“Heaven and earth were one form…. (then they were separated from one another…)”
There are of course bits that have survived intact for millennia. One of these is this fragment from one of Euripides’ lost plays (only 20% or so are complete), The Wise Melanippe, and begins a statement of cosmogony that states the creation of all things. The separation of heaven and earth has always stuck with me, because this separation begins with Euripides with the creation of the world seems to continue on its way with mini-separations of all things over the course of time—like the cosmological world-bearing turtles—all the way down. I’m not sure how or who exactly did this heaven-rending, or to what force it owed its being: evidently the Presocratics tended to depersonalize the actions of the gods and grant their actions to natural forces, so the issue with the heaven-separation business may well have been a motive force rather than a god. Anyway it’s the tearing apart, the removal, the separation phenomena that got my attention to begin with, and one which has stayed with me, though I’m sure that Euripides didn’t have that sort of violent rending in mind while describing the birth of the earth.
And so it is with this map* showing the concentrations of the
Jewish people in Europe in the late 19th
century. Between the time of the publication of this map—1881—and the beginning
of the Nazi regime in Germany
There are large-scale maps of this sort of evidence for
other groups of people in their pre-Euripidean tearing from
their home: maps showing the locations of Indian tribes in North America (pre-Columbian, 17th century, 19th century, they’re all telling pretty much the same devastating story) is one good example of a slender category. There aren’t maps for the mass extermination by starvation created by Joe Stalin, or the millions murdered by Pol Pot or Mao. There are of course more small-scale, localized maps depicting the results of forced relocations or devastating war or drought or hunger or floods. But few, I think, take such a compelling x-ray of a people’s past on a continental scales such as this.
*"Die Verbreitung der Juden in Mitteleurope" found in Richard Andree's , Volkskunde der Juden..., Verlag von Velhagen & Klefirg in Bielfeld und Leipzig: 1881.