Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
History of cartography
Summary
The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.
When and how the earliest maps were made is unclear, but maps of local terrain are believed to have been independently invented by many cultures. The earliest surviving maps include cave paintings and etchings on tusk and stone. Maps were produced extensively by ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, and India.
The earliest maps ignored the curvature of Earth's surface, both because the shape of the Earth was uncertain and because the curvature is not important across the small areas being mapped. However, since the age of Classical Greece, maps of large regions, and especially of the world, have used projection from a model globe in order to control how the inevitable distortion gets apportioned on the map.
Modern methods of transportation, the use of surveillance aircraft, and more recently the availability of have made documentation of many areas possible that were previously inaccessible. Free online services such as Google Earth have made accurate maps of the world more accessible than ever before.
The English term cartography is modern, borrowed from the French cartographie in the 1840s, itself based on Middle Latin carta "map".
It is not always clear whether an ancient artifact had been wrought as a map or as something else. The definition of "map" is also not precise. Thus, no single artifact is generally accepted to be the earliest surviving map. Candidates include:
A map-like representation of a mountain, river, valleys and routes around Pavlov in the Czech Republic, carved on a mammoth tusk, that has been dated to 25,000 BC.
An Aboriginal Australian cylcon that may be as much as 20,000 years old that is thought to depict the Darling River.
A map etched on a mammoth bone at Mezhyrich that is about 15,000 years old.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.