Welcome to You Ask Andy

Karen McKay, age 10, of Merrillville, Ind., for her question:

WHO MADE THE FIRST MAP?

Aren't maps great? They help us when we travel from one place to another. At vacation time they're part of the fun in making it possible to look ahead as you travel down long highways. And when you're following the news, maps help  you locate the exact spot where the action is happening. In school, maps are called on many times to help tell stories of history and geography.

Old maps help us to understand how people lived in ancient times. Ever since man started moving from one place to another, he has drawn maps to keep records of his travels.

The world's first map was one made about 2300 B.C. It was made in Babylonia on a small clay tablet and it showed a man's estate in a mountain lined valley. The map was found in Iraq and is now in the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Mass.

We know that the ancient Egyptians were also map makers. In one that can be traced back to 1300 B.C., the route from the Nile Valley to the gold mines of Nubia and part of ancient Ethiopia can be seen.

The world as the Greeks knew it in 300 B.C. made the first indication that people realized the earth was round. The Greeks designed the first projection and developed a longitude and latitude system.

The Romans were probably the first to make road maps. Unfortunately few have been preserved, but those available show the Romans were excellent surveyors.

A map made in A.D. 150 by Claudius Ptolemy, a scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, is probably the most famous of the ancient maps. It shows the world as it was known at that time. In his eight book " Geogrophia," Ptolemy also included 26 regional maps of Europe, Africa and Asia. Only a few scholars even knew about these ancient maps until the late 1400s when they were finally printed in an atlas.

A map showing the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, called a portolano, was used widely for navigation purposes during the 1400s. It showed harbors and located shipping ports. Fine workmanship on the portolanos indicates they were probably patterned after even earlier maps.

Christopher Columbus was a map maker as well as a navigator. When traveling, he used portolano charts and also made many of his own.

Growth of the world's knowledge can actually be traced on the maps that have been made to record discoveries. On almost every early voyage, a chart maker went along to draw maps of coast lines, islands and harbors.

John Smith, the famous colonial adventurer, is given credit for drawing the first map in America in the early 1600s. At first he drew a map of Virginia and later a map of New England.

 

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