Cartography

Lore & Background

The earliest known map is debated, with a wall painting possibly depicting Çatalhöyük from the late 7th millennium BCE. Prehistoric rock carvings in Mount Bego and Valcamonica from the 4th millennium BCE show geometric patterns interpreted as cultivated plots. Other ancient maps include the Minoan 'House of the Admiral' wall painting from c. The oldest surviving world maps are from 9th century BCE Babylonia, showing Babylon on the Euphrates surrounded by a 'bitter river.' Ancient Greeks and Romans created maps from Anaximander in the 6th century BCE, and Ptolemy wrote Geographia in the 2nd century CE. In ancient China, geographical literature dates to the 5th century BCE, with the oldest extant maps from the State of Qin in the 4th century BCE.

Reader's Guide

Cartography is the study and practice of making and using maps, blending science, aesthetics, and technique to model reality or imagined realities for effective spatial communication. Its traditional objectives include setting a map’s agenda and selecting traits to be mapped—whether physical features like roads or abstract ones like political boundaries—representing terrain on flat media through map projections, and eliminating irrelevant characteristics via generalization to reduce complexity. Map design orchestrates these elements to convey a message to an audience. Historically, cartography dates to prehistoric rock carvings depicting cultivated plots, ancient wall paintings of settlements, and engraved maps of Babylonian cities.

The Greeks and Romans produced maps from the 6th century BCE, with Ptolemy’s 2nd-century CE treatise Geographia containing a world map of the known Ecumene. Arab scholars later translated Greek works, while Roman itineraria mapped the empire’s roads. In China, geographical literature emerged by the 5th century BCE, with extant maps from the 4th century BCE and printed star maps by the 11th century.

Medieval European mappae mundi survived in manuscripts, while Arab geographer al-Idrisi created a detailed world atlas in the 12th century, accurate for centuries. The Age of Discovery saw European cartographers copy earlier maps and produce new ones using explorers’ observations and instruments like the compass, telescope, and sextant. The oldest extant globe dates to 1492. Modern cartography provides the theoretical and practical foundations for geographic information systems (GIS) and geographic information science (GISc), underscoring its enduring role in modeling and communicating spatial information.