topics: |  cartography | history

 
A reconstruction of Ptolemy's map from his Geographia; the surviving text
of this work, available in Arabic translation, includes coordinates (based on
length of the day for latitudes), and a longitude measured in the westernmost
islands he knew, possibly the Cape Verde.

The first maps: China

Maps based on actual field surveys were known in China as early as 600BCE,
and three survey-based military maps survive from Changshu, Hunan, dated
around 168 BCE.  In 267 AD, the Chinese official Pei Xian (or Pei Xiu)
composed the text "Six laws of Mapmaking" which formalized the rectangular
grid system and a graduated scale, which were known in the work by Zhang
Heng (fl. 100AD). (see Rashid Faridi's site on Mapmaking)

In contrast, the map by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy, possibly based on
an earlier map by the Phoenician (Lebanese) mapmaker Marinos of Tyre, was
was executed around 150AD, and some of itse elements, like many other maps
from ancient times, were more imagined than real.

With the gradual spread of the astrolabe and compass from China into the
Hindu and Arabic world by the eighth century, cartography also progressed in
the Islamic world.  Ptolemy's atlas had also been translated into Arabic by
the 9th century.  Particularly notable is the Islamic atlas, centered on
Mecca, which maps the entire Islamic domain from the tenth century.  It was
executed by the Persian geographer al-Istakhri (d.951 AD), and also details
the characteristics of the many peoples populating these domains.

Although most of the chapters in this book treat western maps, there is more
detail on global map making in other parts of the world than is available
in other texts such as  Berthon and Robinson's Shape of the world, or
Lloyd Brown's Story of Maps.