This paper will discuss the changing uses and descriptions of the aerial balance between the 16th and 19th centuries with a focus on the Ottoman empire. The aerial or triangular balance was used in various surveying practices in the Middle East. Its making was explained in detail in al-Karaji’s eleventh century book on extracting hidden waters. Following, this same instrument becomes one of the few illustrated tools in chapters on surveying in Arabic texts on geometry. Al-Amili’s 17th-century book, "The Essentials of Arithmetic" as well as its copies and commentaries described and depicted this tool in their sections on surveying. Yet, it has been difficult to establish how this scientific knowledge was translated into practice to guide social affairs or vice versa. Who were the practitioners? How did they use this tool? What were the intersections between theoretical writings and practical applications? How did the role of books in informing action change throughout time? This paper will look at four different commentaries on al-Amili’s book written between the 17th and 19th centuries along with Ottoman accounts on architecture and surveying to shed light on the link between theory and practice in scientific and architectural practices. Hence, it will explore the mutual transmission of knowledge between writing and making.

My paper explores the history of Ottoman mapping from the 1850s to the birth of “Turkish cartography” in the early 20th-centuries, covering a period when maps gradually became a fixture of not just military planning and administration but also the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects. The current literature approaches this proliferation of technological things as evidence of “countermapping,” constituting an attempt to appropriate European techniques of cartography to reform and strengthen the Ottoman state from within. While this framework helps explain the transformation of Ottoman mapping practices in a historical moment of contact, another crucial field of investigation remains unexplored, that of the myriad of ways in which people actually went about producing, circulating, and consuming maps in the late imperial period. Today “maps,” “charts,” and “plans,” are conventionally thought of as objects that must possess some common character, yet the concepts of “cartography” and “haritacılık” took hold only incrementally in the 19th and early 20th-centuries, a process that was closely tied to Ottoman wars. This process involved the creation of new mapping institutions, professional identities, and genealogies of geographical science and technology. This conceptual shift towards asserting a unity of method, procedure, and purpose of cartography was sustained by the emerging belief in the unity of scientific method, and set the conditions for countermapping to emerge as a framework of analysis. By reading material and conceptual transformations together, my paper excavates the individual life stories of several map producers to highlight the broad array of motives and power-relations sustaining the proliferation of mapping, and ask: What did Ottoman mapping cultures look like before cartography? How can letting go of the category of cartography disclose new social practices and discourses of mapping in the Ottoman Empire?

My paper will explore an example of an institution of higher education in the medieval Islamic world, the knowledge that was imparted there and its practical application. I will use both written sources and material culture remains uncovered during building restoration work in the city of Zabid, Yemen. Zabid was founded in 820. It soon started to grow into a major economic and cultural centre. In 1173 the Ayyubids conquered Yemen and introduced the madrasa as an institution of higher education. About two hundred years later, in 1393, a survey of Zabid’s religious buildings was ordered by the then ruling sultan of the Rasulid dynasty (1229-1454); it recorded some 230 mosques and madrasas, a figure that reflects the city’s importance as a centre of learning. Zabid attracted students and scholars from all over the Islamic world. From the historical sources we learn that Zabid acquired a reputation for teaching and scholarship not only in the religious sciences but also in the mathematical sciences including arithmetic, algebra, astronomy and surveying. Tangible evidence of good command of the mathematical disciplines was found during building restoration work in the Iskandariyya madrasa in Zabid in the sophisticated geometric designs of the painted dome decorations. Two-dimensional designs had to be fitted to curved surfaces, which involved calculated distortions of distances, angles and shapes. Equally important was the practical application by the artisan. As a result, the geometric designs can be read correctly from the ground as if they had been drawn on a flat surface.

This paper considers Ottoman estate inventories and land registers as a body of geographic knowledge alternative to other mapping practices like cartography. The presentation will also serve as an introduction to an ongoing project that employs geospatial systems to map the extensive agricultural holdings [çiftlik] of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha. This notorious historical figure (d.1822), who served as the Ottoman governor over a large swath of territory comprising what is today northern Greece and southern Albania, was also by many accounts the greatest landowner in the region. By employing GIS to visualize Ali Pasha’s çiftlik holdings, I seek to substantiate this claim of Ali Pasha as a leading landholder. I likewise demonstrate how this kind of mapping project, which utilizes abundant yet previously unmapped archival evidence, offers Ottoman studies new and unexpected opportunities for the analysis of landscape. Re-constructing Ali Pasha’s agro-economic regime in its spatial dimensions allows for a detailed depiction of how a system of administrative geography, whose precise contours in the pre-Tanzimat era remains surprisingly elusive, played out on the ground. This study also captures how local people experienced and understood the region in which they lived. This essay presents the preliminary results of this digital visualization project by mapping the çiftlik of Ali Pasha and his sons in the Ottoman sub-provinces of Yanya and Delvine, with a total of over 300 individual farming villages identified and represented. The data set that forms the basis for this project primarily comes from a series of land registers today located in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive in Istanbul, and these findings are compared and evaluated with additional Greek historical sources.