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History of cartography

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Cartography or mapmaking (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) has been an integral part of the human story for a long time (maybe 8,000 years - nobody knows exactly, but longer than written words).[link] From cave paintings to ancient maps of Babylon, Greece and Asia, through the Age of Exploration, and on into the 21st century, people have created and used maps as the essential tools to help them define, explain and navigate their way through the world (and beyond). According to some scholars, mapping represented a significant step forward in the intellectual development of human beings and it serves as a record of the advancing knowledge of the human race.#redirect

Contents

Earliest known maps

The first known maps are of the heavens, not the earth. Dots dating to 16,500 BCE found on the walls of the Lascaux caves map out 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. The Cueva di El Castillo cave in Spain contains a dot map of the Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BCE.[link]

Cave painting and rock carvings with elements that may represent landscape features such as hills or dwellings can be seen here.[link]

The oldest extant picture that resembles what we today think of as a map was created in the late 7th millennium BCE in Çatalhöyük, Anatolia, modern Turkey. This wall painting represents a plan of an early-civilized city that prospered by trading obsidian.[link]

Whoever created the Çatalhöyük ‘mental map’ may have been encouraged by the fact that houses in Çatalhöyük were clustered together and were entered via flat roofs. Therefore, it was normal for the inhabitants to view their city from a bird’s eye view. Later civilizations followed the same convention; today, almost all maps are drawn as if we are looking down from the sky instead of from a horizontal or oblique perspective. There are exceptions: one of the ‘quasi-maps’ of the Minoan civilization on Crete, the “House of the Admiral” wall painting dating from c. 1600 BCE, shows a seaside community in an oblique perspective.

Ancient Near East

Maps in Ancient Bablyonia were made using accurate surveying techniques.[link]

For example, a 7.6 x 6.8 cm clay tablet found in 1930 at Ga-Sur, near today's Kirkuk, shows a map of a river valley between two hills. Cuneiform inscriptions label the features on the map, including a plot of land described as 354 iku (12 hectares) owned by a person called Azala. Most scholars date the tablet to 4,300 BCE-4,500 BCE; Leo Bagrow dissents with a date of 5,800 BCE. Hills are shown by overlapping semicircles, rivers by lines and cities by circles. The map is also marked to show the cardinal directions.[link]

An engraved map from the Kassite period (14th – 12th centuries BCE) of Babylonian history, shows walls and buildings in the holy city of Nippur.[link]

In contrast, the Babylonian World Map -- the earliest surviving map of the world (c. 600BCE) -- is a symbolic, not literal representation. It omits peoples such as the Persians and Egyptians, who were well known to the Babylonians. The area shown is depicted as a circular shape surrounded by water, which fits the religious image of the world in which the Babylonians believed.

Maps were quite rare in ancient Egypt; however those that have survived show an emphasis on geometry and surveying techniques, perhaps stimulated by the need to re-establish the exact boundaries of properties after the annual Nile floods. The Turin Papyrus, dated c. 1300 BCE, shows the mountains east of the Nile where gold and silver were mined, along with the location of the miners’ shelters, wells, and the road network that linked the region with the mainland. Its originality can be seen in the map’s inscriptions, its precise orientation and the use of colour.

Ancient Greece

In classical antiquity, maps were drawn by Anaximander of Miletus, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy using both explorers' observations and a mathematical approach.

Early Greek Maps

Thales of Miletus (c. 600 BCE) thought that the earth was a disk supported by water. His pupil Anaximander (c. 611 – 546 BCE) believed that the earth was a cylindrical form , like a stone pillar and suspended in space.[link] The inhabited part of his world was a circular, disk-shaped, and presumably located on the upper surface of the cylinder.

Anaximander was the first ancient Greek to draw a map of the known world(Dilke). Although the map has not survived, Hecataeus of Miletus (550 – 475 BC) produced another map 50 years later that he claimed was an improved version of the map of his predecessor.

Anaximenes of Miletus (6th century BCE), who studied under Anaximander, rejected the views of his teacher regarding the shape of the earth and instead, he visualized the earth as a rectangular form supported by compressed air.

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 560 – 480 BCE) speculated about the notion of a spherical earth with a central fire at its core. He is also credited with the introduction of a model that divides a spherical earth into five zones. One hot, two temperate, and two cold -- northern and southern. It seems likely that he illustrated his division in the form of a map, however, no evidence of this has survived to the present.

Scylax, a sailor, made a record of his Mediterranean voyages in c. 350 BCE. This was the first Greek set of periploi, or sailing instructions, which became the basis for many future mapmakers, especially in the medieval period.[link]

Spherical Earth and Meridians

Whereas a number of previous Greek philosophers assumed the earth to be spherical, Aristotle (384 – 322BCE) is the one to be credited with proving the earth’s sphericity. Those arguments can be summarized as follows:

It is unclear if he ever produced a map of the world according to his specifications, but if he did we have yet to find it.

A vital contribution to mapping the reality of the world came with a scientific estimate of the circumference of the earth. This event has been described as the first scientific attempt to give geographical studies a mathematical basis. The man credited for this achievement was Eratosthenes (275-195 BCE). He was a devoted geographer who set out to reform and perfect the map of the world. Eratosthenes argued that accurate mapping, even if in two dimensions only, depends upon the establishment of an accurate linear measurements. His great achievement in the field of cartography was the use of new techniques called (A) meridian -- his imaginary north/south line -- and (B) parallel -- his imaginary west/east line.[link] These axis lines were placed over the map of the earth with their origin in the city of Rhodes and divided the world into sectors. Then, Eratosthenes used these earth partitions to reference places on the map.

