Earliest known maps . It is not always clear whether an ancient artifact had been wrought as a map or as something else. The definition of "map" is also not precise. Thus, no single artifact is generally accepted to be the earliest surviving map. Candidates include: • A map-like representation of a mountain, river, valleys and routes around Pavlov in the
Czech Republic, carved on a mammoth tusk, that has been dated to 25,000 BC. • An
Aboriginal Australian cylcon that may be as much as 20,000 years old that is thought to depict the
Darling River. • A map etched on a mammoth bone at
Mezhyrich that is about 15,000 years old. • Dots dating to 14,500 BC found on the walls of the
Lascaux caves map of part of the night sky, including the three bright stars
Vega,
Deneb, and
Altair (the
Summer Triangle asterism), as well as the
Pleiades star cluster. The
Cuevas de El Castillo in Spain that contains a dot map of the
Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BC. • A polished chunk of
sandstone from a cave in Spanish
Navarre, dated to 14,000 BC, that may be symbols for landscape features, such as hills or dwellings, superimposed on animal etchings. Alternatively, it may also represent a spiritual landscape, or simple incisings. • The Ségognole 3 rock shelter in the
Paris Basin of
France contains what is speculated to be a miniature representation of the surrounding landscape, modelled to reflect natural water flows and geomorphological features of the region. It may be the oldest three-dimensional map, and dates back 13,000 years ago, around 12,000 to 11,000 BC. • Another ancient picture that resembles a map that was created in the late 7th millennium BC in
Çatalhöyük,
Anatolia, modern
Turkey. This wall painting may represent a plan of this Neolithic village; however, recent scholarship has questioned the identification of this painting as a map. • The "Saint-Bélec slab" (2200–1600 BC), whose lines and symbols have been argued to represent a cadastral plan of a part of western Brittany.
Ancient Near East Maps in Ancient
Babylonia were made by using accurate
surveying techniques. For example, a 7.6 × 6.8 cm
clay tablet found in 1930 at
Ga-Sur, near contemporary
Kirkuk, shows a map of a river valley between two hills.
Cuneiform inscriptions label the features on the map, including a plot of land described as 354 iku (12 hectares) that was owned by a person called Azala. Most scholars date the tablet to the 25th to 24th century BC. Hills are shown by overlapping semicircles, rivers by lines, and cities by circles. The map also is marked to show the
cardinal directions. An engraved map from the Kassite period (14th–12th centuries BC) of Babylonian history shows walls and buildings in the holy city of
Nippur. The
Babylonian World Map, the earliest surviving map of the world ( BC), is a symbolic, not a literal representation. It deliberately omits peoples such as the
Persians and
Egyptians, who were well known to the Babylonians. The area shown is depicted as a circular shape surrounded by water, which fits the religious image of the world in which the Babylonians believed.
Phoenician sailors made major advances in seafaring and exploration. It is recorded that the first
circumnavigation of Africa was possibly undertaken by Phoenician explorers employed by Egyptian
pharaoh Necho II c. 610–595 BC. In
The Histories, written 431–425 BC,
Herodotus cast doubt on a report of the Sun observed shining from the north. He stated that the phenomenon was observed by Phoenician explorers during their circumnavigation of Africa (
The Histories, 4.42) who claimed to have had the Sun on their right when circumnavigating in a clockwise direction. To modern historians, these details confirm the truth of the Phoenicians' report, and even suggest the possibility that the Phoenicians knew about the
spherical Earth model. However, nothing certain about their knowledge of geography and navigation has survived. an idea which would be suggested by the appearance of the horizon as it is seen from a mountaintop or from a seacoast. This model was accepted by the early
Greeks. Homer and his Greek contemporaries knew very little of the Earth beyond the Libyan desert of
Egypt, the southwest coast of
Asia Minor, and the northern boundary of the Greek homeland. Furthermore, the coast of the Black Sea was only known through myths and legends that circulated during his time. In his poems there is no mention of Europe and Asia as geographical concepts. That is why the big part of Homer's world that is portrayed on this interpretive map represents lands that border on the
Aegean Sea. The Greeks believed that they occupied the central region of Earth and its edges were inhabited by savage, monstrous
barbarians and strange animals and monsters: Homer's
Odyssey mentions a great many of these. Additional statements about ancient geography are found in
Hesiod's poems, probably written during the 8th century BC. Through the lyrics of
Works and Days and
Theogony, he shows to his contemporaries some definite geographical knowledge. He introduces the names of such rivers as
Nile,
Ister (
