Who made the oldest map in the 6th century. History of geographical maps

Who made the ancient maps?

Old maps keep images of the changing world. If we look at the maps of recent decades, it is easy to see how administrative boundaries and names of states are changing, how some of them fall apart, like shabby scraps of paper. Over the centuries, we will notice changes in riverbeds and coastlines. Over the millennia, entire civilizations with cities and arable lands are born and go out. For tens of thousands of years, the climate has noticeably changed, erasing the Ancient World, with its geography, flora and fauna. However, it is believed that it is impossible to see prehistoric realities on ancient maps, since people took up cartography only at the time of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, less than 4 thousand years ago. But sometimes in ancient atlases you can still find traces of incomprehensibly ancient eras ...

That old map

Wet Sahara

The father of cartography is considered to be the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who in the 2nd century A.D. in his “Manual for making geographical maps”generalized and put on a strict mathematical basis the results of the work of his predecessors. For one and a half thousand years, his work was the basis for mapping. Numerous cartographers from medieval monks to university professors obediently drew how the greatest Sahara desert was crossed up and down by full-flowing rivers flowing into non-existent lakes. After all, Ptolemy authoritatively wrote: “Very large rivers flow inside the country [Inner Libya]”.

Even modern geographers pretend that there is nothing strange in this, commenting on Ptolemy, for example, as follows: “Even at the beginning of our era, the western part of the Sahara had more favorable natural conditions. There were many significant rivers here. The Niger River received several tributaries from the north. However, Ptolemy described the Kinips and Gir rivers, as well as the Chelonid marshes in ... Central and Eastern Sahara!

Herodotus, six centuries before Ptolemy, wrote about the places south of the Sirte coast of Libya, where Ptolemy placed the trans-Saharan river Kinips: "The land is sandy, waterless and completely deserted ... The whole country lying inside [Sirte] became completely waterless." True, he mentions a small, coastal river, the Cinip, which flowed into the Sirte and was only 200 stadia (37 kilometers) long. But it was clearly not about the grandiose river system of Ptolemy with sources in the Tibesti highlands, at a latitude of 21 degrees, 1000 kilometers south of its delta in Sirte!

The riddle is solved by looking at a map of the dry channels of the ancient rivers of the Libyan Basin. There you can clearly see the rivers flowing from the Tibesti mountains, merging into one river, which flowed into the Gulf of the Great Sirte (now Sidra) of the Mediterranean Sea. Satellite imagery clearly shows a section of a giant channel with a diameter of 27 kilometers, located just above the ancient delta. Note that the maximum diameter of the Nile Valley is somewhat more modest - 23 kilometers in the area of ​​​​the Fayum oasis ...

When did the water flow there? Geologists believe that "this river disappeared under the sands of the Sahara about 12 thousand years ago, and civilization, probably communicating with the Nile, also died with it." It turns out that the Sahara was not always a desert. For the last half a million years, it has experienced 5 long epochs of rains, when rivers flowed in the Sahara for thousands of years, large lakes splashed, and primitive hunters hunted hippos that are now unseen in the desert. These transformations of the desert into the savanna occurred with a period of about 100 thousand years.

When Homo sapiens appeared in Africa about 140 thousand years ago, the Sahara was a green plain around the giant Paleochad Lake-Sea and Lake Fezzan comparable to it, of which now only a dry bed remains 400 kilometers south of Tripoli. In 2007, using orbital radar to penetrate the sands, scientists discovered the shores and dry bed of another mega-lake in the Sudanese province of North Darfur. This lake splashed just in the region of Ptolemy's Helonid swamps! Apparently, the memory of the prehistoric lake Fezzan has also been preserved. So Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) mentioned the Triton swamp, which “many place between the two Sirts”, where Lake Fezzan was located. But the last lake deposits of Fezzan date back to prehistoric times - more than 6 thousand years ...

