Timeline of Cartography

6700 BCE Map of Catal Hyuk

6700 BCE

The earliest "map" could be a wall painting found in Ankara, Turkey, in 1963, during the excavation of the ancient city of Catal Hyuk.

3000 BCE First map of the moon

3000 BCE

A map of the Moon 10-times older than anything known before has been found carved into stone at one of Ireland's most ancient and mysterious Neolithic sites. "The people who carved this Moon map were the first scientists," said Dr Stooke. "They knew a great deal about the motion of the Moon. They were not primitive at all."
The passage tomb at Knowth is estimated to be about 5,000 years old. It was built by men who had a deep understanding of the motions of the Sun, Moon and stars.

3000 BCE Babylonian clay tablets

3000 BCE

The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites wrote on tablets made from water-cleaned clay. Although these writing bricks varied in shape and dimension, a common form was a thin quadrilateral tile about five inches long. While the clay was still wet, the writer used a stylus to inscribe it with cuneiform characters. By writing on every surface in small characters, he could copy a substantial text on a single tablet. For longer texts he used several tablets.

600 BCE Map of Babylonian empire

600 BCE

Nebuchadnezzar was a patron of the cities and a spectacular builder. He rebuilt all of Babylonia's major cities on a lavish scale. His building activity at Babylon was what turned it into the immense and beautiful city of legend. His city of Babylon covered more than three square miles, surrounded by moats and ringed by a double circuit of walls. The Euphrates flowed through the center of the city, spanned by a beautiful stone bridge.

600 BCE Pythagoras determines the earth is a sphere

600 BCE

By 500 BCE, the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras declared the earth's shape to be a sphere. He arrived at this determination not through scientific observations but because he believed the sphere to be the perfect geometric shape and the gods would only create a "perfect" world. Supported by scientific observations, such as that of the silhouette of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, Pythagoras' assumption eventually proved correct.

Eratosthenes determines circumference of earth and establishes coordinate grid

200 BCE

Eratosthenes, Greek scientific writer, astronomer, and poet, who made the first measurement of the size of Earth for which any details are known. At Syene, southeast of Alexandria in Egypt, the Sun’s rays fall vertically at noon at the summer solstice. Eratosthenes noted that at Alexandria, at the same date and time, sunlight fell at an angle of about 7.2° from the vertical. Given an estimate of the distance between the two cities, he was able to calculate the circumference of Earth.

150 BCE Hipparchus creates early system of latitude based on the sun

150 BCE

The Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus took an experimental approach: observing Earth’s round shadow creeping across the Moon during a lunar eclipse, he concluded that Earth must be spherical and that the Moon was an independent world, and he correctly explained the Moon’s phases and accurately estimated the distance between the two bodies. Hipparchus used the observed dates of two equinoxes and a solstice to calculate the size and direction of the of the Sun’s orbit.

150 Ptolemy creates world map with coordinates for 8,000 locations

150

In his work Geographia, written about AD 150, Ptolemy described and compiled all knowledge about the world’s geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century. Ptolemy’s work is that his works were all copied by hand and redistributed. Most books include maps made many centuries later based on his descriptions or are missing maps altogether. An Arabian scholar wrote that Ptolemy’s Geographia mentioned a colored map with more than 4,530 cities plotted and over 200 mountains.

476 - Roman Empire collapses, scientific cartography halts in Europe

476

In September 476 AD, the last Roman emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by a Germanic prince called Odovacar, who had won control of the remnants of the Roman army of Italy. For many, the fall of Rome marked the death knell of education and literacy, sophisticated architecture, advanced economic interaction, and, not least, the rule of written law. The 'dark ages' which followed were dark because written sources were few and far between.

830 Al-Khwarizimi produces world map partly based on Ptolemy's work

830

Al-Khwarizimi wrote a major book, his Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, which presented the coordinates of localities in the known world based, ultimately, on those in the Geography of Ptolemy but with improved values for the length of the Mediterranean Sea and the location of cities in Asia and Africa. He also assisted in the construction of a world map for al-Maʾmūn and participated in a project to determine the circumference of the Earth, which had long been known to be spherical.

1030 Al-Bīrūnī developes triangulation

1030

Al-Bīrūnī was a Muslim astronomer, mathematician, anthropologist, historian, and geographer.The Taḥdid nihāyāt al-amākin li-taṣḥīḥ masāfāt al-masākin (“Determination of the Coordinates of Places for the Correction of Distances Between Cities”) is al-Bīrūnī’s masterpiece in mathematical geography. He defended the role of the mathematical sciences against the attacks of religious scholars and also detailed all that one needed to know about determining longitudes and latitudes on land.

1375 Abraham Cresques produces world map using portolan maps

1375

Famed 14th-Century Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques produced the Catalan Atlas -- the most famous work of what was much later to be called the Majorcan Style of mapmaking. His maps were Portolan charts. Portolans do not show lines of latitude or longitude, but are criss-crossed with rhumbs – diagonal lines emanating from the 32 points of compass roses arranged throughout the map to enable pilots to chart a course to their destination.

1569 - Gerardus Mercator publishes his first projection for navigation

1569

Gerardus Mercator, original name Gerard De Cremer, or Kremer?, (born March 5, 1512—died December 2, 1594), Flemish cartographer whose most important innovation was a map, embodying what was later known as the Mercator projection, on which parallels and meridians are rendered as straight lines spaced so as to produce at any point an accurate ratio of latitude to longitude. He also introduced the term atlas for a collection of maps.

1730 Sextant developed

1730

Sextant, instrument for determining the angle between the horizon and a celestial body such as the Sun, the Moon, or a star, used in celestial navigation to determine latitude and longitude. The device consists of an arc of a circle, marked off in degrees, and a movable radial arm pivoted at the centre of the circle. The name comes from the Latin sextus, or “one-sixth,” for the sextant’s arc spans 60°, or one-sixth of a circle.

1763 John Harrison develops accurate clock for determining longitude at sea

1763

John Harrison invented the first practical marine chronometer, which enabled navigators to compute accurately their longitude at sea. Harrison became interested in constructing an accurate chronometer in 1728. After ship wrecks caused by poor navigation, the British government to award £20,000 to the first man who developed a chronometer with which longitude could be calculated within half a degree. Harrison completed his first chronometer in 1735 and submitted it for the prize.

1884 - International Meridian Conference chooses Greenwich as the prime meridian

1884

Greenwich meridian, an imaginary line used to indicate 0° longitude that passes through Greenwich, a borough of London, and terminates at the North and South poles. An international conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1884 designated “the meridian passing through the centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich as the initial meridian for longitude.”

late 1900s - high quality maps produced from aerial and satellite imagery and geographic information systems (GPS); global positioning system (GPS) developed

1900

GPS, in full Global Positioning System, space-based radio-navigation system that broadcasts highly accurate navigation pulses to users on or near Earth. In the United States’ Navstar GPS, 24 main satellites in 6 orbits circle Earth every 12 hours. A GPS receiver on Earth measures the time it takes radio signals to travel from four or more satellites to its location, calculates the distance to each satellite, and determines the user’s longitude, latitude, and altitude.