Danube), the shores of the
Bosporus and the
Euxine (
Black Sea), the coast of
Gaul, the island of
Sicily, and a few other regions and rivers. His advanced geographical knowledge not only had predated Greek colonial expansions, but also was used in the earliest Greek world maps, produced by Greek mapmakers such as
Anaximander and
Hecataeus of Miletus, and
Ptolemy using both observations by explorers and a mathematical approach. Early steps in the development of intellectual thought in
ancient Greece belonged to
Ionians from their well-known city of
Miletus in
Asia Minor. Miletus was placed favourably to absorb aspects of
Babylonian knowledge and to profit from the expanding commerce of the
Mediterranean. The earliest ancient Greek who is said to have constructed a map of the world is Anaximander of Miletus (), pupil of
Thales. He believed that the Earth was a cylindrical form, a stone pillar suspended in space. The inhabited part of his world was circular, disk-shaped, and presumably located on the upper surface of the cylinder. Little is known about the map, which has not survived.
Hekatæus of Miletus (550–475 BC) produced another map fifty years later that he claimed was an improved version of the map of his illustrious predecessor. , 500 BC Hecatæus's map describes the Earth as disk with an encircling Ocean, and with Greece placed in the center. This was a very popular contemporary Greek worldview, derived originally from the Homeric poems. Also, similar to many other early maps in antiquity, his map has no scale. As units of measurements, this map used "days of sailing" on the sea and "days of marching" on dry land. The purpose of this map was to accompany Hecatæus's geographical work that was called
Periodos Ges, or
Journey Round the World. A map based on Hecataeus's was intended to aid political decision-making. According to
Herodotus, that map was engraved into a bronze tablet and was carried to Sparta by Aristagoras during the revolt of the Ionian cities against
Persian rule from 499 to 494 BC.
Anaximenes of Miletus (6th century BC), who studied under Anaximander, rejected the views of his teacher regarding the shape of the Earth and instead, he visualized the Earth as a rectangular form supported by compressed air.
Pythagoras of Samos (–480 BC) speculated about the notion of a spherical Earth with a central fire at its core. He is sometimes incorrectly credited with the introduction of a model that divides a spherical Earth into five zones: one hot, two temperate, and two cold—northern and southern. This idea, known as the zonal theory of climate, is more likely to have originated at the time of
Aristotle.
Scylax, a sailor, made a record of his
Mediterranean voyages in BC. This is the earliest known set of Greek
periploi, or sailing instructions, which became the basis for many future mapmakers, especially in the medieval period. The way in which the geographical knowledge of the Greeks advanced from the previous assumptions of the Earth's shape was through Herodotus and his conceptual view of the world. This map also did not survive and many have speculated that it was never produced. A possible reconstruction of his map is displayed adjacent. , 440 BC Herodotus traveled extensively, collecting information and documenting his findings in his books on Europe, Asia, and Libya. He also combined his knowledge with what he learned from the people he met. Herodotus wrote his
Histories in the mid-5th century BC. Although his work was dedicated to the story of long struggle of the Greeks with the Persian Empire, Herodotus also included everything he knew about the geography, history, and peoples of the world. Thus, his work provides a detailed picture of the known world of the 5th century BC. Herodotus rejected the prevailing view of most 5th-century BC maps that the Earth is a disk surrounded by ocean. In his work he describes the Earth as an irregular shape with oceans surrounding only Asia and Africa. He introduces names such as the Atlantic Sea, and the
Erythrean Sea, which translates as the "Red Sea". He also divided the world into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. He depicted the boundary of Europe as the line from the
Pillars of Hercules through the
Bosphorus and the area between the
Caspian Sea and the
Indus River. He regarded the
Nile as the boundary between Asia and Africa. He speculated that the extent of Europe was much greater than was assumed at the time and left Europe's shape to be determined by future research. In the case of Africa, he believed that, except for the small stretch of land in the vicinity of Suez, the continent was in fact surrounded by water. However, he definitely disagreed with his predecessors and contemporaries about its presumed circular shape. He based his theory on the story of Pharaoh
Necho II, the ruler of Egypt between 609 and 594 BC, who had sent
Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa. Apparently, it took them three years, but they certainly did prove his idea. He speculated that the Nile River started as far west as the