Another relic of the wet Sahara is the "Nubian" tributary of the Nile - a river comparable to it, which flowed from the Sahara and flowed into the Nile in the Aswan region, just above the island of Elephantine. Herodotus personally visited this island and made sure that "not a single river flows into the Nile, not a single stream that would replenish its waters." Even Ptolemy himself did not know this tributary, but European cartographers stubbornly drew it, starting with Mercator (1569) and up to the 18th century. When the Aswan High Dam was built, Lake Nasser was formed and partially filled the ancient tributary channel in the form of a narrow bay that cuts into the Sahara for 35 kilometers. And in the pictures taken from space, the Nubian tributary can be traced for 470 kilometers from the Nile as a dark strip of a dry channel, as a chain of salt lakes, and finally, as a “honeycomb” of fields around wells that feed them with water from an aquifer under the scorched surface of the Sahara.

Lake and rivers of the Arabian Desert

The Arabian Desert is located near the Sahara. It has also repeatedly experienced rainy epochs during times of interglacial warming. The last such "climatic optimum" took place 5-10 thousand years ago.

Surprisingly, on the maps built according to Ptolemy's data, we see the Arabian Peninsula, indented by rivers and with a large lake at its southern tip, north of the city of Shabva. But exactly where in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy's geography (1482) there is a lake and the inscription "aqua" (water), now there is a dry depression 200-300 kilometers across, covered with sand. On its southwestern "shore" is one of the oldest cities in Asia - Marib, which arose around 1900 BC. 50 kilometers north of Marib, a wide (about 30 kilometers) dry river valley flows into the bed of an ancient lake from the west. There is a similar river on the maps of Ptolemy. That river and lake can be seen even on maps of the 17th century, for example, by De Wit (1680).

Where the cities of Mecca and Jeddah are now located, Ptolemy placed a large river 700 kilometers long. Shooting from space confirms that there, in the direction indicated by Ptolemy, an ancient river valley stretched up to 12 kilometers wide and one and a half hundred kilometers long. Even the southern tributary, which merges with the main channel at Mecca, is clearly distinguishable. And where Ptolemy placed the sources of the river, now among the sands fields are green, irrigated with water from wells.

Another great river of Ptolemy, which crossed Arabia and flowed into the Persian Gulf on the western coast of the United Arab Emirates, is now hidden under sand dunes. Relics of its delta may be narrow, river-like bays of the sea and salt marshes between the settlements of Al Hamra and Silah.

Ptolemy's strange mountains

Instead of the "East European Plain" of modern geography, the maps of the 15th-16th centuries depict a vast mountain system. For centuries, geographers stubbornly drew the Hyperborean mountains, stretching along the parallels 60o - 62o from the Rybinsk reservoir to the Urals. Now there are only hills about 150 meters high and traces of the outskirts of ancient glaciers that covered the northern territories in the Paleolithic. More than 20 years ago, a Lithuanian scientist specializing in paleogeography, A.A. Seibutis, identified the Hyperborean mountains with the edge of the glacier of the Valdai glaciation 10 - 75 thousand years ago. After all, the edges of modern glaciers in the form of ice cliffs also resemble mountains. In this regard, let's pay attention to the fact that the maps of Nikola Herman (1513) depict the Hyperborean Mountains as a cliff with lakes adjacent to its foot, which surprisingly resemble ice-melt water reservoirs. However, the version of the old maps may be even more scandalous.

From the Hyperborean Mountains to the south-west, the Ripean Ptolemy Mountains extend, which stretch in the direction of the Crimea and, passing into the Amadoka Mountains, descend to a latitude of 50o in the region of the Borisfen (Dnieper) valley. The second spur of the Hyperborean mountains called Hippiti (or Hippici) montes stretches south to 52o latitude between the Don and Volga, along the "Oka-Don Plain" of modern maps. Both directions of the pseudomountains do not correspond to the border of the Valdai glaciation, but formally coincide with the two tongues of the Dnieper glacier, which has moved as far south as possible to 48o - 50o latitude precisely along the Dnieper valley and along the Oka-Don plain. But it was about 250 thousand years ago ...

