He made another important contribution in using a grid to locate positions of places on the Earth. He sketched, quite precisely, the route of the Nile to Khartoum, showing the two Ethiopian tributaries. He measured the circumference of the Earth with great accuracy. Around 350 BC Aristotle put forward six arguments to prove that the Earth was spherical and from that time on scholars generally accepted that indeed it was a sphere.Įratosthenes, around 250 BC, made major contributions to cartography. Pythagoras, in the 6 th century BC, is believed to be the first to put forward a belief in a spherical Earth while Parmenides certainly argued in favour of this in the following century. Of course, although only a very limited portion of the Earth was known to these ancient Greeks, the shape of the Earth was always going to be of fundamental importance in world maps. He is said to have studied under Thales but sadly no details of his map have survived. ![]() The earliest ancient Greek who is said to have constructed a map of the world is Anaximander, who was born in 610 BC in Miletus (now in Turkey ), and died in 546 BC. The Babylonian map of the world is at THIS LINK. ![]() The area shown is depicted as circular surrounded by water which fits the religious image of the world in which the Babylonians believed. One such map shows Babylon and the surrounding area in a stylised form with Babylon represented by a rectangle and the Euphrates river by vertical lines. For example maps have been discovered on Babylonian clay tablets dating from around 600 BC. The oldest extant example of a local Egyptian map is the Turin papyrus which dates from around 1300 BC.Įarly world maps reflect the religious beliefs of the form of the world. Such measurements, however, seem only to have been of local use and there is no evidence that the Egyptians integrated the measurements into maps of large areas. The annual flooding by the Nile meant that without such measurements it was impossible to reconstruct the boundaries that had existed before the flood. In Egypt geometry was used from very early times to help measure land. Whether it is a map or a stylised painting is a matter of debate.Įarly attempts at maps were severely limited by lack of knowledge of anything other than very local features. The wall painting was discovered in 1963 near the modern Ankara in Turkey. In around 6200 BC in Catal Hyük in Anatolia a wall painting was made depicting the positions of the streets and houses of the town together with surrounding features such as the volcano close to the town. Of course what constitutes a map is hard to say, especially when one goes back to the very earliest times. It is hardly surprising that cartography should be considered as a mathematical discipline in early times since cartography measures positions of places (mathematics was the science of measurement ) and represents a the surface of a sphere on a two dimensional map. 2018.This article describes how map making has played an important role in the development of mathematics. "Cartography." Cartography - Geography - Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford University Press, 20 Dec. This exhibit displays books, atlases, and maps either by or about notable cartographers that created maps which had a significant effect on the field of cartography and the world. Throughout history there have been cartographers all over that have created maps which influenced society and the future of cartography. ![]() Cartography has grown in value with the use of the Internet, World Wide Web, and Global Navigation Satellite Systems and with all of the current advances in technology it continues to be an important field. ![]() The history of cartography dates back 14,000 years ago when the earliest maps were created.
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