Who was the first to create a map of the world? On the topic: “The history of the creation of geographical maps

A person is always driven by curiosity. Thousands of years ago, discoverers, going further and further into unknown lands, created the first similarities geographical maps, trying to apply the relief he saw on sheets of papyrus or clay tablets.

Probably the oldest map found is from the Egyptian Museum in Turin, made on papyrus by order of Pharaoh Ramses IV in 1160 BC. e. This map was used by an expedition that, on the orders of the pharaoh, was looking for stone for construction. The map familiar to our eyes appeared in ancient Greece half a thousand years BC. Anaximander of Miletus is considered the first cartographer to create a map of the world known at that time.

The originals of his maps have not survived, but 50 years later they were restored and improved by another scientist from Miletus, Hecataeus. Scientists have recreated this map based on the descriptions of Hecataeus. It is easy to recognize the Mediterranean and Black Seas and nearby lands. But is it possible to determine distances from it? This requires a scale that was not yet available on ancient maps. For a unit of measurement of length, Hecataeus used “days of sailing” on the sea and “days of marching” on dry land, which, of course, did not add accuracy to the maps.

Ancient geographical maps also had other significant shortcomings. They distorted the image, because a spherical surface cannot be turned onto a plane without distortion. Try to carefully remove the orange peel and press it to the table surface: you won’t be able to do this without tearing. In addition, they did not have a degree grid of parallels and meridians, without which it is impossible to accurately determine the location of the object. Meridians first appeared on the map of Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC. e., however, they were carried out through different distances. It was not for nothing that Eratosthenes was called the “Father of Geography” as a mathematician among geographers. The scientist not only measured the size of the Earth, but also used a cylindrical projection to depict it on the map. In this projection there is less distortion because the image is transferred from the ball to the cylinder. Modern maps created in different projections - cylindrical, conical, azimuthal and others.

The most perfect maps of the ancient era are considered to be the geographical maps of Ptolemy, who lived in the 2nd century AD. e. in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Claudius Ptolemy entered the history of science thanks to two large works: the “Manual of Astronomy” in 13 books and the “Manual of Geography”, which consisted of 8 books. 27 maps were added to the Geography Manual, among them a detailed map of the world. No one created a better one either before Ptolemy or 12 centuries after him! This map already had a degree grid. To create it, Ptolemy determined the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of almost four hundred objects. The scientist determined latitude (distance from the equator in degrees) by the altitude of the Sun at noon using a gnomon, longitude (degree distance from the prime meridian) by the difference in the time of observations of the lunar eclipse from different points.

IN medieval Europe The works of ancient scientists were forgotten, but they were preserved in the Arab world. There, Ptolemy's maps were published in the 15th century and reprinted almost 50 more times! Perhaps it was these maps that helped Columbus on his famous voyage. Ptolemy's authority grew so much that even collections of maps were called "Ptolemies" for a long time. It was only in the 16th century, after the publication of Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas of the World, on the cover of which Atlas was depicted holding the Earth, that collections of maps were called “atlases.”

IN Ancient China They also created geographical maps. Interestingly, the first written mention of a geographical map is not related to geography. In the 3rd century BC. e. The Chinese throne was occupied by the Qin dynasty. A rival in the struggle for power, Crown Prince Dan sent an assassin to the ruler of the dynasty with a map of his lands drawn on silk fabric. The mercenary hid a dagger in a bundle of silk. History tells that the assassination attempt failed.

During the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, images of America and Australia, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans appeared on world maps. Errors on maps often resulted in tragedy for sailors. Having explored the shores of Alaska, the large Kamchatka expedition of Vitus Bering in the 18th century did not have time to return to Kamchatka by the beginning of the autumn storms. The dreamer Bering spent three weeks of precious time searching for the mapped but non-existent Land of Gama. His sailing ship "St. Peter", broken, with sailors dying of scurvy, landed on a deserted island, where the famous Commander rested forever. “My blood boils every time,” wrote one of Bering’s assistants, “when I remember the shameless deception caused by an error on the map.”

Today, cartography is completely transferred to digital format. To create detailed maps, not only ground-based geodetic instruments are used - theodolite, level, but also airborne laser scanning, satellite navigation, and digital aerial photography.

