The Map of Knowledge

A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found

By: Violet Moller

Narrated by: Susan Duerden

“The Map of Knowledge is an endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.” (Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

After the Fall of Rome, when many of the great ideas of the ancient world were lost to the ravages of the Dark Ages, three crucial manuscripts passed hand to hand through seven Mediterranean cities and survived to fuel the revival of the Renaissance - an exciting debut history.

The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed.

Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean - rare centers of knowledge in a dark world, where scholars supported by enlightened heads of state collected, translated, and shared manuscripts. In 8th century Baghdad, Arab discoveries augmented Greek learning. Exchange within the thriving Muslim world brought that knowledge to Cordoba, Spain. Toledo became a famous center of translation from Arabic into Latin, a portal through which Greek and Arab ideas reached Western Europe. Salerno, on the Italian coast, was the great center of medical studies, and Sicily, ancient colony of the Greeks, was one of the few places in the West to retain contact with Greek culture and language. Scholars in these cities helped classical ideas make their way to Venice in the 15th century, where printers thrived and the Renaissance took root.

The Map of Knowledge follows three key texts - Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's The Almagest, and Galen's writings on medicine - on a perilous journey driven by insatiable curiosity about the world.

“A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.” (Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads)

“A sumptuous, glittering, endlessly fascinating book, written with passion, verve, and humor.” (Catherine Nixey, author of The Darkening Age)

©2019 Violet Moller (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Euclid’s Elements is the seed from which my subject of mathematics grew. Thanks to this fascinating and meticulous account, I’ve had a glimpse of just how Euclid’s text, together with works by Ptolemy and Galen, blossomed as they wound their way through the centuries and the seven cities at the heart of Violet Moller’s book. What an adventure.” (Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and author of The Music of the Primes)

"Through Moller’s imagination, the reader is invited to marvel at how multicultural the ancient world was, and to consider how the foundational knowledge of the Western world did not simply leap from the ancient Greeks to modern times but was painstakingly preserved, analyzed and innovated upon for almost 1,000 years.” (Rachel Newcomb, Washington Post)

“The author meticulously and enthusiastically unwinds the ‘dense, tangled undergrowth of manuscript history’ in seven cities.... Moller enlivens her history with stories about young scholars who dedicated their lives to preserving these valuable texts.... A dramatic story of how civilization was passed on and preserved.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Ruined by performance

Why does every sentence sound like a newscaster signing off? Truly ruined what seems like a good book.

Great Historical Summary

Great summary of how knowledge (through the building of libraries) move from one empire and culture to another through history. The challenges and impact on knowledge brought on by how culture and religion interacted was also very insightful.

Amazing book

Opened the horizon in my mind behind knowledge and explained how important is to cooperate together no matter what is the religion or skin color is. It is all for the human and also nobody owns the knowledge.

Great literature and the arts of writing history.

It was very interesting to learn about the art in writing books. from different parts of the world. The struggle to keep history alive made me want to listen . Great book!

Fascinating Historical Review

Brilliantly written, providing captivating and unique insights into the little known historical figures who kept our civilizations invaluable legacy of ancient knowledge alive and more or less intact. Excellent performance as well.

Why is the Voice of "Civilization" Always British?

Great Book. Bad Production Choices.

The producers choose to go with the cliched British narrator - the media's constant and invariable "voice of civilization" straight out of central casting.

Never mind the book is explicitly ABOUT how the West has deliberately ignored or derogated the contributions of non-western intellectual traditions to world knowledge.

It's not even stupid. It's perverse.

Fascinating!!

A very interesting listen of the history of travel of knowledge, through cities and cultures!

Terrible narration.

Unbearable. Each sentence is narrated in the same repetitive tone. Every sentence sounds the same. Voice inflection steady, up and down. Over and over and over. Drove me mad.

Interesting

Interesting book on centers of learning and knowledge centers throughout history. Narrator is fine once you become accustomed.

One note narrator and fire-hose names and data

While the depth of research and information in this read is excellent, the way in which it's brought to light is less than palatable. There are ways to write history (Montefiore's "Jerusalem" for instance) and then there are reads like this. A different narrator might make all the difference (as it certainly does with Jerusalem)- every single sentence in this one ends with the same down-turn in pitch; probably excellent as a soporific.
It might even be better in print - thrown at you scatter-gun style are many, many names of middle eastern decent, including multiple (correctly) tacked on patronymics stretching back generations - these are difficult (at least for my ear) to come to terms with and make connections. Seeing them written might alleviate some of the bewilderment. There is also the usual burden of historians - the lack of creativity in European names of old: too many actors with identical names. This of course is not the fault of the author but I have seen this handled better elsewhere.
To its credit, the book tries to "storyfy" the history, following some key players who dragged books about and created translations to disseminate the knowledge to the west, but it suffers from the author having to cram so many centuries into a readable tome and creates name/date whiplash in a non-scholar reader.
One topic worth the read is the sheer volume of more correct knowledge held in the books of the middle east that took centuries to arrive in Europe, predating, for instance, a Copernican heliocentric solar system by many hundreds of years. How much farther ahead would we be as a species if that information had been propagated sooner. A weather bell for current nationalistic thinking.