IT has frequently been remarked that primitive peoples of the
present day, from the Eskimo of the Canadian Arctic to the
Bedawin tribesmen of the Arabian desert, have an almost
instinctive ability to produce rough but quite accurate sketches
on pieces of skin or in the sand, indicating the relative positions
and distances of localities known to them. It may reasonably
be supposed that map making began as a development of
similar abilities among the early inhabitants of the Middle East
and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.

In Egypt, geometrical methods were early used for land
measurement, which was stimulated by the need to re-establish
boundaries after the Nile floods. These cadastral records were
not, it seems, combined to make maps of considerable areas on
a smaller scale, and the few 'maps' in the papyri are more in
the nature of plans. The idea of maps as guides for travellers,
however, was evidently current, for conventional 'maps of the
nether regions' were placed in coffins for the guidance of the
departed. From Assyria, there is a clay tablet with a map of
part of northern Mesopotamia (c. 3,800 B.C.), and from Baby-
lonia, a much later representation of the known world, shown
as a circle surrounded by the sea and the heavenly bodies.
Speculation such as this on the form of the Universe, and the
place of the known world in it, with attempts to represent it
graphically, exercised an important influence on the makers of
maps.

The Greeks took over from the Babylonians, with much
else of greater importance in astronomy and mathematics,
the conception of the earth as a flat circular disc surrounded
by the primordial ocean. In the Hellenic world the first steps
in the development of scientific thought were taken by the
Ionians, who were favourably placed to receive Babylonian

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