Where would we be without maps, those bird’s-eye views of the world that show us the way from A to B? Even the very earliest civilisations needed to know where they were at, and ancient Babylonian clay tablets from 2300BC - the earliest surviving examples of maps - show buildings, paths and water sources. But beyond their immediate surroundings everything was guesswork - an Iranian effort from 1,300 years later depicted the world as a disc adrift in endless seas.
In the Middle Ages, maps of the world conformed to the so-called T-O pattern where the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe sat like the three bars of a T-shaped island, and the first recognisable representation of the continents appeared in the Catalan atlas of 1375. Around 1570, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius began the custom of decorating his maps with illustrations of Atlas, the Titan condemned by Zeus to hold the Earth on his shoulders, which gave collections of maps their generic name.
The habit of early map-makers to use their imaginations where information was thin on the ground prompted the satirist Jonathan Swift to remark: “So Geographers in Afric-maps with savage pictures fill their gaps.” The stereotypical legend “here be dragons” appeared on only one 16th century globe, though others warned of cannibals, lions, elephants, walruses and “huge men having horns four feet long”.
Seafaring nations swapped information to draw up “portolans” - shipping charts - of the Mediterranean which placed East at the top. This led to the use of the word orientation to mean finding your bearings.
As countries came to blows, accurate maps became a military necessity and the Ordnance Survey was established in 1791, producing its first map, a one inch to one mile representation of Kent, 10 years later. Throughout the 19th century, surveyors were dispatched around the country on foot, measuring distances between raised beacons by theodolite, establishing the height of mountains and deciding on place names. Despite their efforts, large areas of the Earth’s surface remained poorly recorded, and by 1940 a mere 10 per cent of the globe was comprehensively mapped.
Aerial photography and satellite technology have made the cartographer’s job easier and recorded the most impenetrable parts of the world. But they still haven’t solved the age-old problem of the amateur map-reader - how to fold it up again afterwards.
Harvey McGavin
