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Early wall painting of the settlement of Catal Hyuk, in Ankara, Turkey. It appears to be a plan of the settlement showing 80 buildings and a local mountain.
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Scratched clay tablets that would fit in the palm of a hand were believed to have been created between 3800 BCE and 2300 BCE.
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Pythagoras made the preposition that the earth is a sphere and Aristotle settled the discussion for all time by 350 BCE. Eratosthenes extended the Greek tradition in the second century with the first highly accurate measurement of the circumference of the earth, developing the first attempt at what would eventually develop into latitude and longitude.
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When the Babylonians developed an empire in 600 BCE, their local maps evolved into maps of the Babylonian empire, using the same technology, but the purpose of the maps had expanded.
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Continued the Greek Tradition of cartography with an 8-volume set of books, including the written coordinates for 8,000 places. None of Ptolemy's maps survive, but there have been numerous reconstructions based on the coordinates and descriptions he provided.
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Almost all progress in scientific cartography stopped in that part of the world until the fourteenth century. During that time interval, a religious view of the world dominated this part of the world, and its maps showed the world as described in the Bible.
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With a relatively accurate map for his own region of the Middle East, the area between southwest Asia and northeast Africa.
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Triangulation determines the distance to a location using simple geometry, the branch of math that deals with shapes and sizes. Hw used geometry to calculate the radius of the earth with an error of less than 1 percent.
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Portolan maps were marine maps that sailors used.
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Gerardus Mercator solved the problem of how to portray the earth on a flat map so that when a navigator drew a straight line on the map, it portrayed the actual curved, great circle route followe by a traveler on the earth.
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The sextant is a portable instrument for determining latitude.
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Finding longitude accurately became such a big problem, that in 1714 a contest with an enormous sum of money as a prize was held to discover an improved method to finding longitude. John Harrison designed a highly accurate clock after 50 years and several attempts to create a clock that earned him the prize money.
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In 1994, the last of 24 satellites was launched to complete the GPS, a means of determining a location on earth by using signals from satellites. With success, the GPS is used by military, various industries and by ordinary people.
