Volume 23 (2019): Issue 3 (July 2019)
Thematic Issue: History and space: challenges, methods, applications. Editors: Piotr Werner, Izabela Gołębiowska, Izabela Karsznia

By the 12^th century, northern territories were fairly well known in practice, but there was an urgent need to explain the state of this region in written form. In most national narratives, there is an evident tendency to emphasise the similarity of local history with a more significant and more authoritative (Roman or sacred) history (Mortensen 2005). This paper deals with a very specific geographical image—“Europe, or Eneá”—that appears on two “textual maps” by an Icelandic historian of the 13^th century, Snorri Sturluson, in his Edda, an Icelandic ars poetica (c. 1220), and in his large compendium of the kings’ sagas entitled Heimskringla (c. 1230). The author demonstrates that the toponym Eneá, going back to the ancient hero Aeneas, was formed by Snorri himself as a result of his immersion in the local Icelandic culture and literature, where the Troy story had, by that time, occupied a significant place.

This article is devoted to the history of Russian hypsometric and geographic investigations of the northern part of China, Mongolia, Manchuria, the Amur and the Ussuri region in the 19th century. The article is based on the analysis of numerous sources from the Russian State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Academy of Sciences, Russian National Library, the Library of the Shanghai Zikawei Observatory. The article’s methodological framework is objectivity concept, systematically of scientific analysis of archival materials.

The considerable attention is paid to H. Fritsche’s, Palladius’s, N.M. Przhevalsky’s and other expeditions. The detailed analysis of a new systematic mapping of the northern part of China, made by the Russian scientists is given. The role of the Beijing Magneto-meteorological observatory in Beijing, as the part of the Russian Academy of sciences, is specially noted. The author considers in details the political and socio-economic conditions of expeditions.

This paper presents a case study of the well irrigation in Guanzhong Plain during the Qing dynasty. The paper analyses the scales and results of well irrigation campaigns sponsored by the government in the mid-eighteen century and the late nineteenth century. Limited by the natural environment and technical conditions, the efficiency of well irrigation is poor. Farmers’ choices also affect the development of well irrigation. Moreover, a lack of management led to the unsustainable use of groundwater. Historical groundwater policies were mainly aimed at increasing agricultural production. Policies should be made according to local conditions. It is important to ensure the sustainable development of groundwater.

The aim of this text is to evaluate the distribution of windmills in Pomerania, an area which stretches from Gdańsk to Toruń, over the period of the nineteenth century. The basic research method was to analyse various maps from both the early nineteenth century and the late nineteenth century. The results made it possible to state that the total number windmills increased by a factor of three, and that this referred mainly to cereal mills. The number of vertical windmills with rotating caps increased at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the number of drainage windmills remained unchanged. The very high demand for wind energy was a result of significant economic development within the Prussian partition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cartographic sources allowed this phenomenon to be verified in the most complete way.

This article examines how the communication network of the Japanese pharmaceutical industry operated around the turn of the century to create spatial interactions across the national medicine market during a period of intense industrialization.

In 1901, pharmaceutical wholesalers in Osaka compiled The Telegraph Codebook of Pharmacies in Japan to facilitate national trade in medicine, although its use was restricted to only the 177 pharmacies that joined the Pharmaceutical Telegraph Communication Alliance. This alliance had close ties with wholesalers in Osaka and comprised national-level qualified chemists. The use of this communication network by telegraph enabled the integration and progression of the Japanese pharmaceutical market in the early 20^th century; however, pharmacies also began to build different and layered communication networks that corresponded to their respective business styles. Findings indicate that pharmacies used different communication networks of different spatial scales, thereby operating regional specialization and national integration networks simultaneously.

The aim of this article is to examine the interactions among main cities and the rural communities subordinate to them in central Italy during Late Middle Age. Premise of my work is the refusal of the assumption that cities and towns interacted between them as a whole. I choose Orvieto and its subordinate town of Bagnoregio in 1303 and 1304 as case study to enlighten that parties and faction based in the city and in the town interacted in ways that it is impossible to reduce to the dichotomy master- servant: this links as a whole shaped the dialogue between the city and its subordinates.

