In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guildsu struck a Map of the Empire which size was that of the Empire, and coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science (1946)

Forward: the limits of cartography

I have always had a weakness for maps. Occupying and inordinate amount of space on my bookshelf are Collins historical atlases* –  heavy in both the literal and figurative sense. They are magnificent volumes, and over the years I have spent many hours tracing their pages, following the movement of armies, adventurers and archeologists, the rise and fall of empires, the migration of peoples and the shifting frontiers that have so often redrawn the world. They offer a visual way of understanding history: not simply what happened, but where it happened, how territories expanded and contracted, and how the political landscape changed beneath the feet of successive generations.

Yet maps have their limitations, and perhaps that is particularly worth remembering when maps become arguments. They can show movement and geography with remarkable clarity, but they cannot tell us everything about the people represented upon them. My Collins atlases cannot tell me a person’s ethnicity or DNA, their beliefs or ideology, their loyalties or aspirations, or what motivated them to move, conquer, settle, flee or remain. They show the where, and often the when, but not necessarily the why. A boundary drawn in ink may look definitive on a map while being porous, contested or meaningless to the people who lived on either side of it. That tension – between the map and the territory, between geography and human experience –  lies behind what follows.

It is particularly relevant when looking at Palestine, a landscape whose names, boundaries and meanings have accumulated over centuries and whose maps are now routinely recruited into arguments about history, identity and belonging. We must be mindful that maps are historical artefacts before they are political weapons. They tell us how successive generations imagined and described a landscape, but they are not, by themselves, title deeds to it.

The temptation with historical cartography is to look backwards with twenty-first-century eyes and ask a map to settle questions that its maker never intended it to answer. Maps preserve layers of memory and geography. They can reveal what people called places, how they understood their surroundings and how their conception of territory changed. But they require interpretation, context and, above all, a little humility.

Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by them. Those Collins atlases taught me to look at history spatially, to see events not as isolated episodes but as movements across landscapes. The older I become, however, the more conscious I am that the map is only the beginning of the story. Behind every line, colour, border and place name are human beings, with memories, identities, ambitions, fears and attachments that no cartographer can fully capture. To understand the history of a place, we must therefore learn to read both the map and the people who inhabit it.

What we take from a book, a review or an opinion piece often tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the author. That is no criticism; it is simply the way reading works. Every reader arrives carrying luggage: political commitments, cultural assumptions, emotional investments, historical knowledge, blind spots and aspirations. Reviewers are no different. Nor, for that matter, am I. The aspiration to complete objectivity is a noble fiction. We are all interpreters before we are judges.

That was my instinctive reaction to British activist Tony Greenstein’s review in the leftwing ezine Mondoweiss, republished below, of British-based American author and researcher Thomas Suárez’s Palestine Mapped.

Even before reaching the conclusion, I suspected where the review was heading. Greenstein is an experienced anti-Zionist campaigner whose intellectual commitments are well established, and they inevitably shape what he finds most valuable in the book. The giveaway comes in the closing paragraphs. He praises what he calls the book’s “apolitical” opening almost as a tactical device, admires the middle section for preparing the reader culturally, but clearly regards the final political chapter as the destination towards which everything else has been travelling. The cartography becomes, in effect, a prelude to contemporary advocacy. That may well be Suárez’s intention too, but Greenstein’s enthusiasm reveals his own priorities every bit as much as the author’s – as is apparent when he describes Suarez’ previous publications about Israel and Palestine.

Yet I suspect the book itself may be richer than the review allows.

Suárez appears to be asking an intriguing question that extends well beyond Israel and Palestine: maps are not merely representations of territory; they are representations of thought. They encode assumptions about power, religion, legitimacy and belonging. Medieval Christian maps centred Jerusalem not because it was geographically central but because it occupied the spiritual centre of Christian cosmology. Islamic geographers such as al-Idrisi organised space differently because they inhabited a different intellectual universe. Renaissance maps reflected the explosion of European exploration, while Protestant biblical scholarship encouraged increasingly detailed attempts to reconcile scripture with physical geography. None of these maps simply described reality. Each reflected the worldview of its makers.