Ister River (Danube) in Europe and cut Africa through the middle. He was the first writer to assume that the Caspian Sea was separated from other seas and he recognised northern Scythia as one of the coldest inhabited lands in the world. Similar to his predecessors, Herodotus also made mistakes. He accepted a clear distinction between the civilized Greeks in the center of the Earth and the barbarians on the world's edges. In his
Histories it is clear that he believed that the world became stranger and stranger when one traveled away from Greece, until one reached the ends of the Earth, where humans behaved as savages. While various previous Greek philosophers presumed the Earth to be spherical,
Aristotle (384–322 BC) is credited with proving the Earth's sphericity. His arguments may be summarized as follows: • The
lunar eclipse is always circular • Ships seem to sink as they move away from view and pass the horizon • Some stars can be seen only from certain parts of the Earth.
Hellenistic Mediterranean A vital contribution to mapping the reality of the world came with a scientific estimate of the circumference of the earth. This event has been described as the first scientific attempt to give geographical studies a mathematical basis. The man credited for this achievement was
Eratosthenes (275–195 BC), a Greek scholar who lived in
Hellenistic North Africa. As described by
George Sarton, historian of science, "there was among them [Eratosthenes's contemporaries] a man of genius but as he was working in a new field they were too stupid to recognize him". His work, including
On the Measurement of the Earth and
Geographica, has only survived in the writings of later philosophers such as
Cleomedes and
Strabo. He was a devoted geographer who set out to reform and perfect the map of the world. Eratosthenes argued that accurate mapping, even if in two dimensions only, depends upon the establishment of accurate linear measurements. He was the first to calculate the
Earth's circumference (within 0.5 percent accuracy). His great achievement in the field of cartography was the use of a new technique of charting with
meridians, his imaginary north–south lines, and
parallels, his imaginary west–east lines. These axis lines were placed over the map of the Earth with their origin in the city of Rhodes and divided the world into sectors. Then, Eratosthenes used these earth partitions to reference places on the map. He also divided Earth into five climatic regions, which was proposed at least as early as the late sixth or early fifth century BC by
Parmenides: a torrid zone across the middle, two frigid zones at extreme north and south, and two temperate bands in between. He was likely also the first person to use the word "geography".
Roman Empire Pomponius Mela 's world map.
Pomponius Mela (1st century B.C.) is unique among ancient geographers in that, after dividing the earth into five zones, of which two only were habitable, he asserts the existence of
antichthones inhabiting the southern temperate zone, inaccessible to the folk of the northern temperate regions due to the unbearable heat of the intervening torrid belt. On the divisions and boundaries of Europe, Asia and Africa, he repeats Eratosthenes; like all classical geographers from
Alexander the Great (except
Ptolemy) he regards the
Caspian Sea as an inlet of the Northern Ocean, corresponding to the
Persian Gulf and the
Red Sea on the south.
Marinus of Tyre Marinus of Tyre (c. A.D. 70–130) was a
Hellenized Phoenician geographer and cartographer. He founded mathematical geography and provided the underpinnings of
Ptolemy's influential
Geographia. Marinus's geographical treatise is lost and known only from Ptolemy's remarks. He introduced improvements to the construction of maps and developed a system of nautical charts. His chief legacy is that he first assigned to each place a proper
latitude and
longitude. His
zero meridian ran through the westernmost land known to him, the
Isles of the Blessed around the location of the
Canary or
Cape Verde Islands. He used the parallel of
Rhodes for measurements of latitude. Ptolemy mentions several revisions of Marinus's geographical work, which is often dated to AD 114 although this is uncertain. Marinus estimated a length of 180,000
stadia for the equator, roughly corresponding to a circumference of the Earth of 33,300 km, about 17% less than the actual value. He also carefully studied the works of his predecessors and the diaries of travelers. His maps were the first in the
Roman Empire to show China. He also invented
equirectangular projection, which is still used in map creation today. A few of Marinus's opinions are reported by Ptolemy. Marinus was of the opinion that the
World Ocean was separated into an eastern and a western part by the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. He thought that the inhabited world stretched in latitude from
Thule (
Norway) to
Agisymba (around the
Tropic of Capricorn) and in longitude from the
Isles of the Blessed (around the
Canaries) to Shera (China). Marinus also coined the term
Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the
Arctic Circle.