An independent confirmation of the glacial realities of old maps is the name of the Sea of ​​Azov, drawn by Ptolemy in the XVI - XVII centuries: Palus Meotides (Sylvanus 1511), Paludes Meotides (Hermann 1513), Maeotis Palus (Ortelius 1638). The Latin words palus and paludis mean "bog" and "marsh" respectively. With a maximum depth of only 15 meters, the Sea of ​​Azov dried up when the ocean level dropped by about 100 meters during the glaciations, that is, more than 10 thousand years ago.

To the source of knowledge

Claudius Ptolemy was not a traveler, but he worked in the famous Alexandrian Library of Egypt and was familiar with the works of his predecessors that have not come down to us. But what predecessors could describe the geographical realities of prehistoric eras, long before the invention of writing?

It is known that nomads and hunters (Indians, Polynesians, Eskimos) made plans and even maps, but always of small areas. From such Paleolithic cartographers, only controversial schemes and drawings of small areas of the terrain have come down to us. First famous map The universe from Babylon (500 BC) is only a rough sketch of the Babylonian kingdom. For cartography of vast spaces, measurements and written fixation of the geographical coordinates of many points are necessary. This kind of activity of primitive societies is not known.

If someone in prehistoric times was engaged in something similar, then the fruits of his work could give rise to historical legends about ancient wisdom. It is interesting that it was in Egypt that the legend of the genius of geography of prehistoric times was preserved. It was Thoth, "the god who measured this Earth." Specialist in historical metrology A.V. Klimenko gave interesting arguments in favor of the fact that ancient scientists, and after them medieval authors, knew the result of Thoth's measurements.

For example, the Khorezm encyclopedist al-Biruni (beginning of the 11th century) in his work “Geodesy” wrote that the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes (the Greek version of the name Thoth) measured the circumference of the Earth at “9000 farsakhs, while farsakhs are 12000 cubits” A.V. Klimenko came to an interesting conclusion: all the dimensions of the earth's circumference mentioned by Aristotle, Archimedes, al-Idrisi, al-Biruni, apparently, are only attempts to convert 9000 farsakhs of Thoth into other units of length. In addition, al-Biruni wrote: “In accordance with the words of Hermes, one degree [on the surface of the Earth] will be equal to 25 farsakhs, which is 75 miles ...” The value of the Roman mile is well known and is equal to 1481 meters. It follows that the circumference of the Earth, according to Thoth, is 39987 kilometers, which is only 0.05% (!) Shorter than the true value if the Earth is measured along the meridian. Note that in geodesy such accuracy was achieved only at the turn of the 18th - 19th centuries, already with the help of optical instruments and various tricks.

He was considered the god of wisdom, counting and writing. Clement of Alexandria (II-III centuries AD) wrote about 42 sacred books of Hermes-Thoth, which were kept in the temples of Egypt. It is possible that some of his legacy ended up in the Library of Alexandria, and from there to Ptolemy. All sources reflecting the opinion of the ancient Egyptians themselves (Papyrus Turin, Manetho, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus) indicate that Egypt carefully kept records of the country's history for many thousands of years. If there was such a tradition, then oral, and then written, information from the times of the humid Sahara, where the ancestors of the Egyptians domesticated cattle, molded the first ceramics and created the first mummies, could be preserved.

But could information about glaciers in northern Europe have reached Egypt? There was obviously some kind of connection between Ancient Egypt and the northern territories. It is known that Baltic amber was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. And in the first half of the 3rd century BC, in the festive procession of the king of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, among exotic animals paraded "one huge polar bear".

A fresco of another ancient Egyptian procession shows… dwarf form of mammoth. The population of such animals really existed and died out already under the pharaohs - about 4 thousand years ago, but ... on the distant Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea.

