Cartographical knowledge poll

[lethargic_man]

Where's this?



(You're not allowed to answer if you saw the threads on the other people's blogs which led to this.)

Comments

[songster.livejournal.com]

Is it Pangaea?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nope; here's Pangaea:



But you're thinking laterally, and that's a good start. :o)

[troo.livejournal.com]

it's not discworld, or somesuch, is it?

[songster.livejournal.com]

Well, it loooks to me like an ancient Earth continent - the bit at the left is South America squashed up and rotated a bit. You've got the general q shape, with the spine of the Andes down the tail. So my next guess would be Gondwanaland. images.google.com finds several versions, some quite similar to this - possibly this is a new and supposedly definitive version?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nope; it's a present day continent. The answer is now at the bottom of the thread.

[darcydodo]

I keep wanting to say it's part of the Philippines, but I don't think it actually is.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nope; here's the Philippines:

[darcydodo]

I found out what it was shortly after I originally posted, since I got to rysmiel's post. :)

[troo.livejournal.com]

Crete (if that's the right spelling... if not, here's the hebrew name: כרתים)?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's this:

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

The name I'm familiar with is the Biblical name כפתור. I wonder why they (presumably the HLA) changed it.

[troo.livejournal.com]

Probably because the people living there now aredifferent from those of 3000 years ago?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

In order to answer this, I think I would need more information on the use of names in Hebrew: what the frequency is of names outliving the original countries or ethnic groups they referred to; how this related to whether Jews lived there or not at the time, whether the place having a clear geographical identity (e.g. an island) had any bearing on it, and so forth.

I can think of names which have outlived their original inhabitants, but only where the same Biblical name continues to be used by with the new inhabitants, e.g. מצרים, which the original inhabitants called Khem, but the current ones, being Semites like the ancient Israelites, call Miṣr. (ObLinguisticGeeking: I wonder whether the dual form of the Hebrew name reflects memory of the union of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt into a single kingdom...)

I'm not sure whether the name תימן is an equivalent of Yemen. (Cite me other names with T -> Y changing between Hebrew and Arabic!)

But you're right that we don't refer to places like Ashur and Aram any more, so you might be right.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The world with the sea level adjusted upwards by some amount and, er, the Pacific almost entirely removed for some reason? With east at the bottom.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...maybe long timescale changes combined (?into the future) with increased sealevel?

[ploni-bat-ploni.livejournal.com]

Without having looked at the other postings: I think it's Anarctica. (Gosh, that's a word I hadn't spelt in ages!)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Well done; prize jackpot to the woman in the lowermost icon!

It's based on a map of Antarctica without the ice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AntarcticaRockSurface.jpg):



As the caption says, this map does not take into consideration the fact that without the ice sea levels would be higher, but Antarctica, no longer weighed down by the weight of the ice, would rise up a long way itself.

james_nicoll mused (http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/377153.html?thread=3821633#t3821633):

I bet if one deleted the map of the continental shelf, few people would recognise it.

So I did that, and rotated it to throw people off further, and it looks like he was right. :o)

[ploni-bat-ploni.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! My A Level Geography did pay off! :-D

I am rather proud of myself now, you realise... hahaha.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Meh, that was also a thought. I was just convinced I was on the right track with it not being present-day.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I got it and then found it confirmed on my f-list before I could write the answer. It's way way cool. Particularly as there used to be a totally whacko cartographic theory relating to 'antarctica without ice' and it looked nothing like this.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Now what I'd like to see is the same done for Greenland.