Ptolemy Ptolemy (90–168), a Hellenized
Egyptian, thought that, with the aid of astronomy and mathematics, the Earth could be mapped very accurately. Ptolemy revolutionized the depiction of the spherical Earth on a map by using
perspective projection, and suggested precise methods for fixing the position of geographic features on its surface using a
coordinate system with parallels of
latitude and
meridians of
longitude. Ptolemy's eight-volume atlas
Geographia is a prototype of modern mapping and
GIS. It included an index of place-names, with the latitude and longitude of each place to guide the search, scale, conventional signs with legends, and the practice of orienting maps so that north is at the top and east to the right of the map—an almost universal custom today. Yet with all his important innovations, however, Ptolemy was not infallible. His most important error was a miscalculation of the circumference of the Earth. He believed that
Eurasia covered 180° of the globe, which convinced
Christopher Columbus to sail across the Atlantic to look for a simpler and faster way to travel to India. Had Columbus known that the true figure was much greater, it is conceivable that he would never have set out on his momentous voyage.
Tabula Peutingeriana '' (5th century). In 2007, the
Tabula Peutingeriana, a 12th-century replica of a 5th-century Roman imperial road map, was placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and displayed to the public for the first time. Although the scroll is well preserved and believed to be an accurate copy of an authentic original, it is on a medium that is now so delicate that it must be protected at all times from exposure to daylight.
China The earliest known maps to have survived in China date to the 4th century BC. In 1986, seven ancient Chinese maps were found in an archeological excavation of a
Qin State tomb in what is now
Fangmatan, in the vicinity of Tianshui City,
Gansu.
Earliest geographical writing In China, the earliest known geographical Chinese writing dates back to the 5th century BC, during the beginning of the
Warring States (481–221 BC). The nine provinces in the time of this geographical work were very small in size compared to their modern Chinese counterparts. The Yu Gong's descriptions pertain to areas of the
Yellow River, the lower valleys of the
Yangzi, with the plain between them and the
Shandong Peninsula, and to the west the most northern parts of the
Wei River and the
Han River were known (along with the southern parts of modern-day
Shanxi). An early text that mentioned maps was the
Rites of Zhou. Later Chinese ideas about the quality of maps made during the Han dynasty and before stem from the assessment given by Pei Xiu.
Tang dynasty The
Tang dynasty (618–907) also had its fair share of cartographers, including the works of
Xu Jingzong in 658,
Wang Mingyuan in 661, and
Wang Zhongsi in 747. located in the
Stele Forest of
Xi'an. This squared map features a graduated scale of 100
li for each rectangular grid. China's coastline and river systems are clearly defined and precisely pinpointed on the map.
Yu Gong is in reference to the Chinese deity described in the
geographical chapter of the
Classic of History, dated 5th century BC. During the
Song dynasty (960–1279)
Emperor Taizu of Song ordered
Lu Duosun in 971 to update and 're-write all the Tu Jing in the world', which would seem to be a daunting task for one individual, who was sent out throughout the provinces to collect texts and as much data as possible. The famous 11th-century scientist and
polymath statesman
Shen Kuo (1031–1095) was also a geographer and cartographer. Shen also created a
three-dimensional raised-relief map using sawdust, wood, beeswax, and wheat paste, while representing the topography and specific locations of a frontier region to the imperial court.
Yuan dynasty (Mongol Empire) In the
Mongol Empire, the
Mongol scholars with the Persian and Chinese cartographers or their foreign colleagues created maps, geographical compendium as well as travel accounts.