Yet the sophisticated surveyor Thoth looks like an outsider among prehistoric tribes. He was called "the lord of foreigners". And he was also considered a god ... of the moon, from which our planet is visible in all details, like a school globe. Is it not from the book of Thoth in the Library of Alexandria that the young traveler Plutarch (about 45 - about 127) learned about the "easy" life on the moon and the fact that "the Egyptians, I remember, claim that the Moon is the seventy-second fraction of the Earth" (more precisely, 1/81 by mass)?

Humans are always driven by curiosity. Thousands of years ago, the discoverers, going farther and farther into uncharted lands, created the first similarities of geographical maps, trying to put the relief they saw on papyrus sheets or clay tablets.

Probably the oldest found is a map from the Egyptian Museum in Turin, made on papyrus by order of Pharaoh Ramses IV in 1160 BC. e. This map was used by the expedition, which, on the orders of the pharaoh, was looking for a 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 by that time.

The originals of his maps have not been preserved, but after 50 years they were restored and improved by another scientist from Miletus - Hecateus. Scientists have recreated this map according to the descriptions of Hecateus. It is easy to recognize the Mediterranean and Black Seas and nearby lands on it. But is it possible to determine distances from it? This requires a scale that was not yet on ancient maps. For a unit of length, Hecateus used "days of sailing" by sea and "days of passage" by dry land, which, of course, did not add accuracy to the maps.

Ancient geographical maps had other significant shortcomings. They distorted the image, because a spherical surface cannot be deployed on a plane without distortion. Try to carefully remove the peel of an orange and press it against the surface of the table: this will not work 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. The "father of geography" Eratosthenes was not without reason called 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 such a projection, there is less distortion, because the image is transferred from the ball to the cylinder. Modern cards create 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 great works: the "Guide to Astronomy" in 13 books and the "Guide to 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 the best either before Ptolemy, or 12 centuries after him! This map already had a degree grid. To create it, Ptolemy determined geographical coordinates(latitude and longitude) of almost four hundred objects. The scientist determined latitude (distance from the equator in degrees) by the height of the Sun at noon using a gnomon, longitude (degree distance from the initial meridian) - by the difference in time of observations of a 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 cards that helped Columbus in his famous voyage. The authority of Ptolemy grew so much that even collections of maps were called "Ptolemies" for a long time. Only in the 16th century, after the publication of the "Atlas of the World" by Gerard Mercator, on the cover of which Atlas was drawn holding the Earth, were collections of maps called "atlases".

In ancient China, geographic maps were also created. Interestingly, the first written mention of a geographical map is not related to geography. In the III century BC. e. The Chinese throne was occupied by the Qin dynasty. 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 roll of silk. History tells that the attempt failed.

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

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

Illustration: depositphotos.com | Kuzmafoto

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For our ancient ancestors, the world was often limited to the land that surrounded and fed them. But even the earliest human civilizations still tried to measure the scale of this world and made the first attempts at mapping.

The first such map is believed to have been made in Babylon over 2,500 years ago, and it shows the world outside the Babylonian kingdom in the form of poisonous waters and dangerous islands where (they believed) humans could not survive.

Over time, maps gradually became larger and larger as people's knowledge of what lay beyond the Mediterranean grew. With the beginning of the era of wandering and exploration in the 15th century, the concept of seeing the world changed, the East began to appear on the maps, a huge uncharted ocean appeared in the place of America. And with the return of Columbus, the maps of the world began to take on a form that is already understandable to us, modern people.

1. The oldest known map of the world from Babylon (6th century BC). At the center of the world is the Babylonian kingdom itself. Around him is a "bitter river". The seven dots across the river are islands that cannot be reached.

2. World map of Hecateus of Miletus (5th-6th century BC). Hecataeus divides the world into three parts: Europe, Asia and Libya, located around the Mediterranean Sea. His world is a round disk surrounded by an ocean.

