I bought a new (used) globe today to add to my humble collection, which called to mind this article that was inspired by my old globe from c.1924. Globes often don’t have dates on them, since those dates would remind you of their obsolescence, especially in these days of rapid change. Still, as a historian I have a keen interest in old globes. I’d love to have one that shows the height of Napoleon’s Empire, say in 1810, before it all came crashing down.
Nowadays, with GPS and Smart phones and all that, we take globes for granted. I’ve sometimes thought if you could take one thing of value back into the past, let’s say 500 years ago, would there be anything more valuable than an accurate globe? An interesting question to ponder …
W.J. Astore
How about a contrary perspective on the Middle East, courtesy of my old globe? It dates from the early 1920s, just after World War I but before Russia became the Soviet Union. Taking a close look at the Middle East (a geographic term that I use loosely), you’ll notice more than a few differences from today’s maps and globes:
- Iraq and Syria don’t exist. Neither does Israel. Today’s Iran is yesterday’s Persia, of course.
- Instead of Iraq and Syria, we have Mesopotamia, a name that resonates history, part of the Fertile Crescent that encompassed the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as well as the Nile in Egypt. Six thousand years ago, the cradle of human civilization, and now more often the scene of devastation caused mainly by endless war.
- Ah, Kurdistan! The Kurds today in northern Iraq and southern Turkey would love to have their own homeland. Naturally, the…
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