The paper focuses on German forms of place names in Czechia and Slovakia, and Hungarian forms of place names in Slovakia, especially on their revitalization and perception after 1989. This concerns their thematization, which is illustrated on the Czech National Corpus and the Slovak National Corpus materials, and on the 1990s discussions about their restoration. German place-name forms are not considered to be a crucial political topic these days; however, Hungarian forms still represent a conflict potential. German forms in Czechia are only thematized in poetry and fiction books, in order to evoke lasting time and the complicated modern Czech history. On the other hand, they are predominantly used in trade names as a marketing tool aimed at German (localization function) and Czech customers (allusive function). In Slovakia, Hungarian forms are not used in marketing and are not thematized in fiction as a positive value connected with the national history.

Many travelers-writers have described the characteristics of the areas visited from a critical point of view, with wit and sense of observation. One of the most significant and unknown works concerning this literary current is the tale of the trip from Paestum to Policastro made in 1828 by C.T. Ramage: his sketchbooks are not only a description of the evidence of the past and of the archaeological remains of the Ancient Greece, but a small geo-history of the Cilento (shortly before its insurrection of that same year), as the first stage of a journey that returns a fresco of the South of Italy as it was before the process of Italian unification, respect to its agricultural landscapes, customs and dietary habits, attitudes, superstitions, society, culture, religious and political affairs, comparable with the present context of the same territories.

The island of Cyprus has been occupied by various powers, during which time the historical and cultural contexts of the main cities of the island have changed and left behind material traces. One of these cities is the main port city of the island Famagusta, where the various ruling powers affected its fabric and the different historic structures of the city combine with modern in the contemporary city. These multicultural structures and historical layers can be followed on the maps. The aim of this paper is to follow the changing urban fabric of Famagusta by examining the selected maps from the 16^th century to modern times. How much the city undergoes spatial alteration and how much of the historical structure and developments can be followed on the cartographic records? The paper will question the perspective of the cartographers towards Famagusta and their priorities in depicting this multicultural city.

Foundation of human civilization and endorsement of its potency are the consequences of prolonged women endeavor, which through its history of superiority and confinement, convey the picturesque of civilization. Since ages, the Indian societal structure has played an active role in stimulating the trends of change in women’s status, which with time also proved to be hindrance to the progress of this country. In this context, the study has attempted to emphasize the women’s status in ancient Indian civilization based on the ancient scripts and texts. The ancient era has been categorized into four distinct periods viz. the Vedic period, the Epic period, the period of Jainism and Buddhism and the age of Dharmaśāstras, Mánusmṛiti onward. The study has portrayed the relegation of the women’s dignified role and position entirely to a subservient one from Vedic period to the period of Dharmaśāstras, Mánusmṛiti onward.

In 1630, Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, travelled to the lands of Poland-Lithuania to begin a seventeen-year military career in the Crown army. The purpose of the Beauplan’s Ukraine (BU) project is to provide a set of open access, georeferenced databases for the populated places, rivers, river fords, river rapids, islands, forests, mountains, valleys, and travel paths that are shown on a selection of maps created by Beauplan. The purpose of this document is to describe how these databases and related materials can be accessed and applied by scholars, with the ultimate goal of this work being to convert the rich source of information provided by Beauplan’s maps into a viable instrument for the laboratory of the historian of south-eastern Europe in Early Modern times.

One of the most mysterious concepts in ancient geography are the Riphaean Mountains that had for centuries been the object of mythological, cosmological, geographic, cartographic, and poetic discourses. Having originated as a designation of the northern (in relation to Greece) Thracian mountain, the name in the course of time became attached to the mountains located in the extreme north of the oecumene. Cosmological ideas explaining the rising of the earth’s surface to the north, the passage of the sun after sunset through the northern outskirts of the oecumene behind the Riphaean Mountains eastward, and many others were associated with these mountains. In ancient literature the Riphaean Mountains are often associated with a blessed people of the Hyperboreans who seemed to live beyond the Riphaean Mountains in a particularly favorable climate. In this paper the attempts of ancient cartographers to locate the Riphaean Mountains on a geographical map will be considered.