The Russian navy as Chartmaker in the eighteenth century

Abstract

The modern period of chart making in Russia began in the reign of Peter the Great. Peter created the country's navy, which became the main focus for cartography in the eighteenth century. In this paper the multi‐faceted duties of naval officers in the charting and mapping of seas, rivers, forest resources and other features important for ship building and the development of navigation, and essential to Russia's geo‐political interests, are considered. The history of the early stages of specialized naval education and the training of surveyors at the Moscow Mathematical‐Navigational School (from 1701) and the St Petersburg Naval Academy (from 1715) are outlined, and the first surveys in the Baltic and Caspian seas are described. Finally, special attention is paid to the hydrographical surveys and charting of the Aegean Sea during the Russian‐Turkish war of 1768–1774, the sources and methods involved, and the little‐known Atlas of the Archipelago (1788) which was created from the surveys.     

A Pirate's Life for me: The Maritime Culture of the Sea Peoples

An anthropological approach to a culture extrapolates social structures, traditions, and general organizing principles of that culture from the careful observation of patterns of behaviour as described in case studies. In the absence of a living culture to record, archaeologists extrapolate this information from behaviour reconstructed from spatially determined patterns in the deposition of material remains and from patterns found in the general organizing principles of historically documented cultures, using arguments based on analogy. This contribution builds on our previous research on the “Sea Peoples” as a piratical culture in order to apply an anthropological approach to understanding the cultural identities of the various tribal groups involved in maritime activities at the end of the Bronze Age who are popularly known as the “Sea Peoples”, and place this within the broader context of the current discussions on the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age in the Mediterranean.     

Literary quests in the Aegean (1840–1940): Identity and cosmopolitanism

Literature is produced within society and reflects social phenomena and therefore it must not be neglected in any interscientific approach to the way a certain geographical area contributes to the construction of an identity. The main purpose of this paper is to point to some directions concerning the study of the Mediterranean, by means of literary works. It is based on the example of Greece and presents a brief discussion through the history and certain themes of Greek literature (movement, traveling, experience of the refugees etc.), concentrating on the search for a national identity, towards either an introspective or a cosmopolitan point of view. The study is not exhaustive; it is indicative of the way literature, both from a contemporary and a general historical point of view, is able to express a more indepth research into the Mediterranean communities.