3. Map of the world by Posidonius (2nd century BC). This map expands on the early Greek vision of the world to include the conquests of Alexander the Great.

4. World map of Pomponius Mela (43 AD)

5. Map of the world by Ptolemy (150 AD). He was the first to add lines of latitude and longitude to the world map.

6. The Peutinger Tablet, a 4th-century Roman map showing the road network of the Roman Empire. The complete map is very long, showing the lands from Iberia to India. In the center of the world, of course, is Rome.

7. Map of the world by Cosmas Indikoplov (6th century AD). The world is shown as a flat rectangle.

8. Later Christian map in the form of a multi-colored clover leaf, compiled by Heinrich Banting (Germany, 1581). In fact, it does not describe the world, or rather, according to this map, the world is a continuation of the Christian trinity, and Jerusalem is its center.

9. Map of the world by Mahmud al-Kashgari (11th century). The world is centered around the ancient city of Balasagun, now the territory of Kyrgyzstan. This also includes places (countries) that, according to predictions, will appear by the end of the world, such as Gog and Magog.

10. Map "Book of Roger" by Al-Idrisi, compiled in 1154. It was created on the basis of information received from Arab traders who traveled all over the world. At that time it was the most accurate and extensive map of the world. Europe and Asia are already clearly visible, but from Africa so far there is only its northern part.

11. Hereford map of the world of the 14th century by one Richard of Haldingham. Jerusalem in the center, East at the top. The circle in the southern part of the map is the Garden of Eden.

12. Chinese map "Da Ming Hunyi Tu" of the late 14th century. The world through the eyes of the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty. China, of course, dominates, and the whole of Europe is squeezed into a small space in the west.

13. Genoese map, compiled in 1457 based on the descriptions of Niccolò da Conti. This is how Europeans see the world and Asia after the opening of the first trade routes to Mongolia and China.

14. Projection of the Erdapfel globe ("Earth Apple") by Martin Beheim (Germany, 1492). Erdapfel is the oldest known globe, showing the world as a sphere, but without America - instead, there is still a huge ocean.

15. Map of the world by Johann Ruysch, compiled in 1507. One of the first images of the New World.

16. Map by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann in 1507. This was the first map to label the New World as "America". America looks like a thin strip of the east coast.

17. Map of the world by Gerard van Schagen in 1689. By this time, most of the world has already been mapped, and only small parts of America remain empty for now.

18. Samuel Dunn's 1794 map of the world. By mapping the discoveries of Captain James Cook, Dunn became the first cartographer to depict our world as accurately as possible.

Ancient riddles always attract modern man. To look, as if through a window, into the secrets of civilizations hidden by time, maps of our world help us ... which we never knew.

Not inferior to modern

To create accurate geographical maps, you need a ship capable of long-distance navigation to explore the area, a chronometer to determine the coordinates, as well as mathematicians and cartographers to process the information received.

Meanwhile, there are ancient maps compiled before our era, which are not inferior in accuracy to modern ones, while there was no question of research vessels (according to official history), and the same chronometer was invented by the English watchmaker John Harrison only in 1761. What did ancient cartographers use? Surely they had at their disposal reliable ships and no less accurate instruments, given the fact that sometimes their maps even surpassed modern analogues in reliability.

Unfortunately, such ancient originals have not come down to us unchanged. They were redrawn many times, transferred from one material to another. Mankind sought to preserve the once acquired knowledge about the world, possibly transmitted by an unknown powerful civilization.

Piri Reis Map

On the margin of the Piri Reis card is written: “No one currently has a card like this. In composing it, I used twenty nautical charts and eight mappa mundis, i.e., maps called by the Arabs “jaferia” and compiled back in the time of Alexander the Great, which depict the entire inhabited world.

