Sometime in 1835, on the northwest coast of India, Alexander Burnes purchased a roll of paper. Inside was a handwritten navigation chart of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden that the British officer came to describe as a “specimen of naval survey without equal in the cabinets of Europe.”
Burnes donated it to the Royal Geographical Society, where a team of experts examined it and put it in a drawer. Since then, the diagnosis has been unanimous: the letter was very beautiful and very attractive, but completely wrong.
For 189 years, we have believed it was wrong. But we were wrong.
And it’s not that we hadn’t studied it. In the last century alone it has been studied in detail on up to five occasions (1947, 1987, 2002, 2012 and 2022). However, all efforts had been futile. However, in recent years, John P. Cooper of the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and his team have studied the topic in depth.
Without much success, really.
Until they realized one thing: what if instead of a document, what they had in their hands was a tool? I mean, what if it wasn’t a map to hang on the wall, but something else?
How did the thing work? The key, always according to the researchers, is that the letter was only opened to the section that the navigator was using at that time. If you look at the map as a whole (more than 180 islands, plus reefs, land landmarks, religious buildings and flags), you don’t understand; above all, because they do not have continuity.
But if you analyze the references fragment by fragment, the idea emerges that it was used to maintain the navigation line, to remind the sailors what they had to do. Its purpose was mnemonic and operational; not representative.
How curious, isn’t it? Yes and that is the main problem, thinking that all this is just ‘curious’. But no, what the letter puts on the table is the Eurocentric bias that still prevails in the history of science: for almost two centuries we judged an Indian tool by the only yardstick we knew (the geometric correspondence with the terrain) and declared it “defective” for not meeting that yardstick.
How many thousands more things will we have out there lost, without fully understanding? It never hurts to remember that there are many things that we do not fully understand.
Image | University of Exeter
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