History.— The earliest maps consisted of simple drawings which merely represented the relative positions of a few known points on the earth's surface and defined in a general way the partly known and partly conjectured limits of the land and water areas. Map-making un doubtedly originated among the wandering tribes of mankind and not among those who inhabited permanent locations such as towns and villages, and were used by those tribes to perpetuate for the benefit of posterity land marks identifying the regions traveled over by them during their wide excursions to unsettled parts of the world. This is evidenced by the well-known fact that the American Indians and the Eskimo and many of the Polynesian tribes, customary wanderers, are very acute in appre hending the meaning of maps, while the ma jority of the settled Negro tribes are absolutely lacking in this respect. It is stated that a map drawn by an Eskimo woman enabled Sir Edward Parry to discover Fury and Heels Strait, while the experience of many pioneer surveyors and topographers, derived from their work through the extensive wildernesses of the American continent, will attest to the general accuracy of elementary Indian charts and of the capacity of those Indians to understand the maps made by others.
Among civilized peoples, the earliest exam ples of maps recorded are those of the Egyp tians. According to Apollonius of Rhodes (230 B.c.) the Egyptians of Colchis, a colony which dated from the time of Rameses II (1340 a.c.), possessed maps engraved on wooden tablets which had been handed down to them from a preceding period. These maps defined with considerable accuracy the known limits of land and water areas and the positions of roads and towns. Other ancient Egyptiau maps are the route maps which were prepared under the di rection of King Sesostris, probably during the 12th dynasty; certain old maps in the Alex andrian Library referred to by Strabo and prob ably collected by Eratosthenes, and the map on papyrus in the museum at Turin, which rep resents the topographical features of a gold mining district in Nubia. Maps of equal if not greater antiquity are recorded among the ancient Babylonians, who originated the idea of dividing the ecliptic into the 12 signs of the zodiac and also the sexagesimal system of numeration which led to the custom of dividing the circle into 360 degrees of 60 minutes each, with each minute subdivided into 60 seconds, and also to the corresponding divisions of the hour.
Among the Greeks the first map appears to be that of Anaximander about 560 B.C. His work was followed about 100 years later by that of Democritus of Abdera, whose work appears to have been based upon data obtained by him formation prior to the 16.h century. In this connection it is well to understand that from the time of Aristotle (384 ac.) the mathe maticians, astronomers and geographers were well aware of the fact that the earth was a sphere and not the flat disc of the Ionic Greeks in the days of Anaximander, the ancient Egyp tians and the Babylonians. Therefore, the map making problem solved by Hipparchus and the successful solution of which formed the founda tion for Ptolemy's work involved the devising of a projection by means of which the spherical surface of the earth could be represented on a plane surface. Although Ptolemy is credited with being the father of rational cartography, it does not appear that any maps were actually drawn by him. The oldest editions of the
Ptolemaic maps on record appear to be the work of Agathodwmon, a mathematician who lived in the 5th century D., and constructed maps accurately based upon Ptolemy's data.
self in his travels, which extended to Persia and perhaps as far as India, and added consid erably to the east and west dimensions of the known world areas. These circumstances prob ably led to the depiction of the world disc in the form of an oval, a distinct departure from the circular form employed by Anaximander and others. About 150 n.c. Hipparchus intro duced among the Greeks the Babylonian system of numeration, and discarding the unreliable geographical data of Erastosthenes and others, which were mainly obtained from travelers suggested the use of only actual astronomical determinations of the latitudes and longitudes of the various points as the true basis for check ing distances and directions. His suggestions were practically carried out by Marinus of Tyre, whose work was subsequently corrected by Ptolemy about the 2d century A.D., into a map which is generally considered to be the most complete summary of geographical in Among the Romans the art of map-making was confined to various kinds of sketch maps valuable for military and political purposes. They did not apply the scientific methods of the Greeks, and although both Cicero and Seneca mention general and topographical maps, and it •is a fact that a survey of the whole Roman Empire was made during the reign of Augustus, the grave errors of Ptolemy's maps in all of the Mediterranean countries awaited rectifica tion until the later Middle Ages.
During the earlier Middle Ages cartography, together with all the other branches of scientific culture, took a step backwards. The ban of the Church was laid heavily on the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth and resulted in the resurrection of the ancient Greek idea of a flat circular earth surrounded by an ocean limited by the edge of the celestial vault. In this way the few maps constructed during this period assumed the form shown in the accompanying figure, and toward the close of the 14th cen tury the entire science of map-malcing actually fell below the level of that attained by the Ionic Greeks in the days of Anaximander and Democritus. It is a fact worth noting, how ever, that during the 13th century a form of nautical charts called or acorn pass" maps made their appearance in Italy and were extensively used for navigating purposes between the ports on the shores of the Mediter ranean Sea. They were constructed with the aid of the compass and consisted of numerous straight lines which radiated from each port to all the other ports shown on the map. These lines marked with bearings and distances gave the ship courses between the various ports, and the maps embodied in a crude way the basic principle of modern map construction from the data obtained by the triangulations of trigo nometrical surveys. With the aid of the loxo dromic maps a very accurate representation of the coasts of the Mediterranean countries was obtained and served admirably to correct the errors of the Ptolemaic maps which the Re naissance had introduced once more into west ern Europe.