That, it seems to me, is the genuinely fascinating proposition. Cartography becomes a history of imagination as much as a history of measurement. Where I become more cautious is when historical maps are enlisted as political witnesses in twenty-first century arguments. Which is what Greenstein does.

One of Suárez’s most interesting observations, as reported by Greenstein, is actually directed against a habit found on both sides of the contemporary conflict. Zionists produce archaeological sites, biblical kingdoms and ancient place names as evidence of enduring Jewish sovereignty. Pro-Palestinian activists respond with Ottoman maps, Roman maps, medieval maps or British Mandate maps labelled “Palestine”. Suárez apparently argues that both are trapped within the same conceptual framework. They assume that an ancient geographical label somehow validates or invalidates modern political rights.

I would take it one step further.

For a long while, I have contemplated what I call the “myth of fingerprints”, the belief that if only we can place our finger on precisely the right point in history, identify the first inhabitants, recover the original map, establish the authentic name, isolate the pure ancestry or locate the primordial kingdom, then modern political legitimacy somehow reveals itself in a neat, straight line stretching from antiquity to today.

History almost never behaves so obligingly.

Old maps certainly tell us something important about the land. I treasure my own Collins historical atlases, those magnificent, oversized volumes that chart the migrations of peoples, the campaigns of armies, the rise and fall of empires, the routes of explorers and the shifting frontiers of kingdoms. They are among the finest visual tools historians possess. But they tell us remarkably little about the people themselves.

A coloured arrow sweeping westward across Europe labelled “Goths” tells us almost nothing about the genetic diversity within those groups, their languages, their changing identities or the beliefs they carried with them. A shaded region marked “Canaan”, “Judaea”, “Palestina”, “Syria”, “Ottoman Syria” or “Mandatory Palestine” identifies an administrative or geographical concept, not a homogeneous nation. Maps can identify where events occurred. They cannot fully explain who the participants were and what compelled them to remain or wander.

Ethnicity itself is a moving target. DNA reveals endless mixing rather than purity. Languages evolve, religions spread, populations intermarry, conquerors assimilate, migrants settle, identities are invented, forgotten and reinvented. The very categories with which we argue today would have puzzled many of the people who supposedly embodied them centuries ago.

This is one reason why I remain sceptical whenever someone reaches triumphantly for an ancient map as though it were a title deed.

The Romans renamed Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Does that settle anything? Of course not. The Byzantine Madaba mosaic depicts Palestine. Does that settle anything? Again, no. Medieval Christian maps centred on Jerusalem in sacred geography. Ottoman maps organised provinces differently. British Mandate surveys imposed modern administrative precision. Each map tells us something true about the intellectual world in which it was created. None provides a final moral verdict on contemporary sovereignty.

Indeed, Suárez’s own broader argument may unintentionally reinforce precisely this conclusion. If maps embody cultural assumptions, then every historical map deserves to be interpreted rather than worshipped.

Greenstein continually circles back to Zionism, Christian Zionism and Israel’s contemporary use of historical imagery. Those are undoubtedly important subjects, and Suárez appears to have assembled considerable evidence for the influence of biblical geography on Western understandings of Palestine. Certainly, Christian millenarianism, evangelical theology and nineteenth-century imperial romanticism all played significant roles in preparing Western audiences to view Palestine through biblical rather than contemporary political lenses. Theodore Herzl himself undoubtedly benefited from Christian Restorationist sympathies.

But there is a wider lesson here that transcends this particular conflict.

Every nation engages in historical cartography. Vladimir Putin’s Russia speaks of Novorossiya and Russkiy Mir not simply as geographical expressions but as historical claims carrying contemporary political force. Chinese maps in the South China Sea Chinese maps invoke imperial precedents, the Nine-Dash Line and ancient tributary systems. Serbian nationalism continually remembers Kosovo Polje – “the Field of Blackbirds”. Irish nationalists remember King James I’s plantations and the partition of 1922 as Irish republicanism and unionism each produce their own historical maps of belonging. America’s has exceptionalism long rested upon maps of westward expansion under Manifest Destiny, as though the movement of a frontier line itself conferred legitimacy, whilst Confederate memory endures still.  Australian history has increasingly become a contest between colonial cadastral maps and Indigenous maps of Country, each representing profoundly different understandings of what land means.

