Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Çatalhöyük mural. Volcanoes or leopard? You make the call.
Many early protomaps do share some similarities with modern cartography, but it's a
blurry line: their primary significance was probably artistic or spiritual. The essential traits
we associate with maps today
evolved gradually over millennia
. We first see cardinal dir-
ections on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but
distances don't appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example
is a bronze plate from China's Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our
oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the
time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth”
maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some
scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.
*
But if the historical “discovery” of maps was a slow and gradual process, the way mod-
ern mapheads discover maps as children is more like the way cavemen must have dis-
covered fire: as a flash of lightning. You see that first map, and your mind is rewired,
probably forever. In my case, the Ur-map was a wooden puzzle of the fifty states I got as
a Christmas present when I was three—you know the kind, Florida decorated with palm
trees, Washington with apples. On my puzzle, Nebraska, confusingly, wore a picture of a
family of pigs. The two peninsulas of Michigan were welded together into a single puzzle
piece, so that I believed for years afterward that Michigan was a single land-mass in the
lumpy shape of a lady's handbag.
For other kids, it was the globe in Dad's study, or the atlas stretched out on the shag car-
peting of the living room, or a free gas station map during a family vacation to Yosemite.
(Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way
that many twentieth-century
Americans
began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks.) But
