Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
By 8000 BC , the people of Mesopotamia—first the Sumerians and in later centuries the Akkadians,
Babylonians, and Assyrians—were using clay tokens to record numbers of animals and measures of grain,
the rudimentary beginnings of written numbers and language that would develop over the next five thou-
sand years. Eventually, they produced such significant innovations as the potter's wheel and wheeled
vehicles, kiln-fired bricks, bronze smelting, and beer.
The first known “map of the world” is a Babylonian clay tablet that dates from approximately six hun-
dred years before Christ. This flat disk is tiny—about three by five inches—and depicts the world as a
circle with two lines running down the center, representing the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Encircling
this is the Bitter River. Outside its bounds reside imaginary beasts, a mapmaker's work of the imagination
to signify the unknown, a tradition that continued for many centuries to come.
While that clay tablet from ancient Babylon represents what has been called the first known world map,
there are much earlier maps from this area and others. A map of the Mesopotamian city of Lagash is carved
in stone in the lap of a statue of a god, the oldest known “city map.” Clay tablets showing settlements and
geographic landmarks have been found in northern Iraq and dated to 2300 BC , the period of Sargon I of
Akkad. These maps, and others from about the same time in Egypt, show plans that undoubtedly were used
for assessing property taxes! This seems to confirm the old cliché about the only certainties in life.
More recently, a relic that might be called a map was discovered in Mezhirich in the former Soviet
Union. This piece of ancient bone on which etchings have been made is estimated to come from a time
ten to twenty thousand years before Christ. It is presumably an early road map of sorts, showing the re-
gion around the site at which it was discovered. It is safe to assume that rudimentary maps predate written
language, as the earliest humans scratched out symbols to show their neighbors the way to the happiest
hunting grounds.
But the sophistication of the early Babylonian maps are testimony to the advances made by the people
between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. And while their maps stand as evidence of their sophistica-
tion, their true brilliance was in their study of the heavens, marking the beginnings of astronomy.
It seems ironic that much of what these early people knew and understood about the earth derived
from their understanding of the heavens, which is why astronomy has often been called the “first science.”
Nowadays people, especially those urbanites unaccustomed to open spaces, marvel at a night sky filled
with stars. But because of pollution and the brightness of man-made illumination, there are few places
left in the world where the brilliance of the night sky equals the celestial canopy witnessed by the ancient
people who began to observe the motion of the sun, stars, and moon and began fixing their seasons to these
regular movements.
Another group that excelled in mapmaking was the Chinese. From well before the time of Christ until
some fifteen hundred years later, the Chinese enjoyed the world's highest standard of living. Prosperous
and agriculturally rich, China was a well-organized, comfortable society, far advanced in science and prac-
tical invention. Chinese mathematicians may have developed the zero and the decimal system and intro-
duced it to the Hindus, who passed it to Baghdad. Surpassing the Mesopotamians, Chinese astronomers
kept the longest and most continuous records of celestial events, and Chinese records mention such events
as the appearance of a comet in 2296 BC and the explosion of a supernova (the rare explosion of most of
the material in a star, resulting in an extremely bright, short-lived object emitting vast amounts of energy)
in 352 BC.
They also elevated cartography to a beautiful art, as well as a far more developed science. Although
there are references to maps in Chinese literature dating from 700 BC , the oldest Chinese maps yet found
date from 200 BC. Highly accurate and incredibly detailed, these maps, woven of silk, showed the names
of provinces, used symbols to distinguish between towns and villages, and depicted mountain ranges and
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