Cartography Article - 1

Expanding Images of Earth

"Maps, like faces, are the signature of history," wrote historian Will Durant, and early cartographers, starting with the Mesopotamians, left pictures of their times. Maps from ancient Babylonia and l2th-century China showed those civilizations filling the Earth, with other known peoples at the margins or missing entirely. In Europe medieval maps of the world were usually oriented east, toward Paradise, with Jerusalem at the center, and monsters and marvels populating the regions beyond Christendom. From ancient times to the Renaissance, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and European maps were bounded by the limits of recorded exploration.

But the writings of Greek scientists, pre-served by Islamic and Byzantine scholars, laid the basis for a tradition of mathematical car-tography that would measure and encompass the globe. In the second century A.D., Ptolemy described a system for mapping the world on a grid of lines of latitude and longitude curved to compensate for Earth's spherical shape. More than 12 centuries later his theories were rediscovered in western Europe, just as mariners, navigating by compass and charts webbed with rhumb lines, sailed to lands Ptolemy never knew, plotting observations of headlands and estuaries.

From the l5th century on, European empires pushed the boundaries of maps east and west, north and south, until they finally covered the inhabited continents, and cartog-raphers stood poised on vast new projects-mapping the interiors of India, the United States, and Brazil and tracing the coastline of Antarctica. All the while, Europeans spread the Western tradition of cartography every-where, until mapmakers around the globe worked from the same set of methods and knowledge, speaking the common languages of mathematics, science, and geography.

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