Drawing maps can be more than just jotting down places, locations, or coordinates on a piece of paper or canvas. Much like history, the way that maps are drawn can be influenced by the cartographer's values, beliefs, and context.
Looking at records of maps from antiquity can give us an idea of not just the places that existed back then, but also of the ruling society, its geopolitical position in the known world, and even its socioeconomic structure as well as the prevailing religious and philosophical thought of that time.
Many maps of the world have been discovered throughout centuries. Some examples being the Hereford Mappa Mundi dated c. 1300, which conveyed not just geographical information but also looked into Biblical subjects as well as general history.
Muhammad al-Idrisi, an Arab geographer, also drew a world map called the Tabula Rogeriana (1154). This was considered the most accurate map of the time since it synthesized the knowledge accumulated by classical geographers along with the information gathered by Arab merchants and explorers who have traveled throughout Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Far East. Commissioned by the Norman King Roger II of Sicily, the Tabula Rogeriana depicts the entirety of the Eurasian continent with parts of northern Africa.
After 1492, the advent of the age of discovery, maps grew larger as more information became available from explorers and mariners who were setting out to sea in search of resources. World maps evolved and cartographers created different ways of presenting places and locations in a clearer and more concise manner.
The Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator introduced the Mercator projection, a cylindrical map projection which aimed to preserve local direction and shapes, in exchange for inflating the size of objects the further they are from the equator. Nevertheless, it became the standard map projection, which we still use today.
What has been considered the oldest world map dated at around the 6th century BCE was a Babylonian world map called the Imago Mundi. It was first discovered by the Middle Eastern archaelogist and Assyriologist, Hormuzd Rassam in the late 19th century in what is now Iraq.
Later, the British Museum acquired the clay tablets and upon further investigation, they concluded that the map had been carved around the late Babylonian period, c. 6th century BCE. It showed regions including Assyria, Urartu (Armenia) and several cities, encircled by a "bitter river" with eight outer regions surrounding it in the shape of triangles.
The schematic above marks the "bitter river" from 14 to 17, while Babylon is number 13. Descriptions of some of the outer regions survived and have been translated as such: (1) Number 19 is the place "where a light brighter than the sunset or stars exists"; (2) Number 18 is the place "which is in complete darkness where one sees nothing"; and (3) Number 22 is the one "where the morning dawns". One can only surmise which of the other two is where a horned bull dwells and where birds cannot reach.
(Image credit: The British Museum, CC BY SA 4.0; Public domain / Wikimedia Commons)