Talk:Georgius Hornius

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Dbachmann

Cut from the article:

He is also one of the first early modern scholars to adopt the colour terminology for race. In a 1653 map by Hornius, included in an atlas published by Jan Janssonius, the three groups are labelled as White (Japhetites), Yellow (Semites) and Black (Hamites).

This is the most hilarious thing. The source I used for the above was Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (2008), p. 165, referencing "a schema developed by the Dutch mapmaker Georg Hornius" (clearly, Hornius is neither Dutch nor a "mapmaker", so I was trying to find the actual reference). The "reference" given by Eze in endnote 44 reads "Hornius, Rdo. Dno. D. Adr. Stalpartio Abb Togerlesi dignisod." I am not joking, this is the reference given in its entirety, there is nothing else there. This is, of course, gibberish. But googling for fragments of this string, we find apparent OCR errors pointing to this, a 1624 atlas of ancient geography, and also this. The 1653 atlas appears to have included some of the maps from the 1624 atlas (Jan Janssonius, Atlas Novus, sive Theatrum Orbis Terrarum 1653). Clearly this has nothing to do with G. Hornius, but it may be worthwhile figuring out what is going on here. --dab (𒁳) 15:19, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Ok, so I found what this was. It's a 1624 map by Ortelius entitled Lumen Historiarum per Orientum. The garbled reference is due to the failure to expand the abbreviations in the dedication to Adrianus Stalpaerts, i.e. to Reverendo Domino, Doctori Adriano Stalpartio, abbati Tongerlensis dignissimo. The map has nothing to do with Hornius, and it was simply reprinted by Janssonius 30 years after its original publication. It isn't clear so far what the map has got to do with colour terminology for race, so far I have not been able to find any reference to race on it. It says a lot about the state of Western academia, imho, that academic publishers are happy to print this nonsense, leaving it to Wikipedians to figure out the actual reference. --dab (𒁳) 15:34, 15 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Found the "colour terminology of race" in Hornius, Arca Noe (1666), p. 37! I have inserted this information in the relevant page, here.--dab (𒁳) 06:22, 16 March 2018 (UTC)Reply