Atlas of the Armenian SSR
Атлас Армянской ССР
Armenia · Академия наук Армянской ССР · 1961
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Cartography: Atlases
Unknown · 1964
This paper examines the unique cartographic and editorial challenges encountered in producing the first Hebrew edition of the Atlas of Israel (1964), a comprehensive work comprising 102 sheets and 720 large-scale maps. Although modeled on other national atlases, the Israeli atlas diverged significantly due to three primary factors: the country's rapid demographic and cultural transformations, its distinctive geographical position and elongated shape, and the uneven reliability of its documentary base. The most influential factor was the dramatic 600% population increase over two generations, which drove extreme changes in agriculture, economy, communication, and services. To capture this dynamism, the atlas employs time-sequence map series for most topics rather than single static representations, and includes supplementary maps to update content. Geographically, Israel's location on the arid zone boundary creates sharp north-south contrasts, with highly diverse physical, human, and economic elements in the north versus a monotonous south, compounded by varied topography over small altitude ranges. These spatial characteristics demanded specialized cartographic solutions. Finally, the area's political history under Ottoman, British, and Israeli administrations within 50 years resulted in data that differ greatly in coverage and reliability. The paper details how these interrelated problems shaped the atlas's content, design, and production.
Criticism and Bibliography. Comprehensive Atlas of the Armenian SSR
Вольф, М. Б.; Мурзаев, Э. М. · 1962
This paper presents a critical review of the Atlas of the Armenian SSR, a comprehensive geographic atlas compiled by a large team of scholars under the editorial leadership of Prof. A. B. Bagdasaryan. The atlas, comprising 96 map pages, is recognized as an exemplary collaborative work that successfully integrates physical and economic geography. The review highlights the atlas’s strengths: a well-designed section on natural conditions that serves as a physical background for economic maps, detailed economic maps covering industry, agriculture, and transport, and notably, population maps that vividly depict the repatriation of Armenians and the relationship between settlement and altitude. However, the review identifies several methodological and practical shortcomings. Key deficiencies include the lack of transparent indicators underlying classifications on many thematic maps, leading to ambiguous interpretations; excessive generalization on the agricultural specialization map, which uses administrative districts rather than finer territorial units (e.g., collective farms), thereby reducing analytical granularity; inconsistent characterization of agricultural zones across different map sheets; missing essential reference maps, such as a detailed place-name index map; and improper application of choropleth methods, such as mapping absolute values instead of relative indices and depicting investment percentages as if they were relative data. Additional issues involve poor coordination between maps, inaccurate symbolization of forest industries, and cartographic design flaws that cause visual isolation of economic regions. Despite these weaknesses, the atlas is positively assessed as a valuable contribution to complex geographic cartography, and the review emphasizes the importance of learning from these shortcomings for the creation of similar atlases for other regions.
Geographical atlases of the transcaucasian republics
A. F. Aslanikashvili; A. B. Baghdasaryan; S. G. Rustamov · 1964
The geographical atlases of Armenia (1961), Azerbaijan (1963), and Georgia (1964) were published in the respective national languages and Russian. The scales and formats vary by country: Armenia's atlas is in album form at 1:1,000,000/1:1,500,000, while the other two are in book form at 1:1,500,000/1:2,500,000. The content broadly follows the recommendations of the 1960 Moscow "National Atlas," supplemented with thematic maps reflecting local natural and socio-economic characteristics. Each of the three volumes includes introductory maps, natural conditions and resources, population, national economy, culture and health, and historical maps, comprising 143, 177, and 168 maps respectively, with natural conditions and resources maps accounting for 49%–57% of the total.
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