Illustration: depositphotos.com | Kuzmafoto

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It is impossible to determine when a person made the first map. It is only known that many millennia BC, man already knew the area around him well and knew how to depict it on sand or tree bark. These cartographic images served to indicate migration routes, hunting places, etc.

Many more hundreds of years passed. People, in addition to hunting and fishing, began to engage in cattle breeding and agriculture. This new, higher level of culture was reflected in the drawings and plans. They become more detailed, more expressive, and more accurately convey the character of the area.

A very valuable ancient drawing of a hunting ground in the North Caucasus has survived to this day. This engraving was made on silver around 3 thousand years BC. e., i.e. This cultural monument of the inhabitants ancient Caucasus was found by scientists during excavations of one of the mounds on the banks of the river. Kuban near the city of Maykop.

In the ancient world, the compilation of geographical maps reached great development. The Greeks established the sphericity of the Earth and its dimensions, introduced cartographic projections, meridians and parallels into science.

One of the most famous scientists of the ancient world, geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria (at the mouth of the Nile River) in the 2nd century, compiled detailed map A land like no one had ever created before.

This map depicts three parts of the world - Europe, Asia and Libya (as Africa was then called), as well as the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean and other seas. The map already has a degree grid. Ptolemy introduced this grid to more correctly depict the spherical shape of the Earth on the map. The rivers, lakes, peninsulas of Europe and North Africa known at that time are shown quite accurately on Ptolemy’s map.

If you compare Ptolemy’s map with a modern one, it is easy to notice that areas located far from the Mediterranean Sea, that is, known to Ptolemy only by rumor, received fantastic outlines.

What is especially striking is that Asia is not depicted in its entirety. Ptolemy did not know where it ended in the north and east. He also did not know about the existence of the Arctic and Pacific oceans. Africa continues on the map to the South Pole and turns into some kind of land connecting to Asia in the east. Ptolemy did not know that Africa ends in the south and is washed by the ocean. He also did not know about the existence of independent continents - America, Antarctica and Australia. Ptolemy depicted the Indian Ocean as a closed sea, into which it was impossible to sail on ships from Europe. And yet, in the ancient world and in subsequent centuries, until the 15th century, no one compiled best card world than Ptolemy.

The Romans widely used maps for administrative and military purposes; they compiled road maps.

During the Middle Ages, the achievements of ancient science were forgotten for a long time. The Church entered into a fierce struggle with scientific ideas about the structure and origin of the world.

In schools, fables were taught about the creation of the world by God in six days, about the global flood, about heaven and hell. The idea that the Earth was spherical was considered “heretical” by churchmen and was strictly persecuted. The idea of ​​the Earth took on a completely fantastic form. In the VI century. The Byzantine merchant - monk Cosmas Indicoplov depicted the Earth in the shape of a rectangle.

The main type of maps is becoming rough, far from reality and devoid of a scientific basis, “monastery maps”. They indicate the decline of cartography in medieval Europe. During this period, many small closed states arose in Europe. With a subsistence economy, these feudal states did not need connections with the outside world.

By the end of the Middle Ages, trade and navigation began to develop in European cities, and art and science began to flourish.

In the XIII-XIV centuries. In Europe, a compass and marine navigation charts, the so-called portolans, appeared.

These maps depicted the coastline in detail and very accurately, while the interior parts of the continents remained empty or were filled with pictures from the life of the peoples inhabiting them.

The era of the greats geographical discoveries created the conditions for the rise of cartographic science: sailors needed a good, truthful geographical map. In the 16th century more appeared correct cards, built in new map projections.
Geographic maps include a lot of scientific material. If you compare different maps of the same area and study them, you can get a very detailed picture of that area.

Therefore, geographical maps are a huge source of knowledge. But a map can become a real source of knowledge only when you have a certain amount of geographical knowledge.

Anyone with knowledge of geography and the ability to read a map can accurately understand the terrain depicted on it, rivers, mountain lakes, high or low hills, cities and villages, railways.