This map was compiled in 1513 by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis, it was included in his atlas "Kitab-i-bahrie" ("Book of the Seas"). Almost 200 years later, the surviving sheets of the atlas were published in Europe, but did not arouse any interest. Only in 1956, when the map came to the American military cartographers, did its systematic study begin, which gave us several sensations.

sensation number one

The map shows the Americas. Nothing surprising at first glance, because the map was completed after the voyage of Columbus. However, Columbus did not carry out such a thorough cartographic description of the area, and his expedition did not go deep into the continent, so he could not display the deltas of the American rivers, and even more so the Andes!

Let's see what Piri Reis himself writes about Columbus: “An infidel named Colombo, a Genoese, discovered these lands. A book fell into the hands of the named Colombo, in which he read that on the edge of the Western Sea, far in the West, there are shores and islands. All sorts of metals were found there and gems. The aforementioned Colombo studied this book for a long time ... Colombo also learned about the passion of the natives for glass jewelry from this book and took them with him to exchange them for gold.

It turns out that Columbus had a certain book, as well as a map, which guided him in swimming. It can be assumed that Christopher Columbus, married to the daughter of the master of the former Knights Templar, received from him some ancient book, as well as a map of America, which became landmarks in his journey. Knowing where you are sailing is the key to success in the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries!

Here the conclusion is more important for us - the maps of Columbus and the maps of Piri Reis have the same ancient source! And the next sensation will tell us how old it is.

sensation number two

The Piri Reis map shows the coastline of Antarctica, and drawn with high accuracy! The conclusions of modern scientists suggest that Antarctica on this map is shown even before complete glaciation (that is, about 6000 years ago!).

Here is the report of American cartographers: “The statement that the lower part of the map shows the Princess Martha Coast, parts of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica, as well as the Palmer Peninsula, is justified. We found this explanation to be the most logical and possibly correct. The geographic details shown at the bottom of the map are in perfect agreement with the seismic data taken through the ice cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition in 1949. This means that the coastline was mapped before it was covered in ice. The ice in this area is approximately 1.5 km thick. We have no idea how these data could be obtained with the assumed level of geographical knowledge in 1513.

And now let's compare: the glaciation of Antarctica occurred at a time when the glaciers of America and Europe were melting. Those. we see before us a picture of the ancient antediluvian world! (This refers to the flood of 9612 BC, associated, according to some scientists, with the deviation of the earth's axis.)

But if we are dealing with such a perfect ancient source, it remains open question: who and when was it created? Maybe other ancient maps will help us figure this out?

Mercator map

Gerard van Kremer (known as Mercator), a Flemish cartographer and scholar, completed his atlas, which included several of his own maps, in 1569. We are again interested in the map of Antarctica, where the Amundsen Sea, Cape Gerlacher and Cape Dart on Mary Byrd Land, Thurston Island, Alexander I Island, Weddell Sea, Padda Island, Regula Ridge and other geographical objects marked on modern maps were perfectly visible.

Of course, we are interested in glaciation. It is located in a small subpolar zone, the rest of the territory is carefully drawn: rivers, valleys, mountain ranges ...
But this card is not the last in our chain…

Map by Philippe Buache

The map was published in 1737 - almost a hundred years before the Antarctic expedition of Bellingshausen and Lazarev. The fact that the map was created even before the initial glaciation of the mainland is simply amazing! On it, East and West Antarctica are separated by a strait that runs along the line of the Transantarctic Mountains, which could only be detected in the complete absence of glaciers!

Hypotheses: where do we get these artifacts from?

The Americans made a great contribution to the study of ancient maps. Historian, geographer, professor Charles Hapgut compared the coastline of Antarctica on all available ancient artifacts. In his book Maps of the Sea Kings, he wrote: “This is the first convincing evidence that some extremely intelligent people preceded all the peoples known to history ... Ancient travelers plowed the seas from pole to pole. Surprising as it may be, there is undeniable evidence that ancient people once explored the coasts of Antarctica when they were still free of ice. It is also indisputable that they possessed such navigational tools that surpassed all those that were available to people in the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and up to the second half of the 18th century.

