Maps & Globes

Top 10 Maps from History that Changed the World

Maps have been around for almost as long as civilization and the concept of getting lost and refusing to ask for directions. They’ve ranged from the whimsical to the bizarre, and they’ve changed the world and how we look at it. These 10 were especially important.

Text version: https://www.toptenz.net/10-maps-from-history-that-changed-the-world.php (be careful of the ads on this page!)

A Brief History of Cartography and Maps

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Maps have always changed for humans throughout history, we are one of the few you have seen images of it, in real life. So how did past people perceive their world? Find out.

From Ptolemy to Pilgrimage: Images of Late Antiquity in Geography, Travel & Cartography

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A survey of Greek and Latin geographical tradition during Late Antiquity (c. 200-600 CE), when various genres of travel narrative rose to prominence. Scott Johnson links this mode of writing to the transition from a pagan/Greco-Roman world to a Christian one as new ways of explaining the known world mixed the classical inheritance with biblical and early Christian history. This mixture was to influence directly the new institution of Christian pilgrimage, while setting a foundation of religious practice for Byzantium, Islam and the western Middle Ages.

Speaker Biography: Scott Johnson received his doctorate in classics from the University of Oxford in 2005. He is a postdoctoral teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks. He has been a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2004-07), a fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (2009-10), and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2010-11). His current research project, "All the World's Knowledge: Geographical Thought in Late Antiquity and Byzantium," is designed to form the basis of his next book.