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A wall mural discovered in Catal Huyuk, Turkey depicts a volcano and village buildings. This may be the world's first map.
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Babylonian astronomers used geometry to track the orbit of Jupiter.
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A clay tablet showing a map of the city of Babylon.
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The scholar, Eratosthenes, an accomplished astronomer and mathematician, measures the circumference of the earth.
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Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer and mathematician, develops a catalogue of the sky that includes celestial latitude and longitude.
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Ptolemy was a Greek scholar that created a world map that included the continents Europe, Asia, and Africa.
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Abraham Cresques and his son Jehudah authored the Catalan Atlas, considered a very important map in medieval times. It contained information on the known world including religious cities and navigational information.
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A sextant is a navigational tool that measures the angle between an astronomical object and the horizon. It can be used to navigate a position line on a nautical chart. It was used by John Hadley in 1730.
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In 1884, the International Meridian Conference chooses Greenwich as the prime meridian.
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Modern cartography uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS). Maps are produced using satellite and aerial imagery. GPS is a global navigational tool that is based in space. GIS layers geographic information into maps. John Tomlinson is considered the "father of GIS."
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Reworking Ptolemy's map and re-calculating the circumference of the earth, Al-Khwarizmi oversaw a team of geographers to make a new world map.
