About Maps

The National Geographic Magazine loves MAPS!  This next article, The Story of Maps, December, 1932, explores the origins of maps and many other interesting and obscure facts.  Apparently, many ancient peoples found maps useful.

In Egypt, "Rameses II is credited with the first maps of estates along the Nile, drawn about 1300 B.C. . . . on a tablet unearthed in Iraq, appears a map of the world dating from about 1000 B.C.  It shows the earth as a disk, with water all around it and Babylon in its center," (p. 759).

It was the work of scholarly Greeks who first conceived of the world as round.  Another Greek idea was to use a network of lines on a map "with which to locate places, as we do to-day with latitude and longitude," (p. 759).

Ptolemy, from Alexandria in northern Africa, was the giant of map makers. He worked in 150 A.D.   "Six of his eight books consist of tables of latitude and longitude for about 8,000 places. . . With his books are maps of 26 countries and one map of the world," (p. 759).

Several Favorite Maps of Mine

I'm standing on a map of The Pacific in 1941, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, July, 2013.

One of the maps in the Map Room of the Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy, October, 2013.  The 'room' is a very long hall with maps of the known world in the middle ages painted on the walls.

Maps generally improved through the years but still were woefully inaccurate.  Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World and set all civilizations to revising their maps.  "For decades after the voyages of Columbus, Europe seethed with excitement and new ideas. . . When news broke that Pizarro (from Spain) had caught an Inca king and held him for ransom of a roomful of gold, equal to $15,000,000, excitement was almost unendurable.  All nations that could build or borrow boats put to sea, and map-making flourished," (p. 765).

Mapping our own country of the United States, even before revolutionary times, was always interesting.  "In one part of Texas, for example, the original survey was made on horseback, at times under Indian attack, and the unit of measurement was the horse's pace, estimated at a vara, or Spanish yard!" (p. 769).  

In 1932, "In mapping flat areas, plains, marshes, deltas, etc., aerial photography has largely taken the place of ground surveys," (p. 770).  In 2014, we are most fortunate to have satellite maps!

In its long career, the National Geographic Society has printed for its members and distributed scores of millions of maps.  In this December issue of its MAGAZINE it mails more maps than existed in the world when Christopher Columbus discovered Ameria," (p. 773).

Personally, and I really hate to admit it, along with one of my brothers, I have inherited the "Get Lost" gene.  It seems that wherever we went, over the years, even with lots of maps, we would always get lost.  It didn't stress us, though, we just got to see more interesting places!  With my GPS now, I hardly ever get lost!