This map, created by Abraham Ortelius, was published in 1570. It used some other maps for reference, namely those created by Francesco Rosselli and Gerhard Mercator, and it looks pretty much like the ones we see today.

Of course, Antarctica isn’t that large, and the northern hemisphere is disproportionality large, but this kind of thing tells us more about the mapmaker’s priorities than the world anyway.

Maps aren’t just drawn pictures of land, they also tell us about what was going on at the time.

While this shows the mileage from Nagasaki to various parts of the world, we can also see American ships and Russian soldiers sailing near the islands, showing us what was happening in the country at that time politically.

Gerhard Mercator (where we get language like Mercator Projections) was a mapmaker who impacted the field heavily.

Essentially, he stretched the north and south parallels in a way that allowed them to fit onto a square map. It distorted things drastically but allowed them to be more easily read. His method is why Greenland looks so big on maps, even today.

This map was drawn from the perspective of the north pole with an intention to show the “New World,” meaning North and South America.

The Contarini map was the first time someone had tried to draw maps from this perspective and relied on math instead of intuition.

When America was “discovered” by Europeans, it posed a challenge for mapmakers. Now, all of a sudden, they had to double everything in the same amount of space!

Most of the time an oval projection was used to display the world and clouds were placed where they had not yet explored.

Africa, Asia, and Europe were the only known bodies of land, and even then, they were pretty inaccurate by modern standards.

This map was made in 1489 and details some interesting things, specifically the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.

Columbus would have studied a map like this before leaving for “India.”

It was always thought that the Vikings were the first to “find” the New World from Europe, then Columbus, and so on.

Well, in 2006 a new map came out that was reportedly made in 1418 in China.

The map has incredible information that was said to have come from explorer Zheng He’s voyages. But many doubt its authenticity, partly because the Chinese making it to the New World in 1418 would change a lot of what we think about the Age of Discovery.

Drawn during the 1400s, this map probably looks really confusing. It was drawn with conventional Muslim mapping methods, including placing the Southern pole at the top (the map is flipped upside down).

The center of the map is the ocean, making it less useful than 0thers might have been. It’s believed that it was likely used as a piece of art rather than a geographic tool, but technically it is a map of Egypt.

Printed maps started arriving in the 15th century and this is one of the earliest. Made in 1475, it depicts hills that represent various cities and regions but clearly was not meant to show the distance between them.

It was designed to accompany a short but universal history so that “poor men unable to afford a library can have a brief manual always on hand in place of many books.”

Britain was on the literal edge of the known world in the 14th century. A monk named Ranulf Higden drew this map to go along with his history of the word.

It depicts Jerusalem at its center but has Britain down in the lower right, painted in red to let everyone know how important it was just sitting there at the edge of the world.

Maps can also be used as propaganda. In 1320, this map was circulated in Europe and put Jerusalem at its center, readying the population for the Crusades (to take back the Holy Land) that were soon to come.

Eventually, that propaganda would pay off when Christian soldiers swarmed the Holy Land looking to drive out the Muslims (who also saw it as their Holy Land).

This map, created by Muslim scholar Al-Idrisi, was completed while under the employment of the Christan king of Sicily. With texts, interviews, and more, he was able to construct this map, with Sicily at the center.

Like all Muslim maps, it is inverted.

Claudius Ptolemy was a second-century philosopher who is often viewed as the “father” of geography. He invented concepts like longitude and latitude, and his writings became the basis for many maps that were created thousands of years later.

He managed to get China and India on his map, but it looks like he overestimated the size of Sri Lanka.

As we’ve mentioned, maps aren’t always just geographical in nature, they are political and religious, too. This map of Korea shows an important religious location, Mount Meru, at the center of their world.

It also contains elements of Hindu mythology and two rings of water surrounding the main landmass.

Known as the Imago Mundi, this Babylonian map is from the 6th century BCE. It contains the main city of Babylon, the Euphrates, and a few other regions like Assyria and Urartu. There are translations of the various phrasings written on the tablet, all of them rather mysterious.

For example, Mesopotamia is surrounded by a “bitter river,” aka an ocean.