The best world map for three centuries was drawn by al-Idrisi in 1154
In 1154 the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi blended Greek learning with reports from Arab merchants to produce a world map that stayed the most accurate for about 300 years. One of his maps put south at the top, and he estimated Earth's circumference to within 10%.
Cartography is the craft and science of making and using maps, resting on the idea that real or imagined places can be modelled to convey spatial information. Traditional mapmakers must decide what to show, whether roads and coastlines or abstractions like place-names and borders; flatten a curved surface through a projection; strip away irrelevant detail and simplify the rest, a process called generalisation; and arrange everything so the message lands. Modern cartography supplies much of the groundwork for geographic information systems.
Nobody agrees on the first map, partly because the word is loosely defined. A wall painting that may show the Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük dates to the late 7th millennium BCE, and rock carvings at Mount Bego and Valcamonica from the 4th millennium BCE seem to depict farm plots. The oldest surviving world maps come from 9th-century BCE Babylonia, one showing Babylon on the Euphrates ringed by a bitter river. Anaximander began Greek mapmaking in the 6th century BCE, Ptolemy's Geographia followed in the 2nd century CE, and the Tabula Peutingeriana is the lone surviving Roman road map. China's oldest extant maps come from the state of Qin in the 4th century BCE, and Su Song's 1092 star charts are the oldest printed ones.
Medieval Europe produced mappae mundi, about 1,100 of which survive, some 900 inside manuscripts. Al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana divided the world into seven climate zones with detailed descriptions. During the Age of Discovery the compass, telescope and sextant sharpened accuracy; Martin Behaim built the oldest surviving globe in 1492, Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 wall map first used the name America, and Diogo Ribero drew the first known planisphere with a graduated Equator in 1527.
Gerardus Mercator's 1569 projection made constant compass bearings into straight lines, perfect for sailors but increasingly inflating lands far from the Equator. In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published what is considered the first true modern atlas and, unusually, credited contributing mapmakers, 183 of them by 1603. Maps became status symbols hung beside paintings, and printing spread them so widely that about 10% of Venetian homes owned one by the late 1500s, while rulers used them to stake territorial claims.
Source: Cartography