Historical geography is always political because memory itself is political. The danger comes when maps cease to illuminate history and begin adjudicating morality.

Ultimately, maps are magnificent servants but poor judges. They reveal where rivers flowed, roads were built, towns and cities grew, frontiers shifted and kingdoms expanded. They help us visualise change across centuries. They expose forgotten worlds and vanished assumptions. But they cannot tell us who possesses superior historical virtue, nor can they determine which descendants inherit exclusive political rights today.

Perhaps that is the deepest weakness of that “myth of fingerprints”. It mistakes continuity for purity, geography for identity and nomenclature for legitimacy. Human history is untidy,  layered and recursive. It resembles less a straight line than a palimpsest, where each generation writes over earlier inscriptions without entirely erasing them. The old text remains faintly visible beneath the new. Maps help us read those layers. They do not resolve them.

In that sense, whether one approaches Palestine Mapped as a work of cartographic history, a study of religious imagination or an intervention in the politics of Zionism, its greatest contribution may not lie in proving who was “there first”. Rather, it reminds us that every map is itself an historical artefact, reflecting the assumptions of those who drew it. The irony is that this applies not only to the maps reproduced in Suárez’s book, but also to the intellectual maps brought by its readers and reviewers. We all chart the landscape according to our own compass bearings. The challenge is not to pretend otherwise, but to remain aware that our own map, however detailed, is never quite the same thing as the territory itself.

Coda: maps cannot be manifestos

One of the limitations of reading about maps is that like maps themselves. they flatten experience.

I’ve visited the church of St. George at Madaba in Jordan and stood next to the sixth-century mosaic of the Holy Land (pictured at the head of this post). It is a thing of beauty, of history, and of humanity. One is struck not only by its artistry but by its humanity. It is not a political manifesto disguised as a map. It is an act of devotion. The craftsmen who laid those tesserae were not anticipating twenty-first century debates over sovereignty. They were trying to depict the sacred geography through which they understood God’s world. Their “facts on the ground”, to use a phrase now freighted with controversy, were the footprints of Jesus and his Apostles.

Our Jordanian guide is part of that story. A Palestinian Christian, proud of a Byzantine mosaic in modern Jordan, her job is to guide visitors through a landscape that has been Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and Hashemite. She herself embodies the layered history that the “myth of fingertips” tends to erase. Human beings are often palimpsests long before maps are.

As we have noted, there is habit of turning historical geography into moral geography. And yet, none of these are really arguments about geography – they are arguments about memory  the stories nations and peoples tell themselves.

To borrow and invert the English poet John Donne, “no man (or map) is an island”. Maps are relational documents. They acquire meaning only through the people who draw them, use them and argue over them. Detached from those human stories, they become little more than coloured parchment. Attached to them, they become objects of extraordinary emotional power.

There is another irony lurking here – that prefigured in the quotation that opened this essay. In a short story, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire whose cartographers became so obsessed with accuracy that they eventually produced a map at the scale of one-to-one, covering the entire empire itself. The map became indistinguishable from the territory and therefore useless. Political history sometimes commits the opposite error: we mistake the map for the territory. We argue over symbols as though they were reality itself.

My Collins atlases, the Madaba mosaic, Ptolemy, Ordnance Survey maps, Google Earth – all are ways of seeing. None is the land itself. The land has always contained more languages, more memories, more ancestors and more contradictions than any map can accommodate.

“The myth of fingerprints” captures the seductive belief that somewhere, if only we point to precisely the right place on precisely the right map at precisely the right moment in history, all our moral and political arguments will dissolve into certainty.

History has never been that obliging. It is less a straight line than a palimpsest. The fingertips point confidently enough. It is the ground beneath them that refuses to stand still.

How the West’s earliest mapping of Palestine continues to shape its understanding of Zionism today