Rashid-al-Din Hamadani described his geographical compendium, "Suvar al-aqalim", constituted volume four of the Collected chronicles of the
Ilkhanate in Persia. His works says about the borders of the seven climes (old world), rivers, major cities, places, climate, and
Mongol yams (relay stations). The
Great Khan Khubilai's ambassador and minister,
Bolad, had helped Rashid's works in relation to the Mongols and
Mongolia. Thanks to
Pax Mongolica, the easterners and the westerners in Mongol dominions were able to gain access to one another's geographical materials. The Mongols required the nations they conquered to send geographical maps to the Mongol headquarters. One of medieval Persian work written in northwest Iran can clarify the historical geography of
Mongolia where
Genghis Khan was born and united the Mongol and
Turkic nomads as recorded in native sources, especially the
Secret History of the Mongols. Map of relay stations, called "yam", and strategic points existed in the
Yuan dynasty.
Ming dynasty The multicolour map,
Da Ming Hunyi Tu dates to the early
Ming dynasty from about 1390, is in multicolour. The horizontal scale is 1:820,000 and the vertical scale is 1:1,060,000. Similar to these, the earliest European style map from China, the
Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (1602) influenced and was exported to Japan and Korea. By this time, Jesuit missionaries contributed to similar maps such as the
Wanguo Quantu (1620s) and the
Kunyu Quantu (1674). While the
Selden Map ( century) employs a system of navigational routes emanating from ports in China. The
Mao Kun map published in 1628 is thought to be based on a
strip map dated to the voyages of
Zheng He. In 1579,
Luo Hongxian published the
Guang Yutu atlas, including more than 40 maps, a grid system, and a systematic way of representing major landmarks such as mountains, rivers, roads and borders. The
Guang Yutu incorporates the discoveries of the naval explorer Zheng He's 15th-century voyages along the coasts of China, Southeast Asia, India and Africa.
Japan and Korea . c.1647. This was one of the only surviving Indian made maps. In 1402, Yi Hoe and Kwan Yun created a world map largely based from Chinese cartographers called the
Gangnido map. It is currently one of the oldest surviving world maps from East Asia. Another notable pre-modern map is the
Cheonhado map developed in Korea in the 17th century.
Sekisui Nagakubo produced a world map in 1785 called the
Comprehensive Map and Description of the Geography of the Myriad Countries of the Globe (), mainly deriving it from an earlier map made by Matteo Ricci. The production was made by woodblock print and folded into paper boards, he made corrections and additions on top of Matteo's production. This was one of the earliest maps with longitude and latitude information in Japan and was written in
Katakana. Another well-known cartographer of the late-Edo period was
Ino Tadataka, he is known for completing the first map of Japan using modern surveying techniques. His most famous work, the consisted of three large map pages at a scale of 1:432,000 and it showed the entire country on eight pages at 1:216,000. Some of his maps are accurate to 1/1000 of a degree, which allowed it to become the definitive maps used in Japan for nearly a century. Maps based on his work were in use as late as 1924.
India cartographer
Nain Singh Rawat (19th century) received a
Royal Geographical Society gold medal in 1876.
Ancient India Indian cartographic traditions covered the locations of the
Pole star and other constellations of use. The 8th-century scholar
Bhavabhuti conceived paintings which indicated geographical regions. The 32 sheet atlas—with maps oriented towards the south as was the case with Islamic works of the era—is part of a larger scholarly work compiled by Isfahani during 1647 CE. (260 × 254 in., or approximately 22 × 21 ft).' though it is known that its map projection type was based on
Marinus of Tyre rather than
Ptolemy. Also in the 9th century, the
Persian mathematician and geographer,
Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi, employed
spherical trigonometry and
map projection methods to convert
polar coordinates to a different coordinate system centred on a specific point on the sphere, in this the
Qibla, the direction to
Mecca.
Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī (973–1048) later developed ideas which are seen as an anticipation of the polar coordinate system. Around 1025, he describes a polar equi-
azimuthal equidistant projection of the
celestial sphere. However, this type of projection had been used in ancient Egyptian star-maps and was not to be fully developed until the 15 and 16th centuries. Al-Khwārizmī,
Al-Ma'mun's most famous geographer, corrected Ptolemy's gross overestimate for the length of the
Mediterranean Sea Al-Khwarizmi thus set the
Prime Meridian of the
Old World at the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, 10–13 degrees to the east of
Alexandria (the prime meridian previously set by Ptolemy) and 70 degrees to the west of
Baghdad. Most medieval Muslim geographers continued to use al-Khwarizmi's prime meridian. Around 1025, Al-Biruni was the first to describe a polar equi-
azimuthal equidistant projection of the
celestial sphere. In his
Codex Masudicus (1037), Al-Biruni theorized the existence of a landmass along the vast ocean between Asia and Europe, or what is today known as the Americas. He deduced its existence on the basis of his accurate estimations of the
Earth's circumference and
Afro-Eurasia's size, which he found spanned only two-fifths of the Earth's circumference, and his discovery of the concept of
specific gravity, from which he deduced that the geological processes that gave rise to
Eurasia must've also given rise to lands in the vast ocean between Asia and Europe. He also theorized that the landmass must be inhabited by human beings, which he deduced from his knowledge of humans inhabiting the broad north–south band stretching from Russia to
South India and
Sub-Saharan Africa, theorizing that the landmass would most likely lie along the same band. He was the first to predict "the existence of land to the east and west of Eurasia, which later on was discovered to be America and Japan". With funding from
Roger II of Sicily (1097–1154), al-Idrisi drew on the knowledge collected at the university of
Cordoba and paid draftsmen to make journeys and map their routes. The book describes the earth as a sphere with a circumference of but maps it in 70 rectangular sections. Notable features include the correct dual sources of the Nile, the coast of Ghana and mentions of Norway. Climate zones were a chief organizational principle. A second and shortened copy from 1192 called
Garden of Joys is known by scholars as the
Little Idrisi.
Piri Reis map of the Ottoman Empire of
Piri Reis (1513) showing parts of the Americas. The Ottoman cartographer
Piri Reis published navigational maps in his
Kitab-ı Bahriye. The work includes an atlas of charts for small segments of the mediterranean, accompanied by sailing instructions covering the sea. In the second version of the work, he included a map of the Americas.
Medieval Europe , a road map of 14th-century Britain
Medieval maps and the Mappa Mundi Medieval maps of the world in Europe were mainly symbolic in form along the lines of the much earlier
Babylonian World Map. Known as
Mappa Mundi (cloths or charts of the world) these maps were circular or symmetrical cosmological diagrams representing the Earth's single land mass as disk-shaped and surrounded by ocean.
Italian cartography and the birth of portolan charts , a medieval European map, was made around 1450 by the Italian monk
Fra Mauro. It is a circular world map drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame, about two meters in diameter.|220x220px
Roger Bacon's investigations of map projections and the appearance of
portolano and then
portolan charts for plying the European trade routes were rare innovations of the period. The Majorcan school is contrasted with the contemporary
Italian cartography school. The
Carta Pisana portolan chart, made at the end of the 13th century (1275–1300), is the oldest surviving
nautical chart (that is, not simply a map but a document showing accurate navigational directions).
Majorcan cartographic school and the "normal" portolan chart The
Majorcan cartographic school was a predominantly Jewish cooperation of
cartographers,
cosmographers and
navigational instrument-makers in late 13th to the 14th and 15th-century
Majorca. With their multicultural heritage the Majorcan cartographic school experimented and developed unique cartographic techniques most dealing with the Mediterranean, as it can be seen in the
Catalan Atlas. The Majorcan school was (co-)responsible for the invention (c.1300) of the "Normal
Portolan chart". It was a contemporary superior, detailed nautical model chart, gridded by compass lines.
Polynesian stick charts The
Polynesian peoples who explored and settled the Pacific islands in the first two millennia AD used maps to navigate across large distances. A surviving map from the
Marshall Islands uses sticks tied in a grid with palm strips representing wave and wind patterns, with shells attached to show the location of islands. Other maps were created as needed using temporary arrangements of stones or shells. ==Early Modern era==