The Map Room

Drawn, Again
and Again

For fifteen centuries, every empire and faith that held this land put it on a map. They all drew the same place. Judea, Jerusalem, the Jordan, the names of Israel. A map is hard to forge, and harder to un-draw.

This is the cartographic record: real maps, made by people with no stake in today's argument. Byzantine mosaicists, an Arab geographer at a Norman court, the Ottoman sultan's own atlas, Napoleon's engineers, Victorian surveyors. Across languages and rulers they charted one continuous land with one continuous set of names. Every map here is in the public domain; each card links to a high-resolution copy at the holding library so you can check the work yourself.

On the images and sources. Thumbnails are public-domain reproductions served from Wikimedia Commons; where a clearer copy lives elsewhere, the link points there (the David Rumsey Collection, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Israel, the Perry-Castañeda Map Collection and the Palestine Exploration Fund). Dates are when each map was made; some, like the Peutinger Table, survive only through later faithful copies. This room will keep growing as we source more.