Picturing Our Planet

Tracing (Roughly) 15,000 Years Of Mapmaking

- Alice Andre-Clark

The world’s first mapmakers left diagrams of bright stars and constellations on cave walls. That was about 15,000 years ago. The old-est known maps of places here on Earth are more than 4,000 years old. But they have some features that modern mapmakers recognize. A map of the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi illustrates a river with a curving triple line. It portrays mountains with repeating rounded shapes. It even has markings for three of the four cardinal directions. North. East. West. The right edge of this ancient map is missing. That’s where South would go.

The World Map Takes Shape In ancient Greece, by about 400 BCE, scholars had reached a startling conclusion about Earth’s shape. They saw ships disappear over the horizon. They observed stars in the night sky change position depending on the observer’s location. These early scientists realized that the planet is spherical.

Greek mathematician Ptolemy recorded coordinates of about 8,000 places in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This gave mapmakers accurate information to use in their work. But these maps had a lot missing too. Explorers had not yet seen the Americas. They hadn’t visited Australia or the southern part of Africa.