The oldest maps found date back to those times when humanity did not even have an idea of ​​writing. If you think about it, there is an explanation for this - navigating the terrain was much more important to the ancients than keeping chronicles and writing something down.

It all started with images of the starry sky on the walls of caves. It was in this amazing way that ancient people marked their location more than 18,000 years ago. This knowledge is still used today when leaving unfamiliar places and looking at star constellations.

Only thousands of years later did the first images of the area appear on stones, wood and animal skins, which could be carried with you or passed on to others. But such maps usually covered a relatively small area: usually within 100 square kilometers.

The first attempts to create a map of the entire world appeared approximately 5-3 millennia BC. But they were rarely distinguished by any accuracy, since they did not take into account the fact that the Earth is round.

Who is considered to be the founder of cartography?

Iconic and familiar even to schoolchildren meridians and parallels appeared only in the third century BC. They were created and put on maps by the famous Greek scientist Eratosthenes. He is considered to be the “father” of modern cartography. Although many historians do not agree with this fact and consider a certain Anaximander and even Pythagoras to be such.

The work of Eratosthenes was continued and improved in the second century in Alexandria by the equally famous Ptolemy. It was he who came up with the idea of ​​dividing meridians and parallels into degrees. His maps were unparalleled for 12 centuries.

But the atlases we are accustomed to appeared only at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. This was facilitated by the development of the aeroindustry, photography and the determination of the prime meridian.

Some interesting facts about geographical maps

The history of the emergence and development of cartography throughout the world was not uniform:

1. The oldest map found in China was drawn on silk and created to mark the path for an assassin.
2. In ancient times, most people could easily draw a diagram of the surrounding area.
3. Most Tuareg tribes create relief maps from wet sand.
4. Some Aboriginal tribes in Australia carve a map of their lands onto wooden weapons as a totem.
5. The sea guides of ancient Polynesia were a complex weave of threads, mollusk shells, twigs and even stones. At the same time, they displayed all cardinal directions, the smallest atolls, and even the direction of currents.

This is only a tiny part of the unusual facts from the history of the appearance of geographical atlases. But even from this it is clear that the author of the very first map will never be found.

It is impossible to determine when they appeared. Among the archaeological finds on all continents one can see primitive drawings on stones, on bone plates, on birch bark, on wood - these are maps of the immediate surroundings. Maps of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians have reached us. In the past and present centuries, travelers constantly turned to the cartographic art of the native population. Their maps provided an invaluable service to those who discovered and mapped unknown lands.

The French traveler Henri Duveyrier visited the central Sahara in 1859, in the areas where the Tuaregs lived. He was unable to explore the Ahaggar highlands, and he put it on his map according to data provided to him by Sheikh Otkhan, who sculpted the entire relief of the highlands from wet sand. Other sources also speak about the same relief maps of the Tuaregs.

The southern neighbors of the Tuaregs, the Fulani, were also excellent in the art of cartography. The ruler of Sokoto, Sultan Belo, drew in the sand for the English major Hugh Clapperton the Quorra River along its entire course, with all the bends, turns, tributaries, and allowed his map to be redrawn on paper. French traveler Victor Largeau wrote in 1876 that a Fulban blacksmith drew for him a schematic map in the sand from Tripoli to Timbuktu (between these points the difference in latitude is as much as 16 degrees).

Professor K. Wale at the beginning of this century, crossing from the village of Lindi to Massasi, received from the black Dog Mbili a primitive map of his route. Lindi was depicted in the lower right corner, Massasi in the upper left. Individual huts and even the traveler’s house with its internal location were marked on the map. Edward Robert Flegel showed Chief Abdulrahman a map of part of Africa - the land of the Fulbe people and neighboring tribes. The chief, together with one of his advisers, corrected this map by making a drawing in the sand.

When in 1840-1843 the English geographer C. T. Beak studied the sources of the Nile, he received from a resident of these places, the Muslim Omar ibn Neji, a simple, small map of the Sobat River basin, a tributary of the White Nile.

Russian scientist Alexander Fedorovich Middendorf (1815-1894) argued that most Siberian Tungus can quickly draw a map of their surroundings on the sand or snow.

Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, a Russian revolutionary and geographer, in the 70s of the 19th century, traveling around Transbaikalia, was guided by a map that a Tungus carved for him on birch bark.

For the remarkable Russian geographer, ethnographer and anthropologist Dmitry Nikolaevich Anuchin, when he traveled through Siberia in 1906, a map of the area of ​​the Yenisei River and its tributary, which is below the village of Lebedev, was drawn by a local resident Shigal.

He depicted the direction of the flow of the Yenisei using the silhouette of a duck flying in spring migration, and the south with a drawing of the sun as its symbol. At first, Shigal drew the sun not exactly in the south, but then corrected his mistake. He marked the forest with two firs. Anuchin recognized the card as very good.

The evidence of V. Jochelson, who at the end of the 9th century conducted a geographical and ethnographic study of the Kolyma region, has been preserved. He received two from local residents small cards made on birch bark. The maps depicted the Kolyma with its tributaries Korkodon and Rassokha, and next to them were villages and hunting grounds.

When L. Strenberg traveled around Sakhalin, his guide was a Nivkh, who made for him a map of the southern part of Sakhalin. He drew the route of the ship "Baikal" from the village of Korsakovskaya to Aleksandrovsk and those protrusions of the mainland past which they sailed.

The Australian aborigines especially amazed travelers with their maps. There were tribes there who lived, perhaps, at the lowest level of social development, almost at the level of the Stone Age, and many of these people were able to draw a surprisingly accurate plan of the surrounding area on a stone or on a piece of tree bark.

In South Australia, designs made on batons are known. These drawings have the meaning of proprietary and tribal symbols, but, in fact, depict the area in which the tribe lives. Thus, for example, in the drawing given here, the native depicted a branch of the Brocken River and a swamp in New South Wells. This is a map of the territory that his tribe occupies, between the swamp and the river.

Completely different and highest degree original maps created by the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and Polynesia - maps made from sticks. The natives used them when sailing between the islands of the archipelago. The first news about these maps was brought to Europe by the German consul F. Gernsheim. There are currently about 50 such maps in European collections. They are made from thin sticks, located in different directions to each other - straight, at an angle, and shells or pebbles are attached to them. All this is connected by threads of palm fibers. The sticks show the direction of sea currents and the most convenient routes in navigation. Pebbles or shells represent islands.

Augustin Kramer, traveling through the southern part Pacific Ocean in 1897-1899, I saw a map of the Marshall Islands drawn in a notebook from one of the native leaders - in shape and outline it resembled stick maps.

One of the first news about Polynesian maps was brought by James Cook (1728-1779). His guide on the 1776 voyage was the Polynesian chief Tupaia. Naturally intelligent, Tupaia knew Polynesia well. Based on his information, a map of the area was drawn up, located between 130°-170° west longitude and 7°-27° south latitude. The map covered an area of ​​9,200 km2 and included 80 islands. The map has not survived to this day, but two copies exist.

Travelers left very interesting information about the cartographic abilities of the Eskimos - both from the north of Canada and Alaska, and from Greenland. The English Arctic explorer William Edward Parry explored the Hudson Bay area in 1821-1823. The Eskimo Iliglyuk made a sketch for him, with the help of which in July 1822 Parry discovered the strait between the Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island. The Eskimos helped Frederick William Beachy on his journey through the Bering Strait to Kotzebue Bay: they drew him a map on the ground, marking mountains and islands with stones, and fishing villages with sticks stuck into the ground.

In 1848-1859, English captain Francis Leopold McClintock took part in the expedition to rescue polar explorer John Franklin. The Eskimos provided McClintock with valuable information: they drew maps of the coast of Elio Bay and other places on the coast, and even indicated the position of the skeletons of both of Franklin's lost ships. McClintock especially appreciated the maps drawn for him by the Eskimos A-Vah-Lah and Ov-Vang-Noot.

Beginning in 1883, research in the Hudson Bay area was carried out by F. Boa. Many Eskimos and Eskimos made various sketch maps for him. The most interesting of them is the one depicting the Bechler Islands in Hudson Bay. The islands are drawn with amazing accuracy, the image almost completely coincides with the then map of the British navy.

