Geography’s most important tool for thinking spatially about the distribution of features across Earth is a map. A map is a two-dimensional or flat-scale model of Earth’s surface, or a portion of it. Geography is immediately distinguished from other disciplines by its reliance on maps to display and analyze information.

A map serves two purposes:

• As a reference tool. A map helps us to find the shortest route between two places and to avoid getting lost along the way. We consult maps to learn where in the world something is found, especially in relationship to a place we know, such as a town, body of water, or highway. The maps in an atlas or a road map are especially useful for this purpose.

• As a communications tool. A map is often the best means for depicting the distribution of human activities or physical features, as well as for thinking about reasons underlying a distribution.

A map is a scale model of the real world, made small enough to work with on a desk or computer. It can be a hasty here’s-how-to-get-to-the-party sketch, an elaborate work of art, or a precise computer-generated product. For centuries, geographers have worked to perfect the science of mapmaking, called cartography. Contemporary cartographers are assisted by computers and satellite imagery.

Geography in the Ancient World

The science of geography has prehistoric roots. One of the earliest surviving fully authenticated maps, depicting the town of Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey, dates from approximately 6200 B.C.E. Archaeologists found the map on the wall of a house that was excavated during the 1960s (Figure 1-6).

(a) This map, dating from 6200 B.C.E., depicts the town of Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, and the eruption of the Hasan Dağ| (Mount Hasan) twin-peaks volcano, which is actually located around 140 kilometers (87 miles) northeast of the town. Archaeological evidence indicates that the volcano did erupt around the time that the map was made. The map is now in the Konya Archaeology Museum. (b) Artist’s impression of Çatalhöyük,created from details on the map

Major contributors to geographic thought in the ancient eastern Mediterranean included:

• Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–ca. 546 B.C.E.), who applied principles of geometry to measuring land area.

• Anaximander (610–ca. 546 B.C.E.), a student of Thales, who made a world map based on information from sailors and argued that the world was shaped like a cylinder.

• Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 495 B.C.E.), who may have been the first to propose a spherical world, arguing that the sphere was the most perfect form.

• Hecataeus (ca. 550–ca. 476 B.C.E.), who may have produced the first geography book, called Periodos Ges (“Journey Around the Earth”).

• Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), who was the first to demonstrate that Earth was spherical on the basis of evidence.

• Eratosthenes (ca. 276–ca. 194 B.C.E.), the inventor of the word “geography,” who accepted that Earth was round (as few others did in his day), calculated its circumference within 0.5 percent accuracy, accurately divided Earth into five climatic regions, and described the known world in one of the first geography books.

• Strabo (ca. 64 B.C.E.–ca. 24 C.E.), who described the known world in a 17-volume work titled Geographica (“Geography”).

• Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170 C.E.), who wrote an eight-volume Geographia, codified basic principles of mapmaking, and prepared numerous maps that were not improved upon for more than 1,000 years

World MAP By Ptolemy, CA.150 C.E The map shows the known world at the height of the Roman Empire, around the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.

Geography’s Revival

After Ptolemy, little progress in mapmaking or geographic thought was made in Europe for more than 1,000 years. Maps became less mathematical and more fanciful, showing Earth as a flat disk surrounded by fierce animals and monsters. Geographic inquiry continued, though, elsewhere in the world. Ancient and medieval contributors outside Europe included:

• “Yu Gong” (“Tribute of Yu”), written by an unknown author in the fifth century B.C.E., described the economic resources of the country’s different provinces; it was a chapter in a book called Shujing (“Book of Documents”), considered one of five classics of ancient Chinese literature.

• Pei Xiu (224–271 C.E.), the “father of Chinese cartography,” who produced an elaborate map of the country in 267 C.E.

• Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), an Arab geographer whose extensive travels through Southwest Asia & North Africa informed his creation of a world map and geography text in 1154, building on Ptolemy’s long-neglected work.

• Ibn Battuta (1304–ca. 1368), a Moroccan scholar who wrote Rihla (“Travels”) based on three decades of journeys covering more than 120,000 kilometers (75,000 miles) through northern Africa, southern Europe, and much of Asia.

World Map By Al-Idrisi, 1154 Al-Idrisi built on Ptolemy’s map, which had been neglected for nearly a millennium.

Ibn Battuta Ibn Battuta on horseback in front of a map of his journeys, illustrated by twentieth-century Polish artist Hanna Balicka-Fribes.

The making of maps as reference tools was revived during the Age of Exploration and Discovery. Columbus, Magellan, and other explorers who sailed across the oceans in search of trade routes and resources in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries required accurate maps to reach desired destinations without wrecking their ships. In turn, cartographers took information collected by the explorers to create more accurate maps. Influential European cartographers included:

• Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470–1520), a German cartographer who was credited with producing the first map to use the label “America”; he wrote on the map (translated from Latin) “from Amerigo the discoverer . . . as if it were the land of Americus, thus America”.

• Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), a Flemish cartographer, who created the first modern atlas and was the first to hypothesize that the continents were once joined together before drifting apart.

• Bernhardus Varenius (1622–1650), who produced Geographia Generalis, which stood for more than a century as the standard treatise on systematic geography.

World Map By Waldseemüller, 1508