The Mercator map shows rivers and valleys hidden under the Antarctic ice. After the Great Patriotic War, American scientists compiled a map with the projection center in Cairo (where the military base USA), compared it with the ancient map of Piri Reis and found their almost complete similarity. Therefore, it is logical to assume that the center of the projection of the source of the Piri Reis map was located near Cairo. It turns out that the ancient cartographers were Egyptians or their ancestors?
But how could the ancient Egyptians know the basics of spherical trigonometry and almost without error determine the exact length of the equator? (Erastofen, who measured the circumference of the Earth in ancient times, did this with a large error, which is unacceptable when creating such accurate maps!)

Hapgut claims that the center of the projection of the ancient map of Piri Reis passes through Alexandria, where its original source could be preserved in the famous library. As for who, in fact, compiled it, there is another guess.

Referring to some studies, it can be assumed that the ancient cartographers are the kings of the Garamants, who ruled at that time in Egypt. Plato calls them the kings of Atlantis! Let us recall what incomprehensible knowledge, according to the legends, the Atlanteans possessed. And it is possible that they used this knowledge to create maps.

Just imagine this mighty civilization, possessing telepathy, controlling aircraft and capable of creating an artificial satellite of the Earth! Already they could carefully study our planet from space, and then process the information received in ways still inaccessible to mankind. It is not clear then only, what did these supermen pay for? Be that as it may, I would like to believe that it was they who left us an ancient legacy, which means that humanity still has a chance to reach their heights in the field of science and progress. The main thing is not to repeat their mistakes ...

It is impossible to establish when a person made the first card. It is only known that many millennia before our era, man already knew the surrounding area well and knew how to depict it on sand or tree bark. These cartographic images served to indicate roaming 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 stage of culture was also reflected in drawings-plans. They become more detailed, more expressive, more accurately convey the character of the area.

A very valuable ancient drawing of the hunting grounds of the North Caucasus has been preserved to this day. This engraving was made on silver around 3000 BC. e., i.e. This cultural monument of the inhabitants of the ancient Caucasus was found by scientists during excavations of one of the mounds on the banks of the river. Kuban near Maykop.

AT ancient world The drawing up of geographical maps has reached a 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 the city of Alexandria (at the mouth of the Nile River) in the 2nd century, compiled detailed map A land that no one has created before him.

This map shows three parts of the world - Europe, Asia and Libya (as Africa was then called), as well as the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean and other seas. The map has already a degree grid. Ptolemy introduced this grid in order 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 we compare Ptolemy's map with the modern one, it is easy to see that the areas located far from the Mediterranean region, that is, known to Ptolemy only by rumor, received fantastic outlines.

Particularly striking is the fact 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 passes into some kind of land, connecting in the east with Asia. Ptolemy did not know that Africa ended in the south and was washed by the ocean. He 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 is impossible to pass on ships from Europe. And yet in ancient world and in subsequent centuries, until the 15th century, no one compiled the best card world than Ptolemy.

The Romans made extensive use of 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.

Fables were taught in schools about the creation of the world by God in six days, about the global flood, about heaven and hell. The idea of ​​the sphericity of the Earth was considered "heretical" by churchmen and was strictly persecuted. The idea of ​​the Earth has taken on an absolutely fantastic form. In the VI century. Byzantine merchant monk Cosmas Indikoplios depicted the Earth in the shape of a rectangle.

The main type of maps are rough, far from reality and devoid of a scientific basis "monastery maps". They testify to 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 the cities of Europe, art and science flourished.

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

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

The era of great geographical discoveries created the conditions for the rise of cartographic science: navigators needed a good, truthful geographical map. In the XVI century. more correct maps appeared, built in new cartographic projections.
Geographic maps include a lot of scientific material. If you compare different maps of the same area, study them, you can get a very detailed idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthis area.

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

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