Many travelers noted that the Eskimos, who picked up a pencil for the first time in their lives, could very accurately and in detail depict the outlines of their coast. The extraordinary orientation abilities of the Eskimos were also described by the American geographer Boizet. In 1898, the Eskimo Nuktan, a resident of North Greenland, drew him a map of Smith Bay, identifying areas with and without perpetual glaciers. Later data showed that this is a very accurate drawing.

Danish ethnologist Kai Birketsmit talks about a very special kind of maps. These are relief maps that were carved from wood by the East Greenlandic Eskimos. One of these maps is kept in the National Museum of Copenhagen. The map consists of two parts that are not connected to each other: the left part shows the eastern coast of Greenland, and the narrower right part shows a chain of islands located in front of the coast.

Canadian polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefanson noted this interesting feature in Eskimo maps: they depict everything that they consider important to them, for example, piers for boats. And the mountains stretching along the coast are unimportant to them; they don’t even depict them.

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First cards

Geographic maps have a long history.

Once upon a time, travelers going to long journey, had no maps, no navigation instruments - nothing that would allow them to determine their location. I had to rely on my memory, the Sun, the Moon and the stars. People made sketches of the places they visited - this is how the first maps appeared.

Since ancient times, maps have been one of the most important documents for any state. The rulers of many countries organized expeditions to explore unknown lands, and the main goal of all travelers was, first of all, to compile detailed geographical maps with the most important landmarks marked on them: rivers, mountains, villages and cities.

The modern name "CARD" comes from the Latin "charte", meaning "letter". Translated, “chartes” means “sheet or roll of papyrus for writing.”

It is difficult to determine when the first cartographic images appeared. Among the archaeological finds on all continents one can see primitive drawings of the area made on stones, bone plates, birch bark, wood, the age of which scientists estimate is approximately 15 thousand years.

The simplest cartographic drawings were already known in the conditions primitive society, even before the birth of writing (application). This is evidenced by primitive cartographic images among peoples who, at the time of their discovery or study, stood at low levels of social development and did not have a written language (Eskimos of North America, Nanai of the Lower Amur, Chukchi and Oduli of Northeast Asia, Micronesians of Oceania, etc. ).

These drawings, executed on wood, bark, etc. and often distinguished by great plausibility, they served to satisfy the needs that arose from the conditions of the general labor of people: to indicate the routes of migrations, hunting places, etc.

Cartographic images carved on rocks in the era of primitive society have been preserved. Particularly remarkable are the Bronze Age rock paintings in the Camonica Valley (northern Italy), including a plan showing cultivated fields, paths, streams and irrigation canals. This plan is one of the oldest cadastral plans.

Before their appearance, the main source of information about the location of a particular object was oral stories. But as people began to travel frequently over ever greater distances, the need for long-term storage of information arose.

The oldest surviving cartographic images include, for example, a city plan on the wall of Çatalhöyük (Turkey), dating back to approximately 6200 BC. BC, a map-like image on a silver vase from Maykop (about 3000 BC), cartographic images on clay tablets from Mesopotamia (about 2300 BC), numerous petroglyph maps of Valcamonica in Italy (1900 -1200 BC), Egyptian map of gold mines (1400 BC), etc. From Babylon, through the Greeks, the Western world inherited the sexagesimal number system, based on the number 60, in which geographic coordinates are expressed today.

Early cartographers themselves collected descriptions of various parts of the world known at that time, interviewing sailors, soldiers and adventurers and displaying the received data on a single map, and filled in the missing places with their imagination or honestly left unpainted blank spots.

The first maps contained a huge number of inaccuracies: at first no one even thought about the rigor of measurements, scales, topographic signs. But even such cards were highly valued. With their help, it was possible to repeat the path taken by the discoverer and avoid the troubles that abounded in wait for travelers.

Starting from the 6th century. BC e., the main contribution to the technology of creating maps in Ancient world contributed by the Greeks, Romans and Chinese.

Unfortunately, no Greek maps of that time have survived, and the Greek contribution to the development of cartography can only be assessed from textual sources - the works of Homer, Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo and other ancient Greeks - and subsequent cartographic reconstructions.

