CHAPTER I 



THE CLASSICAL AND 

 EARLY MEDIEVAL HERITAGE 



It has frequently been remarked that primitive peoples of the 

 present day, from the Eskimo of the Canadian Arctic to the 

 Bedawin tribesmen of the Arabian desert, have an almost 

 instinctive ability to produce rough but quite accurate sketches 

 on pieces of skin or in the sand, indicating the relative positions 

 and distances of localities known to them. It may reasonably 

 be supposed that map making began as a development of 

 similar abilities among the early inhabitants of the Middle East 

 and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. 



In Egypt, geometrical methods v^ere early used for land 

 measurement, v^hich was stimulated by the need to re-establish 

 boundaries after the Nile floods. These cadastral records were 

 not, it seems, combined to make maps of considerable areas on 

 a smaller scale, and the few 'maps' in the papyri are more in 

 the nature of plans. The idea of maps as guides for travellers, 

 however, was evidently current, for conventional 'maps of the 

 nether regions' were placed in coffins for the guidance of the 

 departed. From Assyria, there is a clay tablet with a map of 

 part of northern Mesopotamia {c. 3,800 B.C.), and from Baby- 

 lonia, a much later representation of the known world, shown 

 as a circle surrounded by the sea and the heavenly bodies. 

 Speculation such as this on the form of the Universe, and the 

 place of the known world in it, with attempts to represent it 

 graphically, exercised an important influence on the makers of 

 maps. 



The Greeks took over from the Babylonians, with much 

 else of greater importance in astronomy and mathematics, 

 the conception of the earth as a flat circular disc surrounded 

 by the primordial ocean. In the Hellenic world the first steps 

 in the development of scientific thought were taken by the 

 lonians, who were favourably placed to receive Babylonian 



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