Claudius Ptolemy (A.D. 90-168) thought that with the aid of astronomy and mathematics the earth could be mapped very accurately. Ptolemy revolutionized the depiction of the spherical earth on the map by using perspective projection, and suggested precise methods for fixing the position of geographic features on its surface using coordinate system -- parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude.[link][link]

Ptolemy's eight-book atlas Geographia is a prototype of modern mapmaking. It included an index of place-names, with the latitude and longitude of each place to guide the search, scale, conventional signs with legends, and the practice of orienting maps so that North is at the top and East to the right of the map -- a universal custom today.

But for all his important innovations Ptolemy was not infallible. His most important error was a miscalculation of the circumference of the earth. He believed that Eurasia covered 180° of the globe, which convinced Christopher Columbus to sail across the Atlantic to look for a simpler and faster way to travel to India. Had Columbus known that the true figure was much greater, it is conceivable that he would never have set out on his momentous voyage.

Islamic Mapmaking

In the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars continued and advanced on the mapmaking traditions of earlier cultures. Most used Ptolemy's methods; but they also took advantage of what explorers and merchants learned in their travels across the Muslim world, from Spain to India to Africa, and beyond in trade relationships with China, and Russia.[link]

With funding from Roger II of Sicily (1097-1154), Abu Abdullah Ibn Idrisi (born 1099) wrote his medieval atlas, 'Geography', or 'The Recreation for Him Who Wishes to Travel Through the Countries' in 1154. Besides drawing on the knowledge collected at the University of Cordova, Roger and Idrisi paid draftsmen to make journeys and map their routes. The book describes the earth as a sphere with a circumference of 22,900 miles but maps it in 70 rectangular sections. Notable features include the correct dual sources of the Nile, the coast of Ghana and mentions of Norway. Climate zones were a chief organizational principle. A second and shortened copy from 1192 called Garden of Joys is known by scholars as the Little Idrisi.[link]

China

The earliest surviving Chinese maps of the world date from the Song dynasty (960-1279). The Huayi tu map (1136), carved in stone, shows 500 settlements and a dozen rivers in China, and extends as far as Korea and India. On the reverse, a copy of a more ancient work called the Yuji tu map (estimated to have been first drawn in 1080), uses grid coordinates in a scale of 1:1,500,000 and shows the coastline of China with great accuracy.[link]

The Da Ming hunyi tu map, dating from about 1390, shows Asia, Europe and Africa in multicolour. The horizontal scale is 1:820,000 and the vertical scale is 1:1,060,000.[link]

In 1579, Luo Hongxian published the Guang Yutu atlas, including more than 40 maps, a grid system, and a systematic way of representing major landmarks such as mountains, rivers, roads and borders. The Guang Yutu incorporates the discoveries of naval explorer Zheng He's 15th century voyages along the coasts of China, Southeast Asia, India and Africa.[link]

From the 16th and 17th centuries, several examples survive of maps focused on cultural information. Gridlines are not used on either Yu Shi's Gujin xingsheng zhi tu (1555) or Zhang Huang's Tushu bian (1613); instead, illustrations and annotations show mythical places, exotic foreign peoples, administrative changes and the deeds of historic and legendary heroes.[link]

Pacific Islands

The Polynesian peoples who explored and settled the Pacific islands in the first two millenniums AD used maps to navigate across large distances. A surviving map from the Marshall Islands uses sticks tied in a grid representing wave and wind patterns, with shells attached to show the location of islands. [link] Other maps were created as needed using temporary arrangements of stones or shells.[link]

Early European Maps

Medieval maps in Europe were mainly symbolic in form along the lines of the much earlier Babylonian World Map. Known as Mappa Mundi (cloth of the world) these maps were circular or symmetrical cosmological diagrams representing the earth's single land mass as disk-shaped and surrounded by ocean.[link]

Roger Bacon's investigations of map projections and the appearance of portolano and then portolan charts for plying the European trade routes were rare innovations of the period.

In the Renaissance, with the rediscovery of classical works, maps became more like surveys once again, while the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and the subsequent effort to control and divide those lands revived interest in scientific mapping methods. Peter Whitfield, the author of several books on the history of maps, credits European mapmaking as a factor in the global spread of western power: "Men in Seville, Amsterdam or London had access to knowledge of America, Brazil, or India, while the native peoples knew only their own immediate environment" (Whitfield).

Notable Cartographers of the Age of Exploration

Modern History of Cartography

The Greenwich prime meridian became the international standard reference for cartographers in 1884.

In the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, explorers mapped trails and army engineers surveyed government lands. Two agencies were established to provide detailed, large-scale mapping. They are now known as the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Ocean Survey.

During the 1900's, maps became more abundant due to improvements in printing and photography that made production cheaper and easier. Airplanes made it possible to photograph large areas at a time. Also, since the mid-1900's, the use of computers in map-making has helped to store, sort, and arrange data for mapping in order to create map projections.[link]

Technological changes

In cartography, technology has continually changed in order to meet the demands of new generations of mapmakers and map users. The first maps were manually constructed with brushes and parchment and therefore varied in quality and were limited in distribution. The advent of the compass, printing press, telescope, sextant, quadrant and vernier allowed for the creation of far more accurate maps and the ability to make accurate reproductions.

Advances in photochemical technology, such as the lithographic and photochemical processes, have allowed for the creation of maps that have fine details, do not distort in shape and resist moisture and wear. This also eliminated the need for engraving which further shortened the time it takes to make and reproduce maps.

In the mid to late 20th century advances in electronic technology have led to a new revolution in cartography. Specifically computer hardware devices such as computer screens, plotters, printers, scanners (remote and document) and analytic stereo plotters along with visualization, image processing, spatial analysis and database software, have democratized and greatly expanded the making of maps. See also digital raster graphic.

See also

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
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See Maps for more links to historical maps; however, most of the largest sites are listed at the sites linked below.

References

 

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