linga was the center. The top of the stone was the emblem of Siva; Siva was accorded the apex of stone both because he was 'Lord of the Mountain' (Meru) and because political power in early Champa and Cambodia was legitimized by the identification of the king with Siva. An octagonal section under this cap represented the god Vishnu, and a four-sided section below it symbolized Brahma, the overseer of all things sacred (another instance of the special significance of these numbers). A lowermost section represented the earth, that is, the kingdom. Thus the stone was at once a schematic of the order of the universe, a symbol of the divine authority of the king and his singular embodiment with Siva, and a map of the powers that bestowed