The Greek contribution to cartography was the use of geometry to create maps, the development map projections and in the Earth dimension.

It is believed that the creator of the first geographical map is the ancient Greek scientist Anaximander. In the VI century. BC he drew the first map of the then known world, depicting the Earth as a flat circle surrounded by water.

The ancient Greeks were well aware of the spherical shape of the Earth, as they observed its rounded shadow during periods of lunar eclipses and saw ships appear over the horizon and disappear beyond it.

The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes (about 276-194 BC) back in the 3rd century BC. e. quite accurately calculated the size of the globe. Eratosthenes wrote the book Geography, using the terms “geography”, “latitude” and “longitude” for the first time. The book consisted of three parts. The first part outlined the history of geography; the second describes the shape and size of the Earth, the boundaries of land and oceans, the climates of the Earth; in the third, the land is divided into parts of the world and sphrageds - prototypes of natural zones, and a description of individual countries is also made. He also compiled a geographical map of the populated part of the Earth.

As noted above, Eratosthenes proved the sphericity of the Earth and measured the radius of the globe, and Hipparchus (about 190-125 BC) invented and used a system of meridians and parallels for cartographic projections.

In the Roman Empire, cartography was put at the service of practice. Road maps were created for military, trade and administrative needs. The most famous of them is the so-called Peitinger table (a copy of a map of the 4th century), which is a scroll of 11 glued sheets of parchment 6 m 75 cm long and 34 cm wide. It shows the road network of the Roman Empire from the British Isles to the mouth of the Ganges, amounting to about 104,000 km, with rivers, mountains, settlements.

The crowning achievement of the cartographic works of Roman times was the eight-volume work “Guide to Geography” by Claudius Ptolemy (90-168), where he summarized and systematized the knowledge of ancient scientists about the Earth and the Universe; indicating the coordinates of many geographical points in latitude and longitude; which outlines the basic principles of creating maps and provides the geographical coordinates of 8000 points. And, which during the 14th centuries enjoyed such great popularity among scientists, travelers, and merchants that it was reprinted 42 times.

Ptolemy’s “Geography” contained, as already mentioned, all the information about the Earth available at that time. The maps included with it were very accurate. They have a degree grid.

Ptolemy compiled a detailed map of the Earth, the like of which no one had ever created before. It depicted three parts of the world: Europe, Asia and Libya (as Africa was then called), the Atlantic (Western) Ocean, the Mediterranean (African) and Indian Seas.

The rivers, lakes and peninsulas of Europe and North Africa known at that time were depicted quite accurately, which cannot be said about the lesser-known areas of Asia, which were reconstructed based on fragmentary, often contradictory, geographical information and data.

8000 (eight thousand) points of the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean were plotted by coordinates; the position of some of them was determined astronomically, and most were plotted along routes.

The map is extended in an easterly direction. Half of the map is devoted to famous countries. In its southern part there is a huge continent called the Unknown Land.

Cartography developed in China independently of European traditions. The oldest surviving document on the official survey of the country and the creation of maps dates back to the Zhou Dynasty (1027-221 BC). And the oldest surviving Chinese maps are considered to be maps on bamboo plates, silk and paper, discovered in Fanmatan tombs of the Qin (221-207 BC) and Western Han (206 BC - 25 AD) times. . BC) dynasties, as well as in the Mawangdui graves of the Western Han dynasty.

These maps are comparable in image quality and detail to topographic maps. They were significantly more accurate than even later European maps.

The main Chinese contribution to the creation of maps was the invention no later than the 2nd century. BC e. paper on which maps began to be drawn, and a rectangular grid of coordinates, which was first used by the great Chinese astronomer and mathematician Zhang Heng (78-139 AD). Subsequently, Chinese cartographers invariably used a rectangular coordinate grid.

A century later, the Chinese cartographer Pei Xiu (224-271) developed principles for drawing maps based on the use of a rectangular grid, as well as principles for measuring distances based on the laws of geometry.

Invented by the Chinese in the 8th century. printing allowed them to be the first in world history to begin printing maps. The first surviving printed Chinese map dates back to 1155.