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 map also is marked to show the cardinal directions. Hills are shown by overlapping semicircles, rivers by lines, and cities by circles. Most scholars date the tablet to the 25th to 24th century BC. 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. 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. Maps in Ancient Babylonia were made by using accurate surveying techniques. Ĭlay tablet with map of the Babylonian city of Nippur ( c. The "Saint-Bélec slab" (2200 to 1600 BC), whose lines and symbols have been argued to represent a cadastral plan of a part of western Brittany.This wall painting may represent a plan of this Neolithic village however, recent scholarship has questioned the identification of this painting as a map. Another ancient picture that resembles a map that was created in the late 7th millennium BC in Çatalhöyük, Anatolia, modern Turkey.Alternatively, it may also represent a spiritual landscape, or simple incisings. 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.The Cuevas de El Castillo in Spain that contains a dot map of the Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BC. 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.A map etched on a mammoth bone at Mezhyrich that is about 15,000 years old.An Aboriginal Australian cylcon that may be as much as 20,000 BC years old that is thought to depict the Darling River.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.Thus, no single artifact is generally accepted to be the earliest surviving map. The definition of "map" is also not precise. It is not always clear whether an ancient artifact had been wrought as a map or as something else. Possibly the oldest surviving map has been engraved on this mammoth tusk, dated to 25,000 BC, found from Pavlov in the Czech Republic. Free online services such as Google Earth have made accurate maps of the world more accessible than ever before. ![]() Modern methods of transportation, the use of surveillance aircraft, and more recently the availability of satellite imagery have made documentation of many areas possible that were previously inaccessible. However, since the age of Classical Greece, maps of large regions, and especially of the world, have used projection from a model globe in order to control how the inevitable distortion gets apportioned on the map. The earliest maps ignored the curvature of Earth's surface, both because the shape of the Earth was uncertain and because the curvature is not important across the small areas being mapped. Maps were produced extensively by ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, and India. The earliest surviving maps include cave paintings and etchings on tusk and stone. When and how the earliest maps were made are unknown, but maps of local terrain are believed to have been independently invented by many cultures. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. ![]() This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points.
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