Popular Mechanics calls maps “a 10,000-year journey of humans trying to understand Earth.” The early stretch of that journey is odd. The oldest world map to survive is a clay tablet roughly the size of an early iPhone, and it was never meant to get anyone anywhere.
A world with Babylon in the middle
The Babylonian Map of the World was made in Mesopotamia around 700 to 500 B.C., by Smithsonian Magazine’s dating; Popular Mechanics gives the 6th century B.C. Babylon sits at the center as a circle or rectangle, split by the Euphrates and ringed by smaller circles for neighboring cities. A larger circle around everything stands for the ocean. A few regions carry names, Assyria among them.
Geography was thin. The point lay elsewhere. Jerry Brotton, a Queen Mary University of London professor who specializes in cartography, described “something almost talismanic” about holding the world in your hand. Popular Mechanics read the tablet as an early political map, and as proof of how readily mapmakers put themselves at the center.
Practical maps existed too. Popular Mechanics points to Egyptian papyrus maps that guided miners through the desert in the 12th century B.C., and to stick and shell charts that tracked currents around South Pacific islands more than 2,000 years ago. The Romans drew their empire on a scroll barely a foot high and dozens of feet wide. Smithsonian’s verdict: it could not be realistic, and was more of a statement.
Greeks, and one man with a horoscope problem
The Greeks were the first known culture to measure the world scientifically. Pythagoras argued as early as the 6th century B.C. that the Earth was round. By 200 B.C., Eratosthenes had compared the angles of shadows cast at the same moment in two distant cities and estimated the planet’s circumference to within 1,000 miles.
Then came Claudius Ptolemy, in the second century A.D. He was an astronomer and astrologer who needed to place birth towns exactly for his horoscopes. “He invented geography, but it was just because he wanted to do better horoscopes,” said Matthew Edney, a professor of cartography at the University of Southern Maine. Ptolemy gathered town records and travelers’ tales and built a grid of latitude and longitude. Popular Mechanics counts eight volumes and coordinates for 8,000 locations; Smithsonian says he plotted some 10,000. The sources disagree, and the figure depends on who is counting. He also explained how to flatten a globe onto a plane.
None of Ptolemy’s original maps survive. The oldest recreation dates to the 14th century.
Lost, then borrowed back
With Rome’s fall, his work vanished from the West for almost a thousand years. Maps went back to storytelling. Muhammad al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana in 1154 for King Roger II of Sicily after 15 years of work. It held a world map and 70 regional maps, each with descriptions of cities, roads, rivers and mountains, and it stayed among the most accurate geographic works for three centuries. Islamic cartographers had taken up Ptolemy and corrected him, drawing the Indian Ocean as open water rather than his landlocked sea. Smithsonian notes the map also centered the world on Roger’s landholdings.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi, made around 1300 in England, went the other way. Drawn on a single animal hide, it puts Jerusalem at the middle, east at the top and the Day of Judgment above that, with monsters at the margins.
Ptolemy’s errors had a late consequence. He thought the world about 30 percent smaller than it is, and he used Arabian miles, which ran longer than Italian ones. Columbus carried a map shaped by his work, and the arithmetic told him Asia was close.
Sources
- The Entire History of Maps, Civilization's Greatest Tool | Popular Mechanics
- From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps | Smithsonian Magazine
