What were the earliest maps drawn on?
Answers
Answer:
History’s earliest known world map was scratched on clay tablets in the ancient city of Babylon sometime around 600 B.C. The star-shaped map measures just five-by-three inches and shows the world as a flat disc surrounded by an ocean, or “bitter river.” Babylon and the Euphrates River are depicted in the center as a pair of rectangles, while the neighboring cities of Assyria and Susa are shown as small, circular blobs. Outside of the disc sit a collection of triangular wedges, which depict far-off islands with mysterious labels such as “beyond the flight of birds” and “a place where the sun cannot be seen.” The accompanying cuneiform text describes these unknown lands as being populated by mythological beasts, which suggests that the map shows both real geographical features and elements of Babylonian cosmology.Many elements of the science of cartography can trace their origins to the work of the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known as Ptolemy. Around 150 A.D., he produced “Geography,” an eight-volume textbook that included some of the first maps to use mathematical principles. Ptolemy’s book has a few notable errors—the Indian Ocean, for example, is depicted as a sea—yet it’s still remarkable for its breadth and detail. It boasts more than 8,000 different place names as well as references to such far-flung locales as Iceland and Korea, all of which are plotted according to geometric points of latitude and longitude. Sadly, no maps drawn by Ptolemy have survived to today. His atlas seems to have disappeared for over a thousand years, and it wasn’t until the 13th century that Byzantine scholars began making projections using his coordinates.
Answer:
The earliest maps were drawn on clay tablets in 2300 BC.