Territoriality and Boundaries
The examples above, although brief and eclectic, reaffirms the relationships among geography, cartography, and the perception of space. They point in other directions as well, toward disciplines that may be engaged in searching for the constructs of ancient space.
Human geographers and anthropologists, since the days of Durkheim, have examined border zones like Brauer's. They recognized that social classifications and ordering are essential to human cultures, and secondly, cultural rules that mark difference and differentiation such as boundary systems are basic to social organization and structure (Pellow 1996: 215). Furthermore, spatial use is culturally constructed, and spatial patterning is related to other cultural phenomena. The list conforms to a portion of our hypotheses outlined above.
Robert Sack has shown how these patterns change in tandem with cultures' social and economic systems, and they in turn with perceptions of territoriality. Territoriality is defined as "the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area" (Sack, 1986: 19). Such attempts can be seen in family situations where a parent controls a child by defining territoriality, i.e., by separating zones that are within limits from those that are not. The same processes operate on every level and in every arena of society, and, like social planes of classification, several overlapping territorialities may exist simultaneously. For example, one's access to economic "territory" may differ from access rights in a religious sphere.

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Sack finds territoriality wherever three factors are at work: 1) classification by area (e.g., putting a room or land off-limits); 2) communication by marker, gesture, or symbol that combines statements about space with inclusion or exclusion; and 3) attempt to control the area (Sack, 1986: 21-22). Therefore, territoriality, like boundaries, is associated with the exercise of power, and it is an important factor in persons' spatial relationships and concepts of space.
The record of these relationships and changes in them can be documented historically. Not surprisingly, Sack illustrates a major shift in cartography by selecting the transition from T-O mapping in the Christian Middle Ages to the reassertion of Ptolemaic longitude-latitude coordinates (Sack, 1986: 84-87). For him, the tripartite division of regions on the T-O map affirms that "wherever one actually is located in physical space is immaterial unless one is at the center in the heavenly city, Jerusalem" (Sack, 1986: 85.). This view contrasts with Alexander's where location in space was stressed rather than the relationship to, and dominance of, the center. Ptolemy's longitude-latitude grid, on the other hand, reflects an ability to view and represent space abstractly (Figure 5). The globe is no longer seen as an "amorphous topography but as a homogeneous surface ruled by a uniform grid" (Sack 1986: 85). This distinction will become important again when we consider Genesis 10 below.
The distinction is also important when discussing biblical spatial subtexts generally. The two kinds of mapping -- T-O and Ptolemaic -- point to dramatically different subtexts. In one, space is personal, part of a faith perspective, and associated with religious power. In the other, we sense distancing, abstracting, and placing control in the hands of human agencies.
Malina has used Sack's work to study apocalyptic thought, and I owe him credit for bringing Sack's and his own analyses to my attention. His apocalyptic view of territoriality in antiquity is useful here (Malina, 1993: 370-372).
Malina contrasts post-industrial, modern Western territoriality with antiquity. We could extend and express the contrast analogously to signal the differences between segmented non centralized societies and those that are centralized and ordered by the apparatus of statehood or a similar monopolizing power. In any case, among ancient and/or segmented groups, territory is perceived organically as related to persons and events rather than abstractly as a geometry of distances and directions. What happens to whom and where gives a space (territory) its meaning. The relations of persons and events to space are part of the sense of territory. As a result, to follow Malina, travel is movement through people, not through space. Memories of contacts with places, and events, as well as the associations themselves can take on mythic proportions. In this process, a particular space becomes special or sacred and in some instances is associated with the ancestors.
The proximity of this description of territoriality to biblical data can be felt, as Malina has already argued. We sense groups moving through other groups by will or by warring, keeping track of encounters by lists of tribal-, personal-, place-, and sometimes event-names, defining identities by differentiating self from neighbors and enemies, exercising power by telling stories about space, holding power by ancestral claims to territories, and competing (and often confusing) claims about marginal spaces and border zones. Each of these perceptions tells us something about biblical spatial subtexts and leads us further toward the nature of biblical mapping. They infer that the subtexts are non-geometric and non-Ptolemaic and are closer or similar to those in non centralized tribal societies.