Cartography

Earliest known map

6700 BCE

The earliest known map was believed to be a wall painting found in Catal Hyuk in Ankara, Turkey

Babylonian Empire maps

3800 BCE

These maps were scratched into clay tablets the size of your hand. The maps were created between 3800 BCE - 2300 BCE. One map shows modern day Iraq with a river and some hills, beside it is the tablet's owner's name and their local town.

Babylonian maps evolving with their empire

630 BCE

As the Babylonian Empire grew so did their maps and around 600 BCE their maps were designed to cover all the land.

Greek Advances 1

582 BCE

Pythagoras (582 - 500 BCE) proposed the idea that the world was not flat, as believe by most, but in fact was round. Aristotle further emphasized this thinking in 350 BCE Erathosthenes (276 - 196 BCE) provided the first highly accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference. Furthermore, the developed a coordinate grid of the earth as well. Hipparchus (190-120 BCE) took Erathosthenes' ideas of grids and tried to establish a scientific reasoning for why the placement of this grid system.

Greek Advances 2

63 BCE

Strabo ( 63 BCE - 24 CE) discussed the issues of creating a flat map for a round world. Ptolemy (100 - 170) furthered advances in Greek cartography by writing 8 volumes of books that included 8000 coordinates using the already established longitude system.

Halting in cartography

476

As the Roman Empire collapsed in 476, the advances of cartography started to slow down. Religion became a large factor in people's lives and maps began to reflect this as their design was based off of what the Bible said.

Arabic Scholars

780

Al-Khwarizmi (780 - 850) created a book similar to Ptolemy's alongside an accurate map of the Middle East Al-Biruni (937 - 1050) developed triangulation, a method used to determine the distance to a location using geometry. Al-Biruni was able to calculate the radius of the earth within 1% using geometry as well.

European progress 1

1300

The Europeans began to map their own map, creating maps called portolan charts that mapped the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Following this Abraham Cresques (1325 - 1387) created a world map based off of these portolan charts. Through Portuguese exploration and the creation of the printing press, the world had more accurate maps of the world on mass during the 15th century

European Progress 2

1500

During the 16th century, major European players began to further explore the world to colonize, making advances in maps along the way. Gerardus Mercator (1512 - 1594) created the Mercator projection of the world map which showed the lines of longitude and latitude crossing at right angles on the map and showed counties near the poles much larger than on a globe. In the 18th century the sextant was developed which was used to have accurate tracking of latitude while sailing.

Modern maps

1900

After the 19th century began so did more advances in mapping. Aerial photography began to be used in which people would fly relatively high and take pictures of the land below them. As time further progress and science alongside satellite photography also came around which did the same thing as aerial photography but with greater accuracy.

GPS system

1994

In 1994 when 24 satellites were launched to complete the global positioning system (GPS) which is used to determine a location within 15 meters